Comic Sans Trying to Grow Up

Via Fast Company:

First, let’s talk a bit about Comic Sans, the world’s most reviled font. As it was designed by Vincent Connare for Microsoft’s kid-friendly Bob operating system — an operating system it was bizarrely never used in — Comic Sans was a pudgy, slightly clumsy, but otherwise affable font. It looked like the hand lettering of a comic book. The effect was very much by design: Connare needed a font that looked more appropriate when coming out of Bob’s cartoon OS assistants than Times New Roman or other overly formal fonts.

The new version is called Comic Neue, and according to Craig Rozynski, the new font’s creator, it’ll “make your lemonade stand look like a Fortune 500 company,” which is a fairly hyperbolic description, isn’t it? On the one hand the new Comic Sans is not nearly as stupid-looking as the original; on the other hand, it is not nearly as stupid-looking as the original.