Sep 5, 2013

Comic Sans: it's a Love-Hate relationship

Comic Sans: it's a Love-Hate relationship

There are many people around the world who hate Comic Sans with an firey passion despite, at the same time, loving it so very dearly. Not even its creator, 20 years later, could have imagined the popularity of those smooth, childlike, rounded strokes that appear to come straight out of a classic Watchmen cartoon.

Take Microsoft Bob for example; this was an application designed to facilitate the operation of the Microsoft software. While serious time and effort had gone into creating quality image graphics, the font in which the main character - Rover, your personal assistant - spoke left a lot to be desired. In 1994, Vincent Connare influenced by the comic books of the time, came to realize that no pet should talk like that: "Cartoon dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman”, and decided that the time had come to create Comic Sans. After a series of technical glitches (Comic Sans texts took up considerably more space than expected), Connare discovered that his new font would not be ready in time to be integrated into the launch of Microsoft Bob. Poor Rover was stuck with Times New Roman. News soon came that the software was not all that Microsoft’s users had hoped for; thus giving way to doubts about whether a change in typeface would have made a better impression.