


Vincent Connare, who was working at Microsoft at the time, designed the font for the digital assistant Microsoft Bob, a comic software package designed for kids. Well, it turns out the font Comic Sans was originally designed for the text inside the speech bubbles for one of the very first versions of those assistants. In the past few years, designers initiated a campaign against it called " Ban Comic Sans," calling it "tacky" and an "epic fail." And according to the inventor of Comic Sans himself, the main designer at Twitter tweeted that the font takes up the second most server space used by complaints - after airlines and before Justin Bieber.īut its original intent wasn't to polarize the masses it was to appear in an application meant for young users. Remember those friendly little cartoon assistants that used to help you out on Microsoft Word? You know, the ones that would pop up with a speech bubble reading stuff like, "Looks like you're writing a letter. arguably the most controversial typeface in history.Ĭountless books on typeface design talk about it from both sides of the fence. The History of 6 Iconic Fonts 1) Comic SansĪh, Comic Sans. Get tips for using fonts in your content and web designs in our free guide to visual content creation here. Let's take a look at the brief history of six iconic typefaces from their invention to how they're used today. Over time, the use cases for different fonts have evolved - in some cases, away from their original intention. Everything I've ever done is a solution to somebody's problem." I like the way Vincent Connare, the inventor of Comic Sans, put it: "A typeface is an answer to a question. The look and feel of the document would change entirely depending which of those three fonts you employed, right? That's because different fonts were designed specifically for certain contexts. Now, change the font of that document to Courier. Close your eyes and picture a one-page, typed document - maybe a résumé, or a letter - that uses the font Times New Roman.
