WSJ has a front page article about the typeface Comic Sans.  I can give you an interesting insider story on this as I worked in this group at Microsoft and can provide some history.

Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will

By EMILY STEEL

Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.

Vincent Connare

Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer.

The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: "Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, 'We don't serve your type.'" On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.

There is a Ban Comic Sans movement, but from the moment Vinnie produced Comic Sans it surprised us how viral the typeface was.

The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: "to eradicate this font" and the "evil of typographical ignorance."

"If you love it, you don't know much about typography," Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, "if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."

To start let me give you some background that few know and I haven’t written about. From my first days at Apple in 1985 I was picky about using the right typefaces and eliminating font substitution when printing.  Few knew that Helvetica was the sans serif font and Times Roman was the serif font. Through my years at Apple, I worked with people on the LaserWriter team, Adobe, and the pain of Adobe Type Manager with Type 1 typefaces.  TrueType was created by Apple, and I had the pleasure of working with some passionate type technology developers like Mike Reed, Sampo Kaasila, Richard Becker, and Bryan Ressler. Eventually I got a job where my specialty was the Asian TrueType fonts.  In 1992, I made the switch to Microsoft to be the program manager for Win3.1 Asian TrueType fonts, working on all the Asian fonts.

When I was group program manager for TrueType fonts, I drove the Verdana project, and I’ll tell the insider story to that one in another post (it is much more complicated to tell).  But, bottom line after Verdana it was no longer a business model of take traditional lead typefaces like Times New Roman, Palatino, and Arial digitize them into TrueType fonts.  Microsoft could start from scratch and build fonts that Microsoft owned all copyright and trademarks.

The proliferation of Comic Sans is something of a fluke. In 1994, Mr. Connare was working on a team at Microsoft creating software that consumers eventually would use on home PCs. His designer's sensibilities were shocked, he says, when, one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.

But, then it truly became viral when it was included with Windows.

A product manager recognized the font's appeal and included it as a standard typeface in the operating system for Microsoft Windows. As home computers became widespread, Comic Sans took on a goofy life of its own.

Now this doesn’t have anything to do with green data centers, but it does help tell the story of what I enjoy doing.  I like figuring out problems and coming up with new ways to approach solutions.  In typefaces, breaking the barriers of traditional font development allowed creative new typefaces to be developed like Comic Sans. I paid the price as I pissed off the people who owned the historical method of typeface development whose plan was to digitize 1,000s of historical typefaces.  What could piss them off more than the popularity of Comic Sans vs. Palatino? And as a result, I  was asked to leave the Truetype group, and in hindsight it was one of the best moves I made to leave type behind.

Which reminds me of a good lesson I learned from the Executive in charge of the Macintosh II development. To ship difficult projects you have to be willing to piss people off.

The good thing is Vinnie didn’t mind upsetting a few people creating Comic Sans.

Are you ready to upset a few people as you green your data center?

Last week I was able to catch up with three great friends who I worked with at Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL).  It has been 17 years since I left, and it felt like a surrealistic dream sitting in the cafeteria watching thousands of people going through, recognizing a few here and there, but after 17 years there were few familiar faces.

At one point in our conversation, one friend said Apple needs a person like Steve Jobs, because it needs a Dictator. I agreed, but offered a better description.  What Apple needs is a Chief Showman, and Jobs fills that role well. We continued the conversation that almost all product development is done in Cupertino as people need to be close to Jobs to show their progress. The only product development outside the area is international localization. While almost all high tech companies have shifted development outside the US, Apple is alone focusing development in the US surrounding its corporate campus. Working in small development teams to drive innovation.

But, that is not the secret.

When Steve Jobs was pushed out in 1985, John Sculley had his phase. Then Sculley was pushed out and Michael Spindler had his stint, and was pushed out. Then Ellen Hancock and Gil Amelio. This last phase was some of the darkest days of Apple with losses and low stock price.  Ellen Hancock brought in the IBM mindset. In 1997, Apple purchased NeXT, and Steve Jobs was able orchestrate the removal of Gil and Ellen.

Recognize a pattern? Apple went through a series of managers that was focused on a Top Down Management approach as sited in one of the wikipedia posts above.

In 2007, Jobs summed up his predecessor's tenure with a quote that he attributed to Amelio:

"Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, and my job is to point the ship in the right direction"

Apple was able to reject the cancerous growth of clueless management who knew little about developing great product products like the Apple II and Mac.  It started with John Sculley, then the cancer grew with Michael Spindler, and became life threatening with Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock. Upper and Middle management was in a “careerism” mode.

Careerism is the overwhelming desire or urge to advance one's own career or social status, usually at the expense of other personal interests or social growth.^{[citation needed]}

Careerism is not simply the desire to succeed.^{[citation needed]} In the work place, careerist individuals are often seen as conniving workers who will stop at nothing to succeed.^{[citation needed]}

Apple was in danger of going out of business, and Microsoft was hovering with the success of Windows 95 to squash the Mac. Steve Jobs was able to cut the cancer off and remove it from Apple’s culture.  It took a while to recover, but Apple has had steady growth since 1997.

For the good of industry we can hope Steve Jobs recovers from his latest illness.  He has shown a different way of developing products that beats all the rest of the industry.  Apple has beat back Microsoft and the PC industry, the audio/video players, and gone from nowhere to be “the phone”.  Apple is competing against the broadest range of technology companies and winning consistently.

I’ve had the pleasure of being at Apple for 7 years and working at Microsoft for 14 years watched it as an outsider, yet having insights to how Microsoft has tried to compete against Apple.

Apple’s secret is it is a cancer survivor, rejecting a way that doomed its existence.

Yippee, I just hit 605 RSS subscribers.

I’ve been a little slow with my writing, over the last few months, but I have a bunch more coming as I am now researching many more topics in the New Year.

I don’t have the exponential growth of some sites, but I like the slow and steady, sustainable method anyway.

Just received a nice Green Holiday card from my friends at Jack Morton.