Kevin David Creative

You’ve seen it at the office hastily slapped up with scotch tape on the community fridge with a super serious warning not to steal your co-workers lunch. It’s a font with the bark of a dachshund and the bite of mayonnaise. Comic Sans can take the gravity of your message and make it weightless. But taking a closer look at its origin can bring even the snootiest design critic back down to earth.

The much maligned font has its origins with creator Vincent Connare, a type designer employed at Microsoft who was tasked with creating a style more suitable for younger audiences that would be using a family-friendly version of Windows 95. Connare recognized that the font used in the original design, Times New Roman, was far too formal.

Inspired by the lettering in Batman and Watchmen comic books, Connare intentionally crafted Comic Sans to emulate the playful, spontaneous nature of cartoon speech bubbles. In essence, a font for jokers.

Kids quickly took to the fun-loving font, but it soon started to appear in wildly ill-suited scenarios. Resumes, doctor’s offices, police cars. Not even its partner in crime, Papyrus, can measure up to the chaos caused by Comic Sans.

But Connare is no villain, he simply used the power of his aesthetic prowess to right a designer wrong. “Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message,” Connare says on his website. “The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”

According to a 2020 Twitter poll held by TES, 44% of teachers sampled used Comic Sans in their teaching resources for its ease of use and high legibility. Other outlets such the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland recommend Comic Sans to assist readers that would find more traditional fonts difficult to decipher.

Connare remains proud of his misunderstood collection of characters. “Comic Sans is loved by kids, moms and dads. So it did its job very well.”