(funky music)
- [Narrator] It's 1995,
your word processor is open,
and before you press a single key,
you make the most important
decision of your life:
What font do I use?
All the usual fonts are too conventional.
- [Vincent] There are very
few 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 so
different than everything else.
- [Narrator] The way it flows is strange.
- [Vincent] It had irregularity about it.
- [Narrator] And uniquely flawed.
- [Vincent] The stems
aren't perfectly straight,
they are quite wobbly.
- [Narrator] This is the font you want.
And in that moment, you and
millions 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 his
undergrad in New York City.
- [Vincent] We went to
university in the 1980s.
I was a quite young
rebellious fine arts student.
- [Narrator] He'd spend a
lot of time in art spaces.
- [Vincent] And I'd walk to
the galleries of the old Soho
and look at paintings and artwork.
- [Narrator] To him, what
separated good art from bad art
was this simple benchmark.
- [Vincent] If you didn't
notice them, I considered
that was bad, and if you
did notice, it was good.
Because at least they
made you stop and look.
It either shocked you
or you really liked it.
But if you didn't even notice
and you just walked through,
it was a disaster.
- [Narrator] Vincent
would take that philosophy
to Microsoft, where he was
challenged to make a playful
font for a program called Microsoft Bob.
- [Vincent] And so I looked
at Batman and the Watchmen,
and pretty much tried
to draw on the computer
something that looked similar
to that, but not copying it.
So that's how Comic Sans was made.
By just looking at comic
books and comic characters.
- [Narrator] Not everyone was
a fan of the font's quirks.
- [Vincent] My boss, Robert
Norton, 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 and
I thought it stood out
and it wasn't boring typography
that's in a schoolbook.
- [Narrator] Though the font
didn't make it to the release
of Microsoft Bob, it was
eventually pre-installed
on every Macintosh by 1996.
- [Vincent] I started
to 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 font
spread like wildfire,
in ways Vincent didn't even imagine.
- [Vincent] When I travel
the world and see it
on beach towels.
- [Narrator] War memorials.
- [Vincent] On bread.
- [Narrator] Street signs.
- [Vincent] On everything.
- [Narrator] Its overexposure
even spurred a group
of designers to start an
anti-Comic Sans movement.
- [Vincent] I thought it was funny,
I didn't really find it offensive.
- [Narrator] After all these
years, Vincent finds himself
content with how history
will remember him.
- [Vincent] Comic Sans is
not one of the better pieces
of art, but conceptually,
it's one of the best things
I've ever done, it
probably is the best thing
that I have ever done.
