The Verge alerted me to graphic designer Craig Rozynski's attempts to create a new spin on the much-hated-but-still-ubiquitous Comic Sans font. It's called Comic Neue, and Rozynski is making it available for free. Rozynski claims that he's "beaten" the "squashed, wonky, and weird glyphs of Comic Sans" into "shape," while still "maintaining the honesty that made Comic Sans so popular."

Here's what Comic Neue Regular looks like:

But there are plenty of variations on the theme over at the Comic Neue site. I'm no designer, but I guess it's an improvement over Comic Sans. I mean, it makes sense as a font and some of the Obliques are fairly attractive. But the thing about Comic Sans's ubiquity in documents is that it's easy for people to find; it just lives there in Word, ready to use. I think the people who know how to download a font aren't the people who use Comic Sans, and I think that's a barricade that Rozynski won't be able to vault over without the help of a Microsoft or a Google adopting the font into their word processors.