A Brief History of Times New Roman

Browsing through various design blogs I’ve stumbled upon a short but fascinating video about the Times New Roman. The font first appeared in 1932 in the London newspaper The Times, for which it was designed by Victor Lardent under the direction of Stanley Morison (Monotype). Although no longer used by the newspaper, it is still widely used in books and on the Internet. Times New Roman is based on Plantin and Perpetua, but has been adapted for easy reading and to occupy less space. Finally, Microsoft has made it world famous by making it the default font of its editing software Word (however, since the 2007 version, Calibri became the default font). This font is included with all Windows operating systems since Windows 3.1.

In this video, designers and typographers involved with this truly historic font talk about what it has become over 80 years later. Interestingly enough almost all of them admitted that they have never used the typeface in their design works, even The Times “continues to use its custom lettering in the updated ‘Modern’ & ‘Classic’ versions”.