Comic Sans Was Drawn for a Cartoon Dog

Vincent Connare was sitting in front of a beta of Microsoft Bob in October 1994 when he noticed the problem. Bob was Microsoft's friendly desktop for new users, full of cartoon characters who chatted in speech balloons. The speech balloons were set in Times New Roman. A cartoon dog was talking to the user in the same typeface as a legal brief.

Connare, who had joined Microsoft in 1993 to work on fonts, pulled two comics off the shelf in his office: Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, lettered by John Costanza, and Watchmen, lettered by Dave Gibbons. He drew a new face directly on screen with a mouse, copying the casual irregular shapes that comic letterers used by hand. He missed the deadline. Bob shipped without it.

The font got picked up instead by 3D Movie Maker, another Microsoft project for kids that needed a friendlier voice for its cartoon hosts. From there it slid into the Windows 95 Plus! Pack, and onto every PC after that. The cartoon dog had given the world its most-hated default.

Connare has spent thirty years being asked if he regrets it. He doesn't. "If you love it, you don't know much about typography," he told Dezeen in 2014. "If you hate it, you really don't know much about typography either." He calls Comic Sans the best joke he has ever told. The punchline is that the joke was supposed to stay inside Microsoft Bob.