Comic Sans: The World's Most Hated Font and Its Scientific Redemption

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In 1994 Microsoft typographic engineer Vincent Connare looked at a beta of Microsoft Bob, a friendly program meant to ease newcomers into computing, and saw a cartoon dog speaking in Times New Roman. So he pulled Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns off his shelf and drew a casual, comic-style alphabet freehand with a mouse. The font missed Bob's deadline but slipped into 3D Movie Maker, the Windows 95 Plus pack, Internet Explorer, and Publisher. From there Comic Sans escaped onto millions of desktops, where adults used it for things its creator never imagined.

This episode follows the font from angry open letters and political resignations to a war memorial in the Netherlands, and into the organized backlash from designers who campaigned to ban it. Then comes the reversal. Its uneven, asymmetrical letters turn out to help dyslexic readers, a 2010 study on disfluency found harder-to-read fonts improved retention, and writers swear it cures writer's block. What designers call an aesthetic crime, teachers and accessibility advocates call a lifeline.

• Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert published his furious 2010 open letter about LeBron James leaving Cleveland entirely in Comic Sans.
• A Dutch city engraved the names of fallen military personnel in the font, scraped the stone after complaints, then engraved them again in the same typeface.
• Filmmaker Errol Morris ran an experiment showing readers were less likely to believe a statement set in Comic Sans than in Helvetica or Baskerville.
• Because each letter was drawn by hand, the b and d are not mirror images, and the capital I carries crossbars, giving dyslexic readers clear landmarks.
• The discovery of the Higgs boson was presented at CERN in 2012 on slides set in Comic Sans, and Connare received no royalties for his creation.