He has said he hoped a type foundry or online type library such as Adobe's TypeKit would pick it up.
The original typeface can be downloaded for free from its official website, but Rozynski has suggested that he may sell future, more complete releases. It was released in April 2014 and a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign successfully raised $10,000 to expand the typeface to support non-English languages. He planned the typeface as a joke, but he soon began to take it seriously, commissioning Hrant Papazian of The MicroFoundry to improvements to outlines, spacing, and kerning of all 12 fonts in the family. When he first had the idea to "save" Comic Sans, Rozynski thought that the project would take him a month to complete it actually took three years. He wanted to refine the original letter forms to make them more sophisticated, to create "a version you couldn't easily fault", while "maintaining the honesty that made Comic Sans so popular."
Comic Sans has been called "the world's most reviled typeface," and Rozynski aimed to update Comic Sans to be more suitable to the modern generation and more widely acceptable, including "the typographically savvy." Rozynski based his design on the original glyphs of Comic Sans and have them "beaten into shape" to create a new typeface. Ever the pariah.Comparison of Comic Sans and Comic Neue in creating the new typeface, Rozynski made the strokes straighter and more regularĬomic Neue was designed by Craig Rozynski, an Australian graphic designer living in Japan, who wanted to create an informal script typeface similar to the controversial Microsoft font Comic Sans, which was created by Vincent Connare in the 1990s. The vilified typographer’s only comment on Comic Neue so far has been to say that it’s not casual enough.
Surprisingly, though, Vincent Connare himself doesn’t seem to care for it. Rozynski probably overstates it a bit when he says that Comic Neue will make your kid’s lemonade stand look like a Fortune 500 company, but it certainly seems that, at the very least, Comic Neue is less likely to get your kid’s lemonade stand immolated with a Molotov Cocktail by some psychopathic type snob than Comic Sans would. If Comic Sans resembles the handwriting of a 10-year old with excellent penmanship, Comic Neue is the block lettering of that same kid as a high school senior. Vincent Connare himself doesn’t seem to care for it. Both varieties are available in light, regular, and bold weights, with oblique equivalents. Comic Neue takes what Rozynski calls the “squashed, wonky, and weird glyphs” of Comic Sans and beats them into shape, while Comic Neue Angular gives Comic Sans an extra dose of refinement by replacing the font’s round terminals with angular ones instead. Designed recently by Australian designer Craig Rozynski, Comic Neue is an attempt to polish some of Comic Sans’s rough edges–to create a type family that is just a little more sophisticated, a dash more urbane than Comic Sans’s bumpkinish simplicity, meant for people who want to use Comic Sans but not look like rubes. All for designing a typeface that was just too adept at looking friendly for its own good. Vilified as typography’s antichrist, there mere mention of Vincent Connare’s name now will usually lead to a snort of derision at best, and the spontaneous forming of a lynch mob at worst.
When it was eventually included as a default font in Windows 95, plebs by the thousands started choosing it for everything they’d once used Times New Roman for: emails, Word documents, signs, and so on. The problem with Comic Sans is that it was too good at being friendly to people who didn’t really feel comfortable around computers. Likewise, Comic Sans looks great on a preschool sign, but wildly out of place on an accountant’s business card.
Trajan might look great on a poster for a movie about a Roman centurion, but probably shouldn’t be used on a box of breakfast cereal.
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.Ĭomic Neue is for people who want to use Comic Sans but not look like rubes.Ĭomic Sans was limited, sure, but lots of typefaces are designed to be used in only specific circumstances. It looked like the hand lettering of a comic book. 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. First, let’s talk a bit about Comic Sans, the world’s most reviled font.