On Times New Roman: Personal Reflection and Its History

Preparing for the midterm, I had an opportunity to delve into the aesthetics and the history of the Times New Roman. This one of the most ubiquitous typefaces drew my attention enough for me to pick it as the font of my choice to make type specimen during the class and to research it in preparation for the midterm examination, as it is the typeface of which initiated my interest in typography when I was still in high school. However, the interest with the subject was not with the affection towards the typeface; rather it was born out of rejection. Times New Roman was nothing but a boring rule forced on me, when all the teachers used to say “use standard margin, with 12 point, Times New Roman, double-spaced.” There was no reason as to why that was the standard; that was how it was to be done and the order, much like the look of the font, came with dogmatic authority. “That’s how you write an academic essay,” they said. I remember secretly using Garamond or plain Times, mainly out of spite, but also because they looked nicer to me.

I did not think much on it, but my further research on this typeface has taught me some lessons on why I might have felt that way in high school. Indeed, Times New Roman is the most basic typeface in legal or scholastic setting anywhere. It has been fixated as the standard to a degree where the usage of it has been even forced in some setting, especially with the MLA guideline suggesting—and some instructors requiring—the use of Times New Roman as the font to use. It also comes as one of the basic System Font in every devices and word processors we use.

However, some argues that the continued and wide usage of this font should be reconsidered in many instances. One example is Matthew Butterick, the author of our beloved Typography for Lawyers. He writes: “If you have a choice about using Times New Roman, please stop.”¹ The reason for his argument is that the typeface is simply being overused as a mere crux born out of familiarity and deep entrenchment. I cannot agree with him more.

Nonetheless, in its inception, Times New Roman was born out of a quest for new and innovative needs of the time. The typeface’s history begins with the British newspaper The Times, which was in need for new a new font for its printed papers in 1931. Amid the criticization that the typeface it was using was “out-of-touch with modern typographical trends,” the news agency hired the criticizer Stanley Morison to create something better.² The new typeface, designed with the help of the draftsman Victor Lardent, performed marvelously the function proper for its medium: the efficiency. The new typeface maximized the amount of letters that fit on a line and thus on a page, therefore minimizing the cost of printing.

Morison and Lardent achieved this feat using few but effective methods. First, raised the x-height of each characters. Without inherent changes in the ascender or descender height, but making the x-height elongated, each letters were able to form a narrow shape, making characters more suitable to fit more in a vertical column of the newspaper. Moreover, the kerning has been also narrowed, giving the typeface more condensed look, further making the type more ‘efficient’ for the medium. However, as can be expected, then the readability has to be sacrificed. Morison solved this problem by altering the shape of the letters; the thicker strokes of each characters, like the vertical lines in the “n,” were enlarged, thereby giving the letters a clear contrast against the backdrop of the paper.³ At the same time, the intersections of the thicker strokes were thinned, like in the vertical lines of the “n” where it meet the serif.⁴ Through such measures, Morison was able to both achieve the legibility and the economic efficiency of the typeface.

The result of the focus on the legibility and efficiency however did not directly correlate with the type’s aesthetic capability. As the purpose of the type was clearly a economic and clean way of delivering information, decorative measures were largely omitted and were sacrificed for the functionality. The result was an economic and unobtrusive typeface, that were not visible to the readers digesting the content and were efficient in cramming as many letters as possible while not sacrificing the legibility. Perhaps, it was the perfect typeface for the medium in the capitalistic world.

 

Notes:

1. Matthew Butterick, A Brief History of Times New Roman.
2. Meredith Mann, Where Did Times New Roman Come From?, 2014.
3. Ibid. 
4. Ibid.