Comic Sans

Connare drew it in a few days for Microsoft Bob, where a cartoon dog was speaking in Times New Roman, which looked absurd. It missed that deadline, shipped with Windows 95 Plus! instead, and became the most hated typeface in the world. It is also genuinely easier for many dyslexic readers, because its letters are irregular enough to be hard to confuse with each other, which is why the campaign against it has always been more complicated than it looks.

The facts

Designed by

Vincent Connare

Released

1994

Classification

Display

What it signals now

A hospital notice, a village hall poster, or a joke about typography.

Where you have seen it

• Microsoft Bob, which it was drawn for and never shipped in
• Every school newsletter
• The 2012 announcement of the Higgs boson discovery

Other typefaces from the 1990s

This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.