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?
Comments
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.
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.
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.
In early 1983, when the Macintosh was in development, Bob Bellville, an employee of Apple who had worked previously at Xerox PARC (where the graphical user interface was born), learned that Adobe (also former PARC people) was working on a page description language (PostScript) and hardware to go with it (workstations and printers) and told Steve Jobs about it.
Jobs met with John Warnok and Chuck Geschke (founders of Adobe) and realized that while Apple's hardware (Macintosh) was better, Adobe's PostScript software was better than what Apple had (QuickDraw). He convinced Adobe to just license PostScript to Apple and forget about hardware. At the time, Apple was designing what would become the LaserWriter based on a Canon print engine.
At one point, after the Mac debuted and the LaserWriter was still under development, in cooperation with Adobe, they realized they needed fonts. Adobe first approached Compugraphic (which, for all intents and purposes, is what became today's Monotype), but they wanted complete control over the fonts and PostScript. Adobe declined. Apple also had bad feelings about Compugraphic because of an earlier deal they made with them with the Apple Lisa, which didn't turn out well.
Jonathan Seybold advised Adobe to go to Linotype where they agreed to license Helvetica and Times Roman to Adobe and also to develop the first PostScript typesetter—the Linotronic imagesetter.
After that, Adobes engineers converted Helvetica and Times Roman (four styles each) into PostScript, where they became part of the PostScript base fonts, along with Courier and Symbol.
( * When Times New Roman was created for The London Times in 1930 by Monotype, it was cross-licensed to Linotype for use on their line-casting machines. At Linotype, it was called "Times Roman," and still was when Linotype licensed it to Adobe. Microsoft, who didn't have a deal with Adobe, later licensed Times New Roman and Arial from Monotype to fill the same shoes as Times Roman and Helvetica.)
Incidentally, the book is great and highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of PostScript and desktop publishing. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before (or maybe knew but forgot—it was 20 years ago when it came out).
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.
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."
Similarly, Linotype’s Linotron 505 – a beast of a phototypesetting machine – was often delivered with Times or with Univers. I noticed this while researching book design from the 1970s in the former East Germany; in that decade, an awful lot of books were composed in Univers and/or Times, even though VEB Typoart (the state-run typefoundry and manufacture or typesetting-machine matrices) had neither in its program. This was because large printing plants had been able to import Linotrons from West Germany. 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.
Linotype probably replaced Univers with Helvetica as its default sans in other markets and/or at other times, but I don’t have any stats or anecdotes to provide for that.
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.