I posted this on the Last Plane To Jakarta forums in response my dear friend Nog’s iconoclastic (and very reasonable) questioning of the party line that Times Roman Sucks. It is an impassioned and statement of conservative radicalism, a call to preserve the status quo of dissent.
I Do Not Like Times New Roman.
It is a very well-designed font, and I am sure when it was produced, in 1931, it exhibited all those, and only those, characteristics which might be suggested by its design—efficiency, business, plain, unobtrusive communication. However: in the intervening 75 years (that’s right, kids, it’s a big anniversary!), two facts have come into play:
No amount of lettering should be identically rendered as great as that amount which has been and is currently rendered in Times New Roman. It is unnatural and disturbing to the eye that those 36+ shapes have been repeated so many times; as such, like any over-repeated stimulus, the source and design begin to grate, annoy and displease where once they did nothing. I do not believe there is a face capable of being designed which is so perfect that it may be employed indefinitely and universally without losing effectiveness.
it is an unfortunate fact that the very reasons that TNR was so appropriate and well-suited to its ascendence to the position of Default Font To The World will also damn it eternally. The ability to print was delivered to the masses, and those masses, the vast majority of them wholly untutored in the art of printing, naturally much more often than not did not in fact make any design choices whatever—they printed without thought to type at all, and thus every poorly-set, -spelled, -punctuated, -worded, and -thought out draft, memo, notice, manuscript and essay of the last however-many years is set in Times New Roman. It’s not Stanley Morrison’s fault, then, but it nevertheless remains that for gajillions of computer- and printer-users across the globe, myself included, the look of Times New Roman is inextricably and indelibly bound up with the aesthetics of amateurism—or at least thoughtlessness.
2 Comments
When I had my PC up & attem, I did most of my work in Venetian. And on e2, my ekw base font is Arial. (My headers are supposed to be Fraktur but ekw has been busted for a long time.)
The thing I miss most about font variation is text figure numerals. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be the default for any new fonts.
I’m a major supporter of text figures as well, but the situation isn’t so dire as all that—there’s a lot of serif fonts, new and old, with OsF, and in fact in the last 10 years or so they’ve been on the upswing. They’re nowhere near extinct, and very very fun. In fact, Georgia, a font which manages the nearly inconceivable task of being a) well-designed and pleasing to the eye and b) nearly universally available (and thus suitable for .doc files and web design and the like), has them. So, good news!
Though really, your default font Arial? That’s nearly unpardonable. I don’t know if I can cope with that.
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