Popular Font History
Let’s keep the font love going! Comment with the font that you use the most! There are many more typefaces I didn’t get to today, so let me know which ones I should research next!
LEARN MORE ILLUSTRATOR!
Melissa Yaeger has an exclusive offer just for Mrs. Wheeler students! Receive 10% off her Illustrator Essentials Course by using the code MRSWHEELER
Come one, come all, to our first General Seminar Class!
Think about this: You sit down to write a document, you open Word of Google Drive, what is the first thing you do? Pick a font! You probably make a choice about how the font feels- formal, fun, professional. But how did those fonts come to be? Let’s find out!
TIMES NEW ROMAN
Let’s start with one of the most popular and successful typefaces- Times New Roman.
The name actually tells us a lot about its history because it was created for The Times of London in 1932 by Monotype. The decision to create this new typeface was made out of frustration and lack of legibility of the old type. Times New Roman was easier to read and had a sense of authority.
Here is a look at the first issue with Times New Roman printed on October 2, 1932. A year later it was offered to the public and decades later became more famous as it was included on computer operating systems.
COMIC SANS
Don’t stop this video and storm away when you hear the next font. We HAVE to talk about it. Comic Sans.
In the 1980’s Vincent Connare worked for Microsoft and set out to create a typeface that stood out from all the boring traditional fonts. Inspired by comic book writing, he initially created the font for a kids program called Microsoft Bob, but when that didn’t work out it was included as a system font on Windows 95. Back then there weren’t many fonts to choose from, so Comic Sans was being used everywhere! As fonts became more readily available, Comic Sans quickly became the font people loved to hate. Where do you stand, with Comic Sans?
ARIAL
Created in 1982 by Monotype, the folks that brought us Times New Roman decades before, Arial was intended to be used on an early IBM® laser printer. But once it became pre-loaded on Microsoft and Apple computers, it quickly became the most used sans serif type!
GEORGIA
In 1996 Matthew Carter created a new serif font for Microsoft. It was formal but friendly, it was a great alternative to Times New Roman, it was Georgia. The interesting thing about this typeface is that it was created to be easier to read on low resolution screens, though it has stood the test of time and is still widely used even as screen resolution has improved!
CALIBRI
We’ll end with a more recently made typeface that has become the new norm0 Calibri.
In 2004 Lucas de Groot was secretly hired by Microsoft to create a new font that was easy to read on screen. He had no idea it was going to be the default typeface for the Microsoft Office Suites! Since it’s release it has been the brunt of political scandals known as fontgate- I’ll let you look that one up on your own!
RESOURCES
