Story behind a Viral Font, Comic Sans

April 17, 2009 Dave Ohara

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?

US EPA declares warming gases are health threat

April 17, 2009 Dave Ohara

MSNBC posts on the EPA’s latest declaration.

U.S. declares warming gases are health threat

Obama administration move is aimed at prodding lawmakers to regulate

Charlie Riedel / AP

This coal-fired power plant is one of some 600 across the United States that together provide half of the country's electricity — and much of its greenhouse gas emissions.

WASHINGTON - Having received White House backing, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Friday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a significant threat to human health and thus will be listed as pollutants under the Clean Air Act — a policy the Bush administration rejected.

The move could allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, but it's more likely that the Obama administration will use the action to prod Congress to pass regulations around a system to cap and then trade emissions so that they are gradually lowered.

The EPA last month sent its proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which reviewed and approved it. By law, the decision includes a public comment period before being finalized.

The heat is going to turn up to think about how you are going to green your data center, and there will be no shortage of new news on this topic. Data Centers watch out as you are target rich. Growing faster than anyone else, and being operated by the richest companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, and many others. It used to be I would list financials, but given the current climate the gov’t would be going after their own ownership.

Get ready for energy and carbon audits and compliance as more of what you need to think about in data center operations.

7 year old vs. Thomas Friedman, Inspiring a Green Revolution

April 15, 2009 Dave Ohara

At the Uptime Institute, Thomas L. Friedman presented his ideas from his latest book “Hot, Flat, and Crowded – why we need a green revolution – and how it can renew America .” it was impressive to have Friedman speak. Curious I decided to look up what Friedman’s speaking fees are.

Friedman has built a comfortable life, even leaving aside his wife’s family fortune. His speaking fee recently passed $50,000; with his Times salary, syndication rights, and royalties from his bestselling books, his annual income easily reaches seven figures.

Listening to Friedman’s talk was in some ways depressing, trying to inspire people to take action to do the right thing for the environment.

Here is a video you can view to give you an idea on what Friedman presented.

Leaving the conference, I ran into Olivier Sanche who I had blogged about at the Google data center event. We were chatting and he was short on time as he needed to meet his family. Olivier asked if I wanted to meet his daughter, Emilie Sanche. Why would Olivier want me to meet his daughter? Because I was the one who helped tell the story of how Olivier’s daughter was worried about global warming and the polar bears were going to drown.

One of the questions for the panel members was on subject of green and sustainability.

Ken Brill gave a practical view of show me the money. Green is overhyped and a clear ROI needs to be established for projects.

Olivier Sanche starts by telling the story of his child telling him how the polar bears are drowning, then he thinks he is potentially building a data center that will have a bigger impact to global warming than any other action he has as an individual. Olivier tells his team we need to do the right thing, and how we impact the environment is part of the equation.

I have 7 year old daughter as well, and quite frankly thinking about my children’s future is a big inspiration to do the right thing.

I had great conversations with Google and Microsoft engineers who get the whole idea of taking risks to be environmentally sensitive in data center design and operation. Financially all the ideas may not pay out, but taking risks to be innovative in sustainability is worth it in the long run.

So at the end of the day was I more inspired by a Pulitzer winning author or a 7 year old who is proud of her dad’s efforts?

Emilie it was a pleasure to meet you, and keep on prodding your dad to do the right thing.

Microsoft’s Farewell Blog Entry?

April 15, 2009 Dave Ohara

Mike Manos’s farewell blog entry is up on his site.

Farmers, so long

April 13, 2009 by mmanos

This post represents a bittersweet moment in my career. As you have no doubt heard I am moving on from Microsoft to take on an exciting senior role at Digital Realty Trust. I will save the specifics on my new role and its mission for a future post on my personal Loosebolts blog. But for now, I want to reflect a bit on my work here at Microsoft, our team, and a little bit on what it means to be a farmer.

A farmer you say? What the heck is he talking about? As I sit here writing this post my thoughts go back to one of many memorable moments here at the company. It’s a rainy, windy and biting cold day in April and a crowd of around 150 people are milling about the recently completed Microsoft data center facility in Quincy, Washington. The crowd is an odd mixture of city and state officials, Microsoft executives and facilities personnel, and key vendors from construction firms to operational support teams. Everyone is anxious for the ribbon-cutting ceremony to begin and I am mingling my way to the front of the crowd. Despite the weather there is a warmth and a glow as we have just completed Microsoft’s first mega-scale facility and the team is full of pride at the accomplishment.

This post doesn’t have anything of real interest, and reminds me of a press release. What I want to see is a post from Mike after he leaves Microsoft.

I did run into Mike’s new Digital Reality Trusts co-workers at Uptime’s conference, and they can’t wait for him to start.

Google Beats the Drum Again at Uptime

April 14, 2009 Dave Ohara

Google was mentioned by Ken Brill dozens of times, and the highlight was Google’s presentations by Bill Weihl and Chris Malone.

The good thing for all of your who could not make it to Uptime I’ve blogged tons on Google already and what they disclosed at their Google Efficient Data Center on April 1, 2009. There was nothing I saw new vs. April 1st event.

The major group of people who have benefitted from Google’s presentation are the vendors at the Uptime conference. It may be my imagination, but it seems like 75% of the people at the conference are the vendors.

Where are the customers?