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When people talk about fonts being "dated", they just mean "overused". Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around fo

When people talk about fonts being "dated", they just mean "overused". Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as Word's default font, because TNR had become ubiquitous (and because docs were starting to be read on-screen more than in-print, so switching to a sans-serif default made sense). But TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text). Most of the commonly recommended alternatives (e.g. Baskerville and Garamond) pre-date it by decades or centuries, so it's hardly an "age" thing. It's just that readers don't see them as frequently as they do TNR. Even Calibri came along simply because Helvetica/Arial were "old". But Apple (well-respected for typography) still use Helvetica as the body text default in their office apps. And only the most pretentious of font snobs, who have carefully studied the capital "R" and "G", could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. I still think that Arial is a much nicer font than Calibri for body text. It just feels "old" because people have seen it on Wikipedia pages a million times.

ComputerGuru 5y ago
No, I meant dated as in “the novelty of it wore off and without that it doesn’t stand on its own two feet.” (If you read my other replies, you'll find that we are probably in complete agreement.) I probably qualify as a font snob (although hopefully not a pretentious one). Either/both of Arial or Helvetica are better designed than Calibri. Arial is available with some “fixes” as Arial Nova for free on the MS Store. Georgia, used everywhere as it is/was, will never be old or dated in my lifetime (but there’s a Georgia Pro with more weights and some changes to hinting available for free on the MS Store). Tahoma/Verdana [1] has aged beautifully and remains excellent for the web (as evidenced by its use on HN) - it's also permanently associated in my mind with being the MS Encarta body font long before Wikipedia was a thing. All but Arial were designed by the one and only Matthew Carter. (Times New Roman was certainly overused and elicits some unpleasant gut reactions thanks to its guilt by association with poorly formatted and improperly typeset Word documents but is nevertheless still a classic - and of course its core origins long predate the web.) [1]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/
schrijver 5y ago
> And only the most pretentious of font snobs (…) could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. Everybody with a passing interest in typefaces can tell Helvetica and Arial apart—that’s hardly a hallmark of pretentiousness. Judging Arial as a Helvetica clone might be pretentious, especially given how Helvetica is itself a clone (of Akzidenzk Grotesk). > TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text). Being optimised for denseness makes it a bad default choice for Word though… Especially for the page wide one column layouts that 99% of Word documents are. I think it works much better in the narrow newspaper columns for which it was designed, and where space is at a premium. Times and Times New Roman get used often in scientific publishing, I imagine because the fonts default-looking-ness makes things look undesigned and unfrivolous. Also here it looks off in the single column designs most books use. I have a hard copy of SICP, which is typeset in LaTeX, and it really bums me that it’s set in Times. Especially since LaTeX’s default font Computer Modern works better for readability IMHO. > Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more. For sure! https://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-type-design-and-the-logic-of-the-fork https://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-...

ComputerGuru 5y ago

No, I meant dated as in “the novelty of it wore off and without that it doesn’t stand on its own two feet.” (If you read my other replies, you'll find that we are probably in complete agreement.) I probably qualify as a font snob (although hopefully not a pretentious one). Either/both of Arial or Helvetica are better designed than Calibri. Arial is available with some “fixes” as Arial Nova for free on the MS Store. Georgia, used everywhere as it is/was, will never be old or dated in my lifetime (but there’s a Georgia Pro with more weights and some changes to hinting available for free on the MS Store). Tahoma/Verdana [1] has aged beautifully and remains excellent for the web (as evidenced by its use on HN) - it's also permanently associated in my mind with being the MS Encarta body font long before Wikipedia was a thing. All but Arial were designed by the one and only Matthew Carter. (Times New Roman was certainly overused and elicits some unpleasant gut reactions thanks to its guilt by association with poorly formatted and improperly typeset Word documents but is nevertheless still a classic - and of course its core origins long predate the web.) [1]: https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2017/tahoma-vs-verdana/

schrijver 5y ago

> And only the most pretentious of font snobs (…) could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. Everybody with a passing interest in typefaces can tell Helvetica and Arial apart—that’s hardly a hallmark of pretentiousness. Judging Arial as a Helvetica clone might be pretentious, especially given how Helvetica is itself a clone (of Akzidenzk Grotesk). > TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text). Being optimised for denseness makes it a bad default choice for Word though… Especially for the page wide one column layouts that 99% of Word documents are. I think it works much better in the narrow newspaper columns for which it was designed, and where space is at a premium. Times and Times New Roman get used often in scientific publishing, I imagine because the fonts default-looking-ness makes things look undesigned and unfrivolous. Also here it looks off in the single column designs most books use. I have a hard copy of SICP, which is typeset in LaTeX, and it really bums me that it’s set in Times. Especially since LaTeX’s default font Computer Modern works better for readability IMHO. > Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more. For sure! https://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-type-design-and-the-logic-of-the-fork https://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-...