Trebuchet, designed by Vincent Connare in 1996, is a humanist sans serif designed for easy screen readability. Trebuchet takes its inspiration from the sans serifs of the 1930s which had large x heights and round features intended to promote readability on signs.

The typeface name is credited to a puzzle heard at Microsoft, where the question was asked, "could you build a Trebuchet (a form of medieval catapult) to launch a person from the main campus to the consumer campus, and how?" The Trebuchet fonts are intended to be the vehicle that fires your messages across the Internet. “Launch your message with a Trebuchet page”.

One of Connare’s intentions when designing Trebuchet was to instill personality into the letterforms, even at small sizes, while retaining clarity and readability. He wanted to create a typeface which was significantly distinguishable from Verdana and MS Sans.