Nothing predestined the infamous Comic Sans MS to become what it is today: a typeface hated by graphic designers and which was nevertheless very popular with the general public. The tumultuous history of this typography has its roots in 1994 when Microsoft decided to create an intuitive, fun and illustrative interface to help users use a desktop computer. This future failure is called Microsoft Bob. This interface gave us to see our computer as the interior of a house with its different rooms, and it was by this analogy that the user had to become familiar with all the functions of the machine. It was thus easier to learn how to organize your files, find a program or even delete files.
And all this, supported by a little yellow dog e-commerce photo editing named Rover, who acted as a mascot and explained to us through speech bubbles how to proceed. American comics as inspiration It is because this dog initially communicated in Times New Roman that our story becomes interesting. A typographer passing by found this typeface cold and unsuitable for this purpose. He then decided to draw a new one. He was inspired by the lettering of American comic strips , trying to mimicry reproduce handwriting through round, clumsy and irregular shapes. He wanted to obtain a warm typography that visually gave off a certain orality. Its creator thus recounts his creative process... “ I looked into graphic novels, like “ Watchmen ” and “ Dark Knight Returns ”. I could have scanned the boards and copied the letters, but that didn't seem very ethical to me.
Instead, I looked at several letters, and tried to reproduce them on the screen. There were no sketches, no studies. I simply drew with my mouse, and erased as I went along what was wrong. » It was therefore in 1995 that this typographer named Vincent Connare (truthfully) created the famous Comic Sans MS . The particle “Sans” emphasizes its absence of serifs while the “MS” designates its parent company: Microsoft. By creating the Comic Sans, Vincent Connare breaks ( without knowing it? ) all the traditions of typography. His superior at Microsoft (the story does not say whether it was Bill Gates himself or not!) comes to claim that the “p” and the “q” are exactly the opposite of each other.