Love it or (more likely) loathe it, the Comic Sans font has become something of a cultural phenomenon in artistic circles, held up as the pinnacle of bad taste when it comes to font design.
But for its creator Vincent Connare, it's viewed far more fondly. In fact, he considers it “the best thing I've ever done”.
In this excellent video from Great Big Story, Connare speaks of his work creating the world's “most contentious font”.
Holy-comic-book-influence, Batman!
Connare made the font while working for Microsoft, with the typeface intended for a Windows program called Bob. It never made it to the program – but would, ironically, end up on every Mac by 1996.
Inspired by the captions in comics including Batman and The Watchmen, Connare had been a fine arts student in New York City at the time. Wandering galleries, he said of the works inside that “if you didn’t notice them, I considered that was bad. And if you did notice that was good because at least they made you stop and look”.
Well Comic Sans certainly got noticed, becoming so hated (despite it being school kids' go-to font), that anti-Comic Sans campaigns have been created.
But Connare sees the funny side to it all, and who can blame him? How many other fonts can you name?
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