When did Helvetica and Times New Roman reach such levels of influence?

Typofactory
Typofactory Posts: 56
in History of Typography
Hello,

I was wondering when fonts like Helvetica or Times New Roman reached their apotheosis, or were in the public eye. Some other fonts are Arial, and then going a bit into obscurity are fonts like Futura or Georgia. I know that Helvetica was one of Apple’s default fonts in the Mac, but that couldn’t have been the entire reason, could it?
Tagged:

Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,227
    They were standard fonts in the first Apple LaserWriter printer in the mid-1980s, which led to pretty much every operating system adopting them—or metrics-compatible clones—as core fonts.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,739
    And the reason for that was that they were the base fonts in PostScript.
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,440
    edited September 2023
    My impressions are that the ubiquity of Times New Roman came mostly from it being a default in the first generations of Microsoft Word (related to its availability for printing), but that Helvetica had become a kind of default sans considerably earlier then the arrival of desktop publishing.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Helvetica arrived with the Modernist/international/Swiss design movement--preceded by Agzidenz Grotesk in the late 1950s but roared to popularity in the 196os. The phototype era had a brief heyday before the DTP burst in the 1980s. As John Hudson accurately stated, becoming a built in part of postscript printer technology was the hall of fame vote.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,227
    Helvetica had become a kind of default sans considerably earlier then the arrival of desktop publishing.
    Helvetica had fallen out of fashion for a period in the 1970s, though, to the degree that when Neville Brody used it for The Face in the early 1980s it was seen as something of a revival.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,216

    One measure of the ubiquity of Times: it was the default face of American pulp fiction in the mid-20th century.
    It could take an absurd amount of abuse and still function, rather like hard-boiled private detectives such as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.
    The ‘pulp’ being closely related to blotting paper, there was a considerable amount of press gain on the pages of novels such as Spillane’s The Big Kill.
    My copy is the 34th printing, it was a million-seller in paperback. 
    Note the small caps. 
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    The early laser printers contained the fonts inside themselves, rather than getting data on the shape of characters from a graphical operating system on the computer. The HP LaserWriter had Helvetica and Times Roman built in, and this is why we have Arial, a typeface based on Monotype Grotesque but which is metric-compatible with Helvetica.
    But blaming the HP LaserWriter instead of the Macintosh does not even come close to telling the whole story.
    Instead, Times Roman and Helvetica were both hugely popular long before ordinary people got the chance to set type themselves on computers. They were widely used, and two of the most popular typefaces in existence, back in the nineteen-sixties.
    It's been said that the three serif typefaces used in magazine publishing then were Times Roman, Century Schoolbook (or Expanded), and Caledonia - three, instead of just one, because publishers wanted to differentiate their magazines from their immediate competitors. Helvetica Medium was most famous for its use in signage in airports, but it was used in many other contexts as well.
    And imitating popular typefaces with knockoffs under other names was common in the phototypesetting era, and Times Roman and Helvetica were two of the chief victims, although many other popular typefaces also recieved the same treatment. For Times Roman, the Selectric Composer had Press Roman, and the Varityper had Exeter.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    Having spent a lot of time studying it, I would not say Press Roman from the Selectric Composer is all that similar to Times. It was inspired by Times, but is quite a lot wider, on average.

    The cruder unit system necessitated a redesign, as just rounding to the nearest required width and adjusting the outlines appropriately would have created a frankenfont. (I tried it, and it looks awful.) Also, the Selectric Composer actually used _the same_ set of proportional widths for all its proportional fonts! (Though I would not be shocked if they did Press Roman first, and then made everything fit its widths system.)

    That notwithstanding, John S is 100% correct that there were many, many Times and Helvetica lookalikes available on various typesetting systems.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    edited September 2023
    Thomas Phinney said:
    Having spent a lot of time studying it, I would not say Press Roman from the Selectric Composer is all that similar to Times. It was inspired by Times, but is quite a lot wider, on average.
    Um, that would depend on the point size. In addition to using the same set of proportional widths for all typestyles, as you note below, the width of a unit had only three possible values: 1/72" (red), 1/84" (yellow), and 1/96" (blue). In the case of Press Roman, the 11 point size used red, and the 10 point size used yellow - so 11 point Press Roman was wide, and 10 point Press Roman was narrow.
    Also, the Selectric Composer actually used _the same_ set of proportional widths for all its proportional fonts! (Though I would not be shocked if they did Press Roman first, and then made everything fit its widths system.)

    According to an article about how the Selectric Composer was developed in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, IBM averaged the widths of several dozen popular typefaces to arrive at the unit system to use on the device.
    That being said, however, if you compare the unit system of the Composer to the widths of Monotype Times Roman, you will find a consistent ratio between all the characters, except that M, W, m and w on the Composer, the widest letters, have been narrowed somewhat.
    The Varityper used a unit system like some IBM Executive typewriters, except that 5-unit characters became 4-unit characters. Making the widest characters narrower allowed a mechanism with a limited number of available widths, from mechanical considerations, to handle larger point sizes, and with a finer width resolution, and so this was a common area to skimp on.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 364
    edited September 2023
    John Savard said:
    According to an article about how the Selectric Composer was developed in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, IBM averaged the widths of several dozen popular typefaces to arrive at the unit system to use on the device.
    That being said, however, if you compare the unit system of the Composer to the widths of Monotype Times Roman, you will find a consistent ratio between all the characters, except that M, W, m and w on the Composer, the widest letters, have been narrowed somewhat.

    Frutiger claimed that the widths of the Selectric Composer fonts were indeed modeled after Times. Only when IBM engaged him to adapt Univers for the Composer, he did some research to find better, universally suited unit widths by analyzing popular fonts and averaging their letter widths. The results were however not taken into consideration, as IBM's unit system was already finalized at that point.

  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 297
    As I recall, the way to tell Times Roman from Times New Roman, on Mac and Windows machines in the early 90s at least, was one of them had a descending italic capital J, and the other did not.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    John Butler said:
    As I recall, the way to tell Times Roman from Times New Roman, on Mac and Windows machines in the early 90s at least, was one of them had a descending italic capital J, and the other did not.

    I haven't been able to locate the descending italic capital J on any version of Times. However, you may be thinking of the swash italic lowercase Z, absent from Times 327 from Monotype, but found both on their Times Wide and on Linotype's version of Times.
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,739
    edited October 2023
    @John Butler The J is non-descending in both, going back to the metal days. @John Savard is correct in that Linotype's version has a descender on the lowercase z. (Both have a z descender in Bold Italic.) Another difference is the capital P, which has a more curved bottom in TNR. 

    I made a slight error in that the digital version of Times Roman (from Linotype) the family name is just "Times." The plain style is called "Times Roman," but "Roman" is the style name rather than part of the family name. In the original Linotype the family was called "Times Roman," so you had names like "Times Roman Italic," whereas in the digital version it's "Times Italic."
  • Florian Hardwig
    Florian Hardwig Posts: 273
    edited October 2023
    Mark, thank you for sharing these insights! This sounds like a great book indeed.
    I once made me a cheat sheet for telling apart Times and Times New Roman (the system versions on Mac OS and MS Windows, that is).
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 364
    That reminded me of this handy comparison, which I made, like, exactly 25 years ago:


  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 364
    The descending J is found only in the Bold and Bold Italic styles of Linotype’s Times.


  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    Thanks Jens! There are a couple of points here that I had not yet used in a case, could be handy.  :)
  • Mike Duggan
    Mike Duggan Posts: 239
    Brings back memories of Hinting TNRoman for Windows 3.1... : )
  • Patrick Griffin
    Patrick Griffin Posts: 81
    The first font I ever "made" was a 12pt bitmap version of Times Roman, for textbooks we were printing at the university print shop in 1989. The font editing software I used was Elixifont.
  • Patrick Griffin
    Patrick Griffin Posts: 81
    Now that I'm dredging up the old muck, I think Times Roman must have been a mass use standard before the Mac. I mean for common office use, not just trade printing. I've seen daisy wheels of it in a couple of different sizes, dating back to the late 1970s.
  • Florian Hardwig
    Florian Hardwig Posts: 273
    Even for techniques unrelated to typesetting machines (or body text, for that matter), Times was a standard long before the Mac: Letraset carried Times Bold as early as 1960, as one of their first dozen typeface styles. This was for their initial wet transfer product, and before they launched the dry version that made them famous. The Bold Italic was added by 1962, and (the lighter and less display-oriented) Times New Roman later in the 1960s. In the case of Letraset, this was also because Monotype (like other established players) didn’t yet understand the value of the designs. Belittled newcomer Letraset with their non-competing product could obtain the rights for a bargain. Letraset adopted Helvetica in 1964, under the peculiar name “New Haas Grotesque”.


  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    edited October 2023
    Florian Hardwig said:
    Belittled newcomer Letraset with their non-competing product could obtain the rights for a bargain. Letraset adopted Helvetica in 1964, under the peculiar name “New Haas Grotesque”.

    There is some history behind that name.
    Neue Haas Grotesk was the name of the original typeface as designed by Max Miedinger under the art direction of Eduard Hoffman at the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei. When Linotype bought the rights to the face, they revised it, and the result is what acquired the name Helvetica.
    So perhaps Letraset actually was able to strike a deal directly with Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei instead of going through Linotype, but, of course, that is not necessarily the case, there could have been a different explanation. (Such as licensing the typeface, but not its trademark, from Linotype, and choosing to use a name with at least some connection to the typeface. I suspect this is more likely, but I don't know the story offhand.)

    Dan Reynolds said:
    Typoart eventually made a Times clone for phototypesetting to fill that gap, which rather deliciously was named Timeless. The go-to replacement for Univers was Maxima, which – despite what detractors may have claimed – was not a copy of Univers but arguably a better grot for book composition.

    In my opinion, Univers is a better sans-serif typeface for book composition than Helvetica. Given that, if Typoart's Maxima is better still, it will be worth looking into.
    Oh. According to Identifont, it was developed as a substitute for Helvetica, rather than Univers, and from their specimen, I would say it more closely resembles Helvetica than Univers (but, indeed, it is not a copy of Helvetica either... or did I misunderstand you, imagining you to have said the detractors thought it a clone of Univers). Also, I had not realized this typeface originated, and was used, in the DDR.
    In fact, if anything, while the shapes of Maxima closely resemble those of Helvetica, the "feel" of this typeface, at least to me, is more like that of Monotype Grotesque. (Yes, the original, not its sinister offspring Arial.)

Categories