Love it or hate it, Comic Sans has to be one of the most successful, universal and renowned fonts in modern-day history.

Either way, the story of its creation is actually very interesting. Vincent Connare, a firmer typographic engineer at Microsoft, was the forefather of the contentious typeface. During his undergraduate student days in NYC, he’d spend most of his time in galleries and other art space. There, he began to notice that he’d differentiate good and bad art by its individuality and difference. “If you didn’t notice them, I’d consider that as bad,” he reflects. “And if you did notice, it was good. Because at least that made you stop and look. It either shocked you or you really liked it. If you didn’t really notice and just walked through, it was a disaster.”

He then began looking at comic books and comic characters in order to establish a more playful font. Enter Comic Sans: a font that was different from everything else, a font that popped out from the rest. He speaks about the moment when his boss called the font weird. “It should be weird,” he replied at the time, “and it stood out, and it wasn’t boring typography that’s in a schoolbook.”

The mini history lesson then briefly touches on the “anti-Comic Sans movement” that emerged online, saturated with a wish to remove the typeface from the web. Rather trivial, right? Well, what does its creator think about the resistance? “I thought it was funny. I didn’t really find it offensive.”

“It had irregularity about it,” surmises Connare. “The stems aren’t perfectly straight; they’re quite wobbly… Comic Sans is not one of the better pieces of art but, conceptually, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.” Not bad at all. Now, we’re sure that this is going to produce a polarising response but, before you get your arguments in order, check out the brief history video in the gallery above.