Comic Sans: the soap opera
Filed in: design, Mon, Feb 23 2004 00:48 PT
A little birdie pointed me to an interview with Comic Sans inventor Vincent Connare. He takes some understandable (though certainly arguable) shots at people who don’t like Comic Sans. And in the comments, one of the biggest hatchets in design is buried, between Connare and bancomicsans creator Dave Combs. Good for them.
I really don’t have a beef with Vincent Connare as a designer. I even use one of his fonts, Trebuchet, right here in this blog. I knew the whole story about how Comic Sans was designed, and how it ended up in Windows. I just think it’s tragic that it was the only cute font included in Windows 95 and 98, and that it owes its success to nothing more than being different from Arial and Times New Roman. And yes, Apple’s Chalkboard font is a knockoff of Comic Sans, but at least it fixes (in my mind, anyway) the horrible lowercase m and n.
As Monty Burns once said, “You know, I’m no art critic, but I know what I hate.” I don’t like Chalkboard much more, and I don’t think it belongs on any more menus and corporate identities than Comic Sans, but at least it’s less painful to have to stare at in Font Book. In the grand scheme, that’s all I expect to be able to ask for out of cutesy fonts these days.
