People love to hate the font Comic Sans. It’s a perfectly appropriate font to use for invitations to a child’s birthday party or in a cartoon balloon. The problem was that as we learned to use personal computers for everything, Comic Sans was used inappropriately and overused until it became a joke in itself. It looks ridiculous on a warning label or a tombstone or a political billboard, but examples of all those can be found. So how did the beleaguered font come about in the first place?
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The credit, or blame, goes to typographical engineer Vincent Connare. In 1994, he was working on a program for Microsoft called Microsoft Bob, which was aimed at children. The text belonging to the program’s virtual assistant seemed quite harsh in Times New Roman. He was a talking dog, after all. Connare couldn’t find a more appropriate font, so he looked outside of the supply of available computer fonts for inspiration and designed Comic Sans for the dog. Maybe that’s why the font seems most at home overlaying an image of Doge. Now that Comic Sans is thirty years old, read the short version of its origin in an excerpt from the book Comic Sans, Is it Really That Bad? by Thomas Steeles. -via Kottke
(Image credit: Stephen Curry)
Source: neatorama