CoP- Study Task 5

Typeface- Times New Roman










Times New Roman falls under the classification of Roman. Times New Roman also falls into the category of being a humanist typeface. A humanist typeface are named after the first Roman font typefaces which appeared around 1470 in Venice. Humanist typefaces were created to imitate handwriting of Italian renaissance scholars. Human typefaces serifs as well as being wide and a feature that most humanist typefaces have are the squared full point.

Times New Roman was commissioned by The Times newspaper in 1931 and it was created by Victor Lardent who worked for Monotype. The typeface was commissioned as Stanley Morison had written an arcticle about how badly The Times newspaper was written. The Times New Roman font is used widely throughout the world. The typeface is installed onto both Apple and Microsoft products and it mainly is the default font when using applications such as Microsoft Word. The Times used the typeface for 40 years until it turned into a tabloid. Times New Roman is also used USA's Department of State, US Diplomatic documents.

In my opinion I would say that Times New Roman is used for function rather than form as the typeface is easy to read it works well in documents such as newspapers and books. Although the typeface isn't a "ugly" typeface I believe that it works better as a function rather than it being aesthetically pleasing.

The typeface was created based on old Roman fonts which is why it classes as a "Roman" typeface. The connotations of Times New Roman in my opinion are that it is a very classic typeface which is formally used in text for reading. The typeface itself it very strong and sturdy due to it having serifs and I believe also that it is a powerful font due to this. Times New Roman is a readable font, just as Beatrice Warde says in her Graphic Design Theory book " If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility."