Thomas Steele pens an essay that tickled my font-nerdery. The opening paragraph starts:
Playing the first chords of Smoke on the Water at a guitar shop; the Reliant Robin; Crocs; an unwelcome dad joke. All oddities that share the same kind of infamous hate as Comic Sans.
https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/thomas-steeles-comic-sans-is-it-really-that-bad-publication-graphic-design-extract-310124
And it gets even better.
It may seem like a form of premature career suicide for a graphic design student hoping to secure a job in the creative industry, to write an essay about their career equivalent of Voldemort.
In the early stages of designing the new font, Vincent looked to the hand-written type style present in comic books like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, where the sans serif type was hand-rendered using a speedball pen and paper. Each word was meticulously crafted to fit in each speech bubble proportionally – so small variations were made to the type to suit the context of the frame it was housed in, as the design journalist and writer Simon Garfield uncovered. It’s understandable to see why Connare chose comics as his main source of inspiration; there’s a clear parallel to make between the speech bubbles used in comics and the speech bubbles that Rover uses. Additionally, the accessible, child-friendly atmosphere that Microsoft Bob wanted to achieve could be seen in the design of comic books – with the less-rigid hand drawn sans serif type, and bright colours.
I knew this but had forgotten that Comic-Sans came from thoughtful consideration and also from Microsoft.
Despite Connare’s efforts, the speech bubbles that Rover talked in were only designed to the size specifications of Times New Roman and as Comic Sans was slightly bigger, and given the little time that was left on the Bob project, the decision was made to scrap it – so Microsoft Bob was released Comic Sans-less.
Thomas also helpfully links to a video that I saw around 13 years ago that really resonated with me as it dove deep to help explain why Comic-Sans was not a great font despite being included in most platforms and the web as a default font.
The blog post doesn’t leave a satisfactory ending as it’s a lede to a book, that I purchased. I look forward to reading it in detail.
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