Vincent Connare

Vincent Connare

Vincent Connare is a popular contemporary graphic designer and typographer based in America. He has formerly worked for the world’s leading software company, Microsoft. He is widely recognized for designing Trebuchet MS and Comic Sans font.

Vincent Connare was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1960. He received his formal education from Milford High School in Milford, Massachusetts. He then went on to study at New York Institute of Technology where he opted for Fine Art and Photography. Before working for Compugraphic where his college girlfriend worked, he provided his services as a photographer at The Worcester Telegram, a Massachusetts’ newspaper. Compugraphic needed a typographer to transform its typeface library from its existing photosetting incarnation for digital use. He joined the company as a typographic engineer in 1987 and remained one till 1993. In fact, he also became a member of Intellifont, TrueType and Ikarus font production teams during his time at Agfa/Compugraphic. He was the first type designer to acquaint himself with TrueType hinting.

Connare is credited for doing TrueType hinting of font for Hewlett-Packard, creating first TrueType font pack for Apple and another font pack for Microsoft. In 1993, he was landed a job at Microsoft Corporations which required him ‘to fix things’ for them. He is responsible for creating the original test bitmap and TrueType fonts to test Tahoma font. Moreover, he developed a version of Arial font for Microsoft’s WebTV to be used in digi-boxes. He modified the Windows Baltic MS Sans bitmap fonts using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and converted the hexadecimal number to binary. Microsoft launched its Windows 1995 in which they featured a new interactive program, Microsoft Bob. Although Connare was impressed by the software, he found Times Roman font in characters’ speech bubbles strange.

Inspired by DC and Marvel Comic’s lettering style, Connare developed Comic Sans font. Disney adopted his font for advertisement and for which he merely received a signed Mickey Mouse picture. While working for Microsoft he designed another popular typeface, Trebuchet. He also wrote documents on the subject of font production and TrueType hinting. He left Microsoft in 1999 and moved to England to study Type Design at Reading University and earned a Masters degree. Upon completion of his studies, he returned to America. He had previously worked a small hinting job for Dalton Maag Limited, a London based type design agency. In 2001 he was offered a serious post there which he gladly accepted and relocated to UK again. At Dalton Maag he was appointed to supervise the final production of fonts for their major clients. Some of these clients include BMW, Virgin Galactic, UBS, Tui-Thompson, Winterthur, and Burberry.

In 2008, Connare launched his latest design Magpie OpenType, inspired by Pierre Simon Fournier le jeune’s 18th century types. He designed and engineered font and logos, for instance, the iconic Ministry of Sound logo. Currently he writes documentation, trains young font engineers, deliver lectures at conferences around the world and give interviews. In addition to being an accomplished typeface designer, Connare has expertise as a photographer and photo technician, as well. His photographic work has been published in articles and advertisements for publications such as Closer magazine, Spotlight, Nivea Fashion Police, Company magazine and Creative Review. He also provided several different services including photographic support, website production, audio/video production to internationally recognized fashion designer Scott Henshall and TV presenter Hannah Sandling.