4 ms·

"And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy." Why? Can someone explain this?

by Inu 8y ago

tacon 8y ago
>Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jahewson 8y ago
The version of Times New Roman shipped with Windows is not true to the original and looks kinda disappointing. The originals from Monotype/Linotype are fine. Arial is a poor clone of Helvetica. It only exists to avoid licensing it.
crazygringo 8y ago
As wonderful as those fonts may have been once, now merely because they're defaults and ubiquitous they will come across as you not caring about the medium of your message, and by extension not caring about the message itself. Messages are defined not just by their content but also by their medium, like it or not. It's the same thing as wearing the same shirt and pants every day that was what K-Mart had on sale: you don't care and it wasn't chosen to flatter your body. Apathetic and sloppy. (And I personally find great aesthetic beauty in Times and in Helvetica, Arial's original -- it's sad to me that they're simply no longer viable choices for design.)
- dwrodri 8y ago
  I would say that Helvetica is most certainly a viable choice for design. Helvetica is great for when you want to present text that appears both modern yet extremely neutral. The MIT Technology [1] review uses a lot of Arial and Neue Haas Grotesk, which is the metal predecessor to Helvetica. I may have some bias since I am a fan of the Helvetica documentary. Regardless of my preferences I think designers who reject Helvetica due to its popularity value originality more than practicality. In something like an art museum, or a fast food restaurant, originality is very important—people need to know what sets you apart from the rest! For something like code documentation or a technical manual, Helvetica is a great choice. When someone is reading my documentation, they have a very specific goal in mind, and the text I'm writing needs to serve a very explicit purpose. If the reader is thinking about anything that's not the literal contents of the text, there is room for improvement in the design of the content (IMO). If you are intentional with your use of Helvetica, it can be a great choice. If it is obvious that you picked the default typeface, then your design will suffer. 1: https://www.technologyreview.com/ https://www.technologyreview.com/
nikofeyn 8y ago
the author has rather strong opinions about a lot of stuff, so pretty much everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt. that is, it's mostly a matter of opinion. one of the most beautifully typeset mathematics books, namely michael spivak's calculus, is typeset in baskerville, which is very similar to times new roman. basically no one in their right mind can claim spivak to be apathetic and sloppy, since he dedicated a massive amount of time to design his own tex math fonts. spivak writes about this here: https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf i have actually bought his fonts and use them. i have a passing interest in fonts, but am by no means an expert. i choose the low-hanging fruit when i can, such as buying the mathtime professional fonts for use in my LaTeX documents or switching dr. racket (the racket ide) to use consolas instead of its default font. that being said, i find butterick's font choice to be against my own aesthetic. he seems to really like tall, squeezed fonts, and he often plays with font color in ways that i don't like, such as grayed out blacks and colors against white or off-white backgrounds. i have always found it hard to read. for example, in his beautiful racket book, you can use a color picker to show that his blacks are not black and have been reduced. i don't know what purpose this serves. you can also see the grayed out look on the redesigned racket site (https://racket-lang.org/ https://racket-lang.org/). it makes things very washed out when reading. another example is that in the below link, look at the "l", "h", "d", and "f" when zoomed in. they all have this slant at the top, but on the f, it almost looks like a rendering bug or issue. when reading at regular zoom, it makes things look just off. it makes reading such fonts more tiring because there's little things like that you have to unconsciously process. https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/from-br-to-racket-base.html#macro-definitions https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/from-br-to-racket-base.... all that to say, it seems font choices, like many things, are rather personal. i personally prefer things that don't seem so designed. most of his fonts seem heavily designed. so, such hard ultimatums like what you quoted should basically be ignored.
coffeefirst 8y ago
I have an actual answer for Times New Roman. TNR was derived from a newspaper typeface that addressed two problems: 1. Newspapers are laid out in lots of narrow columns. You want to be able to pack a lot of letters in a short line. 2. Newsprint is a very think paper that absorbs ink, so you need think lines to minimize bleeding Most people today don't write in tiny columns, so they throw TNR on an 8.5x11 document or a the main block of a website, and you wind up with line lengths that are too long. In use cases with narrow columns, that's fine, but it doesn't fit very well for the main body of text. The second item is irrelevant. Instead, the thin lines are just harder to read on a screen. You can test this: go to the new york times on your browser, open an article with dev tools, set the second paragraph in Times New Roman and the third in Georgia, and observe how well each one reads compared to the default font. Georgia has a large x-height, is wider, has a variety of thin and think lines, all things meant to make it easier to read on low res screens that were the norm in the 90's. Georgia might not be the sleekest option on a retina screen, but it's still very readable. All of this is more of an art than a science. You can have (or borrow) strong opinions, and have good reasons behind them, without anyone else being wrong.
Arn_Thor 8y ago
I had the same knee-jerk question, but found the answer in the very book, in the Font Recommendations section https://practicaltypography.com/system-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/system-fonts.html

"And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy." Why? Can someone explain this?

by Inu 8y ago

"And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy." Why? Can someone explain this?

tacon 8y ago

>Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jahewson 8y ago

The version of Times New Roman shipped with Windows is not true to the original and looks kinda disappointing. The originals from Monotype/Linotype are fine. Arial is a poor clone of Helvetica. It only exists to avoid licensing it.

crazygringo 8y ago

As wonderful as those fonts may have been once, now merely because they're defaults and ubiquitous they will come across as you not caring about the medium of your message, and by extension not caring about the message itself. Messages are defined not just by their content but also by their medium, like it or not. It's the same thing as wearing the same shirt and pants every day that was what K-Mart had on sale: you don't care and it wasn't chosen to flatter your body. Apathetic and sloppy. (And I personally find great aesthetic beauty in Times and in Helvetica, Arial's original -- it's sad to me that they're simply no longer viable choices for design.)

dwrodri 8y ago
I would say that Helvetica is most certainly a viable choice for design. Helvetica is great for when you want to present text that appears both modern yet extremely neutral. The MIT Technology [1] review uses a lot of Arial and Neue Haas Grotesk, which is the metal predecessor to Helvetica. I may have some bias since I am a fan of the Helvetica documentary. Regardless of my preferences I think designers who reject Helvetica due to its popularity value originality more than practicality. In something like an art museum, or a fast food restaurant, originality is very important—people need to know what sets you apart from the rest! For something like code documentation or a technical manual, Helvetica is a great choice. When someone is reading my documentation, they have a very specific goal in mind, and the text I'm writing needs to serve a very explicit purpose. If the reader is thinking about anything that's not the literal contents of the text, there is room for improvement in the design of the content (IMO). If you are intentional with your use of Helvetica, it can be a great choice. If it is obvious that you picked the default typeface, then your design will suffer. 1: https://www.technologyreview.com/ https://www.technologyreview.com/

nikofeyn 8y ago

the author has rather strong opinions about a lot of stuff, so pretty much everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt. that is, it's mostly a matter of opinion. one of the most beautifully typeset mathematics books, namely michael spivak's calculus, is typeset in baskerville, which is very similar to times new roman. basically no one in their right mind can claim spivak to be apathetic and sloppy, since he dedicated a massive amount of time to design his own tex math fonts. spivak writes about this here: https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf https://tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/spivak/spivak.pdf i have actually bought his fonts and use them. i have a passing interest in fonts, but am by no means an expert. i choose the low-hanging fruit when i can, such as buying the mathtime professional fonts for use in my LaTeX documents or switching dr. racket (the racket ide) to use consolas instead of its default font. that being said, i find butterick's font choice to be against my own aesthetic. he seems to really like tall, squeezed fonts, and he often plays with font color in ways that i don't like, such as grayed out blacks and colors against white or off-white backgrounds. i have always found it hard to read. for example, in his beautiful racket book, you can use a color picker to show that his blacks are not black and have been reduced. i don't know what purpose this serves. you can also see the grayed out look on the redesigned racket site (https://racket-lang.org/ https://racket-lang.org/). it makes things very washed out when reading. another example is that in the below link, look at the "l", "h", "d", and "f" when zoomed in. they all have this slant at the top, but on the f, it almost looks like a rendering bug or issue. when reading at regular zoom, it makes things look just off. it makes reading such fonts more tiring because there's little things like that you have to unconsciously process. https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/from-br-to-racket-base.html#macro-definitions https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/from-br-to-racket-base.... all that to say, it seems font choices, like many things, are rather personal. i personally prefer things that don't seem so designed. most of his fonts seem heavily designed. so, such hard ultimatums like what you quoted should basically be ignored.

coffeefirst 8y ago

I have an actual answer for Times New Roman. TNR was derived from a newspaper typeface that addressed two problems: 1. Newspapers are laid out in lots of narrow columns. You want to be able to pack a lot of letters in a short line. 2. Newsprint is a very think paper that absorbs ink, so you need think lines to minimize bleeding Most people today don't write in tiny columns, so they throw TNR on an 8.5x11 document or a the main block of a website, and you wind up with line lengths that are too long. In use cases with narrow columns, that's fine, but it doesn't fit very well for the main body of text. The second item is irrelevant. Instead, the thin lines are just harder to read on a screen. You can test this: go to the new york times on your browser, open an article with dev tools, set the second paragraph in Times New Roman and the third in Georgia, and observe how well each one reads compared to the default font. Georgia has a large x-height, is wider, has a variety of thin and think lines, all things meant to make it easier to read on low res screens that were the norm in the 90's. Georgia might not be the sleekest option on a retina screen, but it's still very readable. All of this is more of an art than a science. You can have (or borrow) strong opinions, and have good reasons behind them, without anyone else being wrong.

Arn_Thor 8y ago

I had the same knee-jerk question, but found the answer in the very book, in the Font Recommendations section https://practicaltypography.com/system-fonts.html https://practicaltypography.com/system-fonts.html