Comic Sans designer: "Comic Sans was not designed as a typeface"

[jcwentz]

http://www.connare.com/comic.htm

[paulgb]

"The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way."

I love the irony that Comic Sans was born because the designer was shocked at seeing another font used inappropriately.

[BrandonM]

I found it kind of weird that he showed anger at the end at OS/X copying his font, when he had just admitted that much of his inspiration came from comic books. Is this not the pot calling the kettle black?

That aside, it was an interesting story.

[aston → BrandonM]

Microsoft, of course, copied Helvetica (as Arial) to distribute with their OS.

[wanorris → aston]

Maybe I'm focusing on minor details, but Arial has never seemed like a dead ringer for Helvetica to me. Or at least no more than, say, Franklin Gothic and Helvetica are the same font. There are some clear differences in letterforms that give the fonts a somewhat different feel, at least to me.

Having said that, regardless of the differences in execution, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that some Product Manager at Microsoft said "Make me something that looks like Helvetica", and the result was Arial.

[Hexstream]

Sounds like Microsoft's sum of its parts is less than its individual constituents...

[vlad]

Has anyone else noticed how many great articles start out with "when I worked at Microsoft?"

[hhm → vlad]

Yes, it's interesting. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22when+i+worked+at+microsoft...

[portLAN]

It was designed as a floor wax.

[nivi → portLAN]

It should have been called "Comic Sans is based on The Dark Knight Returns".