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Times New Arial Mutates Familiar Fonts Into Something Wholly New (inputmag.com) 66

A project out of design studio Libermann Kiepe Reddemann (LKR) in Hamburg, Germany, in conjunction with designer Elias Hanzer, Times New Arial is a variable font that combines two of the most instantly recognizable fonts of the last two decades. From a report: Variable fonts are children of the internet. They're single font files that can dynamically adjust their height, width, slant, or other attributes without the need for a larger font file size, which makes them great for responsive web design. "The possibility to use custom fonts in the world wide web is rather new and has only been possible since the introduction of CSS2 in 1998," LKR explains. "Until then it was only possible to use fonts for the web that were installed on the user's computer, the so-called system fonts." Those system fonts were Times New Roman -- the serif option -- and Arial -- the grotesque or sans-serif one. That's why, according to LKR, that pair of fonts "nowadays embody default and nostalgic web design." In an interview with It's Nice That, LKR's David Liebermann says, "We wanted to combine this conventional aesthetic with new technical possibility in order to revive and refine them, so in turn, we could experiment with them in our projects."
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Times New Arial Mutates Familiar Fonts Into Something Wholly New

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  • Boring (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chewbacon ( 797801 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @12:10PM (#59985050)

    It should morph into Webdings instead.

  • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @12:47PM (#59985292)

    Serifs and Sans Serif are mutually exclusive for a reason.

    Times is designed for print while Arial is designed for displays. Specifically, serifs on screen make it harder to read while lack of serifs can make it harder to read on print -- as a general rule.

    The problem isn't the fonts per se -- it is all the hoops people have to jump in order to change the default hideous fonts to something more readable.

    The biggest problem is all the fucking whitespace on the margins wasted on a wide screen monitor because some clueless web designers thinks everyone views their content on mobile devices.

    And good luck if you ever try to print this page. WYSIWYG hasn't been true for decades W.R.T. Web Browsers.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 )

      Times is designed for print while Arial is designed for displays.

      This is not true at all. Arial is a metrically identical copy of Helvetica made by IBM for their printers. Helvetica was designed in 1957 (and even Monotype grotesque was released in 1926, and Gill Sans in 1928).

      Whoever told you that Arial was designed for display lied to you.

      • Times is designed for print while Arial is designed for displays.

        This is not true at all. Arial is a metrically identical copy of Helvetica made by IBM for their printers. Helvetica was designed in 1957 (and even Monotype grotesque was released in 1926, and Gill Sans in 1928).

        Whoever told you that Arial was designed for display lied to you.

        Made for low DPI outputs then, which these days are mostly screens.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          Also no. Did you read "Helvetica was designed in 1957 (and even Monotype grotesque was released in 1926, and Gill Sans in 1928)"? You think "low DPI output" was important then?

      • Whoever told you that Arial was designed for display lied to you.

        Or they simply could have been mistaken. Lies and mistakes aren't the same thing. Intent matters. Seriously, what would be the benefit for someone to lie about *this*? Stop assuming the worst in people and their actions as your default.

        • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          Funny how you post this in a thread where people are literally making crap up and presenting it as fact. It is not merely "mistaken" to do that, it is lying regardless of intent.

          • Verdana was in fact designed for displays. It also is sans-serif, but a full width font unlike Helvetica which is semi-condensed. Some people misuse the term Helvetica (or Arial, which is a very similar font) for any sans-serif font.

            • Not only easy to read but "I" looks different from "l", so you can tell slashdot.org from sIashdot from org. I'll be happy if other fonts did that.

              But Verdana was developed by the evil Microsoft.

              I use Verdana for development in Eclipse.

    • by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:49PM (#59985676)

      I think you may be confusing the history of Arial with the history of some other fonts that have been widely distributed by Microsoft.
      Microsoft's Tahoma [microsoft.com] and Verdana [microsoft.com] had been designed for displays.
      Arial had been designed already in 1982 to compete with Helvetica in print. It is close, but has some distinct differences.
      I found this article [creativepro.com] that tells their histories and compares the two.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:01PM (#59986044) Journal

      Serifs and Sans Serif are mutually exclusive for a reason.

      No, the "swelling" of the limb tips can be on a continuous scale. I've seen and used "semi serif" fonts before.

      I couldn't really find one in MS-Word at the moment to present an example. The closest find is variations of "Copperplate Gothic", but the lower case is missing for some reason.

      I should note there are two kinds of "limb swelling". One is rather abrupt, like a nail head, similar to Times, and others are more gradual, more like cone limbs. If one made a UI to design such, then the abruptness could be one slider and the degree another slider (ratio of tip diameter to start of limb, per inner end).

      A fancier UI would allow you to plot a limb profile curve, and then the "degree" slider would multiply that curve (including zero multiplication: sans serif).

      And the Advanced Pro++ edition would allow a different curve for each side of the limb, but I digress.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:21PM (#59986154) Journal

      whitespace on the margins wasted on a wide screen monitor because some clueless web designers thinks everyone views their content on mobile devices.

      It's a digression from fonts, but the "finger first" UI designs certainly have wasted a lot of screen real-estate, not just the margins, making one have scroll more or jump between screens.

      Mouse users are being punished for fadhood. If it's a work-oriented app for mostly desktops, then throw the mobilites under the bus and do it right. (With zooming, occasional fingering is still do-able on mouse GUIs.)

      #MakeMiceGreatAgain!

      • I believe the only reason people think mobiles are the "majority" of internet users is because phones are pinging 20-30+ things every minute 24 hours a day on a stock phone.

        • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @05:50PM (#59986912) Journal

          Mobile style is the lowest common denominator, but it does drag down mouser productivity as a trade-off. If the majority of actual users are mousers, then you are holding back productivity of the majority for the sake of the minority.

          Roughly 5 years ago everyone was predicting the death of most Windows and desktops even for business use. Just like the associated UI (non) styling, they were flat wrong.

          By the way, ambiguous icons are not a big problem with mice because roll-over pop-up text can give you a textual description. Mobile has no equivalent (at least not an accepted standard). Ambiguous icons drive me bats on mobile.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@worf . n et> on Friday April 24, 2020 @03:52PM (#59986336)

      Serifs make prose text easier to read. Sans-Serif are generally for blocks of short text. A wall of text is easier to read in serif - the serifs add a line making it easier to follow down a line without the eye skipping to another line of text midway through is one of the benefits.

      But you often use sans serif for big bold headlines because they do display a bit better. But only in short visible bursts because the eye doesn't carry the line too well.

      Microsoft in the early 00's released their fonts for the web, a set of 12 fonts that you could now guarantee would be on every web-enabled system out there. This was because font substitution sucks - unless you were using something like Adobe Type Manager that measured the weights and spacing of every font and built a database of fonts that look similar so can be substituted with little visual degradation, you could get weird layout issues. It's why PDF was popular because it allowed font embedding - so even if the viewer didn't have the font in question, they could still display it fine.(of course, embedded fonts require a new license so foundries were happy for that).

      But on the web, every browser displayed things differently depending on installed fonts - which on some systems was fine, but on others (like Linux) was a bit sparse. So when Microsoft released them, pretty much everyone used them because you could count on every system, including Linux, having those fonts installed and the character set known. It's kind of why no matter what OS you use now, at least the web browsers all work and look the same. Linux typography was pretty bad before.

      But I guess what they really mean is the font decides - if it's used in a short block of text, it'll be sans serif. If you have a lot of text, it'll be serif automatically. (Yes, fonts can do this they are programs after all. It's what lets fonts like what IntelliJ has work without needing special editor support - the font renderer knows how to do it properly and to the underlying editor it's still normal characters). It's also why font handling issues are major vulnerabilities in OSes.

      • by jbengt ( 874751 )

        Serifs make prose text easier to read.

        No, serif fonts are harder to read if you don't have perfect focus, especially in smaller sizes

        Microsoft in the early 00's released their fonts for the web, a set of 12 fonts that you could now guarantee would be on every web-enabled system out there. This was because font substitution sucks - unless you were using something like Adobe Type Manager that measured the weights and spacing of every font and built a database of fonts that look similar so can be substituted

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm still waiting for an affordable 8k monitor so that print fonts look good on screen too.

  • Damn fonts (Score:5, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Friday April 24, 2020 @12:52PM (#59985312)

    I would make a font joke but I’m not bold enough.

    I was going to insult someone using paragraph formatting tools.
    It would have been entirely justified.

    Times New Roman and Arial walk into a bar. The barman says “we don’t serve your type here”.

    In which font are horoscopes written? Futura.

    A font meets a friend in Rome and asks “are you a Roman too?” “No, but I am an Italic”

    There was a lot of trouble in the Wild West fonts as they were Sans Sheriff.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:12PM (#59985436)

    I love this quotation because it demonstrates a huge way the web changed, so huge that you don't even see it. It's not so much an elephant in the room, and the room has become an elephant and you don't see the elephant that you're inside of. But here's the quotation:

    “The possibility to use custom fonts in the world wide web is rather new and has only been possible since the introduction of CSS2 in 1998,” LKR explains. “Until then it was only possible to use fonts for the web that were installed on the user’s computer, the so-called system fonts.”

    The second part of this quotation is correct, but the first part only appears to be correct from a modern perspective, yet it's glaring and obviously false from a 1990s perspective. (As Obi Wan would say, "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.") If someone had told you "you can't use a custom font" in 1996, you would immediately know they're clearly wrong, and you could even trivially demonstrate that it's wrong by doing the "impossible" thing in a few seconds. But it doesn't look wrong to you right now, does it?

    Before reading on, can you spot where the error is?

    ...

    ...

    ...

    He's talking about a web page expressing a desire to use a certain font. Yeah, it's true, pages couldn't do that until CSS.

    But in the 1990s, you didn't want that! In the 1990s you would be looking at the issue as the user selecting their favorite font (and color and the background color!). The user was in control, because the browser was made more for the users than for publishers. You would just go into your browser preferences and change which fonts, colors, etc to use. It simply came down to: what looks most readable to you, on your screen?

    We have lost that. Oh, my browser still has a default font that I can control, but it rarely gets used because most pages specify a font, and the browser blindly obeys. But before CSS, the page couldn't do that, so the "deafault" font wasn't so much a default, as the choice.

    • They aren't talking about font selection, but parameters like slant and kerning.

    • by bbsguru ( 586178 )
      Even more fun, this refers to CSS2 as 'new', and 'recent'.
      That's right, there was a full 9 year history of the World Wide Web before CSS2 came along, 22 years ago
    • That's hardly an "error", and I don't know what fantasy world you come from where everyone customized their browser fonts & colours once upon a time. Maybe YOU did but it was never widespread.

      And if you still really want to customize your own fonts, it's not particularly hard for those determined to do so: https://www.technorms.com/4010... [technorms.com]

    • the first part only appears to be correct from a modern perspective

      It's correct from a modem perspective, because my connection is too slow to download custom fonts.

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Yes, but the concept of web pages originally was that the browser determined the presentation, not web page "designer". Everyone, save a deranged few, would recognize the vast improvement of flipping this around, and in the context of the web developer controlling the presentation, a requirement today, your observation has no merit.

  • by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Friday April 24, 2020 @01:32PM (#59985572)
    Wow! With this new font and Microsoft's new double space error correction I might even start having sex again. Life is GOOD!
    • Very good, sir. I will clear your afternoon schedule, fetch your lotion and load pornhub immediately.

    • I might even start having sex again

      Wait what? What else have you been doing locked in your home for the past month? Don't tell me you're one of those people who actually get's dressed for work.

  • May our eyes melt to save our hearts!

  • Early on a font that can be scaled to any size was a big thing, and it often took a good amount of computing power to render fonts at different sizes. Just take a look at Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh. Having a large font scroll on the screen was a big deal.

    For the most part, Fonts haven't change sense. Now that we computers with GPU's that can Render 3d worlds without a blip, having the fonts with more rendering options seems the natural progression. Such as font size, font slant, font-weight, up

  • From TFA:

    The possibility to use custom fonts in the world wide web is rather new and has only been possible since the introduction of CSS2 in 1998

    Who wrote this, Rip Van Winkle? How is a 22-year-old capability "rather new?"

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