Font Fables

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving font of choice. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. It can’t fly, it can’t see through walls, it can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What it can do is make things happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about the apertures and the ligatures, and you can feel the humility boring into you. Times' rewards are its moments – the wilful verification of its veracity, the surrender you must enact unto it. Times speaks not much, and when it does, it does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. Times compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, equivocally denigrating the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times (the newspaper) was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with the Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular.

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and its cousins, people began to regard the font as a symbol of the times past: it survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia, plagues, climactic crescendos and devastating denouements.

[caption id="attachment_558" align="aligncenter" width="645" caption="Champion."][/caption]

There was something about it that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the speaker of the war-torn parliament that is this world was always Times New Roman: stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with the font. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of Times New Roman answer the question without hesitation: Times New Roman is both, if not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has enhanced productivity possible; a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end and design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of Times New Roman (a relationship advertised by having it as the default font), has now introduced a new default, Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Love,

A writer.