Of all the fonts installed with Windows, surely Vincent Connare’s Comic Sans is the most characterful. Originally intended to be the speech-balloon font in Microsoft 3D Movie Maker, it has been bundled with most copies of Windows since 1995. Almost extravagantly unintimidating, Comic Sans has enjoyed huge popularity from Windows users in even the most inappropriate of circumstances (sightings that its designer is keen to record). More…

One unexpected result was a UK study of dyslexic reading abilities, where Comic Sans came out ahead of other (more normal) common fonts. The experimenters cited the design’s simple forms for ‘a’ and ‘g’, so the result may be due to the researchers’ unfamiliarity with the hundreds of other fonts that share these characteristics, or (more charitably) their deliberate focus on commonly available fonts.