(funky music) - [narrator] it's 1995,your word processor is open, and before you press a single key, you make the most importantdecision of your life: what font do i use?
3d printed hermit crab shells, all the usual fonts are too conventional. - [vincent] there are veryfew very casual typefaces that you could use. - [narrator] you keep scrolling.
too stately. too boring. but then... - [vincent] it pops out of the menu. - [narrator] what is this font? - [vincent] it was sodifferent than everything else. - [narrator] the way it flows is strange. - [vincent] it had irregularity about it. - [narrator] and uniquely flawed.
- [vincent] the stemsaren't perfectly straight, they are quite wobbly. - [narrator] this is the font you want. and in that moment, you andmillions of other people click on the button that says... comic sans. how did a font both loathed and cherished come to dominate the world? - [vincent] my name is vincent connare,
i was a typographic engineer at microsoft. i contributed to lots of fonts,like webdings, trebuchet, and most notably, comic sans. so it's all my fault. - [narrator] to understand comic sans, you have to understand its creator. years before his work at microsoft, vincent was working on hisundergrad in new york city. - [vincent] we went touniversity in the 1980s.
i was a quite youngrebellious fine arts student. - [narrator] he'd spend alot of time in art spaces. - [vincent] and i'd walk tothe galleries of the old soho and look at paintings and artwork. - [narrator] to him, whatseparated good art from bad art was this simple benchmark. - [vincent] if you didn'tnotice them, i considered that was bad, and if youdid notice, it was good. because at least theymade you stop and look.
it either shocked youor you really liked it. but if you didn't even noticeand you just walked through, it was a disaster. - [narrator] vincentwould take that philosophy to microsoft, where he waschallenged to make a playful font for a program called microsoft bob. - [vincent] and so i lookedat batman and the watchmen, and pretty much triedto draw on the computer something that looked similarto that, but not copying it.
so that's how comic sans was made. by just looking at comicbooks and comic characters. - [narrator] not everyone wasa fan of the font's quirks. - [vincent] my boss, robertnorton, he didn't really like the font, and he thought it should be a bit more typographic,and i argued, and said no, it should be weird andi thought it stood out and it wasn't boring typographythat's in a schoolbook. - [narrator] though the fontdidn't make it to the release
of microsoft bob, it waseventually pre-installed on every macintosh by 1996. - [vincent] i startedto see it when it was in the wild, so to speak. the first one i remember was a neon sign over a store called fun stamps. that's when i realized,it's gonna get used any way anybody wants to use it, and that just snowballed from there.
- [narrator] the fontspread like wildfire, in ways vincent didn't even imagine. - [vincent] when i travelthe world and see it on beach towels. - [narrator] war memorials. - [vincent] on bread. - [narrator] street signs. - [vincent] on everything. - [narrator] its overexposureeven spurred a group
of designers to start ananti-comic sans movement. - [vincent] i thought it was funny, i didn't really find it offensive. - [narrator] after all theseyears, vincent finds himself content with how historywill remember him.
- [vincent] comic sans isnot one of the better pieces of art, but conceptually,it's one of the best things i've ever done, itprobably is the best thing that i have ever done.
