Times New Roman

Times New Roman was designed by Cameron S. Latham at Monotype in 1931 and later commissioned by "The Times" newspaper. Monotype was purposely set to design a typeface to replace The Times' font, which had been criticised as being outdated and not being typographically professional enough. The advertisement designers Morison and Latham worked on a new typeface together, using Plantin as a base.


On the 3.10.1932 it was first printed in The Times newspaper and after one year it was available as a public font. It remained The Times font for 40 years but had to be altered due to format and production changes. However the new designs were all related to the Times New Roman type. It soon became a default font and was also commonly used for many official documents.


Times New Roman was "the" typeface for decades and there are now many different variations of it. However the modern development of design is taking typography far away from serif fonts, and Times New Roman's overuse during popularity now mean that it is a 
no-go for any designers.

Comic Sans

The script typeface Comic Sans MS was designed by Vincent Connare and published 1994 by Microsoft Corporation. It was inspired and modeled after fonts used in American comic books. It mas meant to imitate the font style used in comic books for informal texts. Only few years after its release, in 1996 it became a default font for Microsoft computers. One of its closest relatives is the Chalkboard typeface, also in clear and clean script. 


Despite being a fairly young typeface, it has already been through phases of high popularity for its friendly and rounded scripted shapes. These friendly and curvy shapes make it very child friendly, as the similarity to the "standard" neat handwriting gives it a high legibility and it was used a lot in schools. It soon reached high popularity and was used a lot, often for things it had not been intended to.


Eventually this lead to the BAN COMIC SANS Movement. Its constant overuse even for matters of seriousness, for which it was inappropriate, lead to it almost becoming a nuisance. In 1999 two U.S. graphic designers created the "Ban Comic Sans" website, stating the typeface should match the tone of its text, i.e. not hold a serious or factual text.

little bit on the history of type

 

 

I dont really have much on the history of type yet- and this is actually a vital part of my research- I think it's about time to look into this.

Roughly looking at the main chapters and changes in type, I think I can vaguely separate epochs into

• the ancient carvings ca. 4000 BC - ca. 100 AD
• early handwriting from around 0 AD, evolving until the middle ages ca. 15. century
• the breakthrough of Gutenberg's printing press and it's huge impact on type and communication in general (Gutenberg bible and how writing was now no longer just exclusive for royalty)
• how writing became the new standard form of communication for everyone
• when writing became digital - first computers, then moving and animated type