Vincent Connare

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Vincent Connare
Vincent Connare 2012.jpg
Connare in 2012
Born (1960-09-26) September 26, 1960 (age 64)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Education University of Reading, New York Institute of Technology, Milford High School (Massachusetts)
Occupation(s) Typeface designer, photographer
Known for Comic Sans, Trebuchet MS, Webdings, Marlett, Microsoft
Website www.connare.com

Vincent Connare (born September 26, 1960) [1] [2] is an American type designer and former Microsoft employee. Among his creations are the fonts Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS, as well as the Man in Business Suit Levitating emoji. Besides text typefaces, he finalized and hinted the font Marlett which has been used for scalable User Interface icons in Microsoft Windows since 1995 and created portions of the font Webdings that was first shipped with Internet Explorer.

Contents

Education

Connare studied at Milford High School in Milford, Massachusetts and at the New York Institute of Technology where he received a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts and Photography. He later earned a master's degree in Type Design at the University of Reading. [1] [3] [4]

Career

After graduating from the New York Institute of Technology, Connare began working as a photographer for the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts and helped establish a Cherokee-language newspaper.

Microsoft

He joined Microsoft in 1993. [5] While working for Microsoft, Connare contributed to documents on font production as well as the fonts Trebuchet MS, Webdings, and most notably Comic Sans. An icon of a jumping man that Connare created for Webdings was later made an emoji with the identifier U+1F574🕴 MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING . [6]

He left Microsoft in 1999 and worked towards his master's degree at the University of Reading in England. [5]

Dalton Maag

After completing his studies at the University of Reading, he joined Dalton Maag, a typeface design company located in Brixton, London, in 2001. [5] While working at Dalton Maag, Connare created the Magpie font and designed a font for an update of the Ministry of Sound logo which was originally designed by the artist Chemical X [7]

Comic Sans

Creating Comic Sans

When Microsoft launched Windows 1995, it featured a new program, Microsoft Bob, that included a cartoon that would talk with speech bubbles, and text presented in Times New Roman. Connare felt that the cartoons in Microsoft Bob needed a less formal looking font; something more suitable for kids. [8] Inspired by DC and Marvel comic books, Connare created Comic Sans in 1994 by using a mouse and cursor to draw intentionally sloppy letters. Microsoft Bob inevitably faded into obscurity, but Comic Sans secured its legacy after Microsoft included the font in Windows 95.

Reception

Soon after Connare created Comic Sans, the font was adopted by many notable companies including Apple, BMW, and Burberry. Despite the font's commercial success, it became controversial and has garnered many detractors, particularly in the graphic design industry. The hatred has gotten so intense that there have been several attempts to get the font banned. Connare has not been offended by the negative backlash to his creation; in fact, at the Fourth Annual Boring Conference, Connare said he found the contempt for his work to be "mildly amusing". [9]

Comic Sans has been used in multiple applications ranging from newspapers titles and store signs, to the Spanish Copa del Rey trophy and the Pope's photo album at the Vatican. [10] Connare has stated that he is very proud of the font, offering different rationales. Arguing that "Comic Sans does what it was commissioned to do, it is loved by kids, mums, dads and many family members. So it did its job very well. It matched the brief!" He has also referred to it as "the best joke I've ever told." [11]

Comic Sans is a particularly popular typeface; in fact, Simon Garfield's book, Just My Type, devotes the first chapter to Comic Sans. The typeface is also listed in the book How to Design a Typeface by the Design Museum in London, which was reviewed in newspapers across London. Comic Sans has also featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. [12]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Typeface</span> Set of characters that share common design features

A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dingbat</span> Typographic symbol class

In typography, a dingbat is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames, or as a dinkus. Some of the dingbat symbols have been used as signature marks or used in bookbinding to order sections.

Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Certain versions of the font's copyright string include attribution to Type Solutions, Inc., the maker of a tool used to hint the font.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Comic Sans</span> Sans-serif typeface by Microsoft

Comic Sans MS is a sans-serif typeface designed by Vincent Connare and released in 1994 by Microsoft Corporation. It is a non-connecting script inspired by comic book lettering, intended for use in cartoon speech bubbles, as well as in other casual environments, such as informal documents and children's materials.

Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Webdings, all of them in TrueType font format packaged in executable files (".exe") for Microsoft Windows and in BinHexed Stuff-It archives (".sit.hqx") for Macintosh. These packages were published as freeware under a proprietary license imposing some restrictions on distribution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webdings</span> Typeface for dingbats (decorational symbols and glyphs)

Webdings is a TrueType dingbat typeface developed in 1997. It was initially distributed with Internet Explorer 4.0, then as part of Core fonts for the Web, and is included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 98. All of the pictographic Webding glyphs that were not unifiable with existing Unicode characters were added to the Unicode Standard when version 7.0 was released in June 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgia (typeface)</span> 1996 typeface by Matthew Carter

Georgia is a serif typeface designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Thomas Rickner for Microsoft. It was intended as a serif typeface that would appear elegant but legible when printed small or on low-resolution screens. The typeface is inspired by Scotch Roman designs of the 19th century and was based on designs for a print typeface on which Carter was working when contacted by Microsoft; this would be released under the name Miller the following year. The typeface's name referred to a tabloid headline, "Alien heads found in Georgia."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trebuchet MS</span> Humanist sans-serif typeface family

Trebuchet MS is a humanist sans-serif typeface that Vincent Connare designed for Microsoft Corporation in 1996, and it is also used as the font for the logo of Half-Life. Trebuchet MS was the font used for the window titles in the Windows XP default theme,

Segoe is a typeface, or family of fonts, that is best known for its use by Microsoft. The company uses Segoe in its online and printed marketing materials, including recent logos for a number of products. Additionally, the Segoe UI font sub-family is used by numerous Microsoft applications, and may be installed by applications. It was adopted as Microsoft's default operating system font, and is also used on Outlook.com, Microsoft's web-based email service. On August 23, 2012, Microsoft unveiled its new corporate logo typeset in Segoe, replacing the logo it had used for the previous 25 years.

Ascender Corporation was a digital typeface foundry and software development company in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers, and people previously involved in developing fonts used widely in computers, inkjet printers, phones, and other digital technology devices. On December 8, 2010, Ascender Corp. was acquired by Monotype Imaging.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Carpenter (designer)</span>

Ron Carpenter is an English typographer. He was trained as a cartographer and later became a typeface designer. He works for independent font foundry, Dalton Maag.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ubuntu (typeface)</span> Open-source sans-serif typeface family

Ubuntu is an OpenType-based font family, designed to be a modern, humanist-style typeface by London-based type foundry Dalton Maag, with funding by Canonical Ltd. The font was under development for nearly nine months, with only a limited initial release through a beta program, until September 2010. It was then that it became the new default font of the Ubuntu operating system in Ubuntu 10.10. Its designers include Vincent Connare, creator of the Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS fonts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nokia Pure</span> Typeface

Nokia Pure is a typeface designed by London-based type foundry Dalton Maag for Nokia. It was designed primarily for use in digital media, in Nokia devices, and mobile environments. It has been the company's main typeface since its introduction. Its designers include Vincent Connare, creator of the classic font Comic Sans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dalton Maag</span> Type foundry

Dalton Maag is an independent font foundry with offices in London, UK, and São Paulo, Brazil. It designs fonts for use in corporate identities, logos, and other text uses. Dalton Maag has a library of 30 retail fonts as of 2016 and offers custom font creation and modification services to its clients.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Comic Neue</span> Typeface

Comic Neue is a casual script typeface released in 2014. It was designed by Craig Rozynski with Hrant Papazian as a more modern, refined version of the ubiquitous, but often criticized typeface Comic Sans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Man in Business Suit Levitating emoji</span> Emoji depicting a levitating man wearing a suit

Man in Business Suit Levitating (🕴️) is an emoji depicting a man wearing a suit and fedora while levitating. Initially created as part of Webdings, the icon was made an emoji by the Unicode Consortium in 2014. The appearance of Man in Business Suit Levitating was originally based on the logo of 2 Tone Records; the logo was itself a depiction of reggae musician Peter Tosh.

References

  1. 1 2 Macmillan, Neil (2006). An A-Z of type designers. Yale University Press. ISBN   0300111517 . Retrieved October 21, 2010.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  2. ↑ "Vincent Connare". MyFonts. Bitstream. Retrieved October 21, 2010.
  3. ↑ "Vincent Connare". Designers. Typophile. Archived from the original on October 27, 2017. Retrieved October 21, 2010.
  4. ↑ "Vincent Connare". classmates.com . Retrieved January 7, 2022.
  5. 1 2 3 Loxley, Simon (October 9, 2008). "Meet Vincent Connare". Design Week . Retrieved June 28, 2024.
  6. ↑ Veix, Joe (March 30, 2016). "The secret history of the 'Man in Business Suit Levitating' emoji". Newsweek. Retrieved March 2, 2022.
  7. ↑ "Design Week". Design Week. Design Week Ltd. Retrieved November 14, 2024.
  8. ↑ Fletcher, Dan (May 27, 2010). "The 50 Worst Inventions". Time. ISSN   0040-781X . Retrieved October 28, 2017.
  9. ↑ Dowling, Tim (June 4, 2014). "The Comic Sans creator explains how he made the world's most-hated font". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved October 26, 2017.
  10. ↑ "Why we're loving: Vincent Connare, type designer" . Retrieved November 1, 2017.
  11. ↑ "People who don't like Comic Sans don't know anything about design". Dezeen. November 27, 2014. Retrieved November 1, 2017.
  12. ↑ "The Story Behind Comic Sans - Fonts.com - Fonts.com". Fonts.com. Retrieved November 1, 2017.
Connare explains how he came to create 'the world's favourite font' in 2009. Vincent Connare Comic Sans.jpg
Connare explains how he came to create 'the world's favourite font' in 2009.
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