Meet the Russian designer behind the Comic Sans-Helvetica mash-up font
The creator of Comic Helvetic says many in Russia are opposed to the war in Ukraine
Russian designer Alexander Pravdin combined two of the most famous fonts in the world, and the results may delight, upset, or confuse you.
Designed as an experimental project over the course of four months and released in 2019, Comic Helvetic tempers the casualness of Comic Sans with the structure of Helvetica.
“It could have been done faster, but I wanted it to be more than just a joke, I wanted it to be a well-made typeface,” Pravdin told me in a DM on Behance. “Maybe I have some perfectionism problems, cause I always take a very long time to draw simple graphics.”
The mash-up font found new life in the U.S. on April Fool’s Day after it was selected for Print’s Type Tuesday.
For a typeface with parent fonts most often criticized for being basic, the response I saw to Comic Helvetic was surprisingly positive. Input described it as an “unholy combination” that no one asked for, but called it “pretty compelling” and “perfect.” I saw more than one Twitter user say they were obsessed.
Based on comic book lettering, Comic Sans was designed by Vincent Connare and released by Microsoft in 1994. It’s been described as a font everyone loves to hate, and an attempted glow up was made in 2014 when designers Craig Rozynski and Hrant Papazain released the more formal Comic Neue in hopes of becoming “the casual script choice for everyone including the typographically savvy.” Clearly, there’s something about Comic Sans we feel needs tinkering.
Comic Helvetic is available for free in light, medium, and heavy, and in Latin and Cyrillic characters. Pravdin said he hasn’t seen it used in person.
“Maybe people don't know what to do with it,” he said.
Pravdin has a Ukrainian flag emoji in his Behance bio, and he said it’s hard to support Ukraine living in Russia.
“[T]here are many people around who are not influenced by government propaganda and are against this war,” he said. “We will continue to try to stop it as soon as possible.”
As of last month, nearly 15,000 people have been detained in Russia for demonstrating against the war, and protests have been held in more than 100 cities, according to the Washington Post.
Pravdin has released two previous sans serif typefaces that are also available as free downloads on DaFont: Songer, which was released in 2018, and his most popular, Next Art, which was released in 2017 and has more than 300,000 downloads.
He said he has another finished typeface he’s waiting to release because he doesn’t feel that now is a suitable time to publish it.