Thomas Steeles unearths the origins of the world’s most hated font, Comic Sans

The year was 1994 and Vincent Connare, a typographical engineer at the Microsoft Corporation, was reviewing a trial version of the soon-to-be-released program, Microsoft Bob. The programme was intended to be released as a more user-friendly interface for novices; hence, a big target audience was children.

Amongst the friendly visuals and accessible language was a virtual assistant in the form of a friendly yellow dog called Rover. Rover sat in the corner of your screen and used speech bubbles to communicate with the user.

However, Connare found a big issue with the typeface that Rover used to speak. See, Rover spoke in Times New Roman, which was such an inappropriate use of the font – as Times is typically used for large bodies of printed text (usually of a serious/academic nature) and is a complete contrast to the art style and personality of Rover.

In the early stages of designing the new font, Vincent looked to the hand-written type style present in comic books like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, where the sans serif type was hand-rendered using a speedball pen and paper. Each word was meticulously crafted to fit in each speech bubble proportionally – so small variations were made to the type to suit the context of the frame it was housed in, as the design journalist and writer Simon Garfield uncovered. It’s understandable to see why Connare chose comics as his main source of inspiration; there’s a clear parallel to make between the speech bubbles used in comics and the speech bubbles that Rover uses. Additionally, the accessible, child-friendly atmosphere that Microsoft Bob wanted to achieve could be seen in the design of comic books – with the less-rigid hand drawn sans serif type, and bright colours.

Despite Connare’s efforts, the speech bubbles that Rover talked in were only designed to the size specifications of Times New Roman and as Comic Sans was slightly bigger, and given the little time that was left on the Bob project, the decision was made to scrap it – so Microsoft Bob was released Comic Sans-less.

When all hope seemed to have dissipated, Comic Sans rose from the ashes like a less graceful phoenix; later being released to Microsoft 3D Movie Maker which still adopted the type in helpful speech bubbles – a familiar home for Comic Sans. Even later when the bubbles were replaced by audio, Comic Sans remained in pop-up windows. Comic Sans’ influence spread even more once it reached Windows 95 Plus! Pack where it became a default font amongst Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, and Wingdings. Its reign continued, later being used as a default font for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Publisher. Sooner or later, due to the introduction of personal computers, Comic Sans invaded its way into every modern home, to be used by anyone, however they’d like.

Read more in Comic Sans, Is it Really That Bad? by Thomas Steeles, available here.