4 ms·
Ask HN: What is the most timeless font?
I am looking for a font that can be read easily in 100year or 1000years. A font nobody will link to a given period.
- danielam 3y agoTimes.
- wizofaus 3y agoYou'd like to think a timeless font would have a timeless name, though...
- pyeri 3y agoArial and Verdana are probably your best bets. The cockroaches that survived the millennia and living today have the best chances of surviving more future millennia too!
- retrac 3y agoHelvetica, or Times New Roman. Or any of their relatives or clones. Modeled on fonts that were modeled on fonts that were, originally, modeled (for lower case) on Renaissance Italian scribal forms, and (for upper case) Roman monumental inscriptions. Typefaces are incredibly conservative, really: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Trajan_inscription_duotone.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Trajan_inscri...
- jamesliudotcc 3y agoTimes New Roman is less than 150 years old, Helvetica less than 100. Despite their ubiquity due to being the default fonts on personal computers, they aren't super common in publishing or signage. They're actually kind of special purpose typefaces. Times is specifically designed packing narrow columns, like newspapers, and Helvetica is for ... I dunno what, documentary filmmakers? (The documentary was great). As another commenter has said, Garamond has been around for many more centuries.
- f30e3dfed1c9 3y agoGaramond has already been around for more than 500 years, no reason to think it won't be legible in another 500.
- surprisetalk 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect