I have, of late, grown a fondness towards Times New Roman. Perhaps it is the bibliophile in me — although a lot of imprints these days too are letting go of the Times family for preppier alternatives like Garamond and Palatino.
Contrary to popular belief, Times New Roman is not a classical typeface like, say, the very Swiss, very classic Helvetica — another personal favorite of mine — or even the slightly more modern Helvetica Neue or its grandfather, Akzidenz Grotesk.
But to truly appreciate Times New Roman (TNR henceforth for simplicity) we will have to understand a little bit about its history, and that story begins in the 1930s.
A brief history of Times
In 1929 Times of London hired the British Monotype foundry’s Stanley Morrison to design a new typeface for the newspaper. They wanted a legible type that was a tad narrower than usual to account for the narrow columns of a newspaper so they could fit in more words.
Good type gets out of the way.
It is hard to say just where Mr Morrison got started from: perhaps an abandoned American project by one William Starling Burgess, or perhaps the older Plantin type by Monotype’s very own Fran Pierpont. In any case, when he delivered the typeface and Times started using it, it suddenly shot to fame.
Then TNR came to novels, personal computers, you name it. The problem with the unfortunate typeface was just that — misfortune. It was not, and is not, bad in any way; indeed it is a decent typeface that is readable and can hold its own, but it fell to the evil practice of overuse.
Much like Comic Sans, TNR was so overused that it came to stand for carelessness. Since it was the default type on word processors, using TNR went from being elegant to becoming a sign of laziness because the writer did not bother to change the default font — and this even if the writer made a conscious decision to use TNR.
A comeback
When was the last time you used Times New Roman?
I probably last used it around the first time I used word processors several years ago and then for my college project report (because they insisted it be in Times, 12pt, double-spaced). And then I decided, quite unapologetically, that I would use it right here on my website for 2015.
Not only do I like TNR and its elegance no matter what many in a herd believe, I also predict it is going to be making a comeback soon, because, thanks to the fact that it went largely unused in public projects (in advertisements, magazines etc. that constantly push themselves before our eyes) in recent years, our weariness with the typeface has dramatically reduced.
I speak, of course, for regular people, not certain designers who chose to hate TNR because they can or, worse, are supposed to.
Good type gets out of the way
Yet another reason I support TNR is precisely what makes so many people hate it: the font has absolutely no eye-catching tendency. It gets out of the way. Unless you intend to decorate headlines — in other words, for the body of your content — you need to make sure your typeface gets out of the way and lets your substance speak for itself.
If your writing has no substance, now that is a different matter entirely.
Master German industrial designer, and a talent I admire greatly, Dieter Rams once said of good design: [it] is unobtrusive; [it] is as little design as possible. The same goes for typography — any typeface that steals the thunder from your content has no place presenting your content. It is quite a simple idea.
Times New Roman may be a modern font by comparison to certain others, but our close-mindedness alone prevents it from being a classic. It is the quintessential typeface because it presents content and makes reading easy while not fighting for attention.
Lone live TNR. And welcome 2015. (This, as it so happens, is my first article for 2015.) Lastly, below is an interesting video about Times New Roman from the Unquiet series.
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