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Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

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Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#101

Post by jfengel »

ericmay wrote: post #93
halostatue wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard. That would require that the individuals involved actually have taste . Instead, as with everything else from this administration, it's a toot on their favourite dog whistle.

[flagged]

I do find it faintly ironic that Sort Of Greek Or Roman Or Something architecture was the villain in Ayn Rand's novel.

Living here in DC I don't especially mind Federalist Architecture, even though it does look like somebody saw some photos of Rome and Athens and kinda mashed them together. But I don't love insisting that a 19th century view of the second century BC must forevermore be the only possible taste.

Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#102

Post by QuercusMax »

dheera wrote: post #91
tolerance wrote: post #23

This was a terrific, reasonable take on this “controversy”. I have to admit that the correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office. Imagine reading the Warren Commission report set in that. The author seems to settle on the consensus that surrounded TNR before this exchange made the news. It’s banal. At times it signals to its original objectives (e.g., Prof. Dr. style websites […

> correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office In general this is the way I feel about anything written in a Microsoft-, Apple-, or Ubuntu-supplied typeface. If you stick to system fonts you the pinnacle of embodiment of apathy in my book. Have some backbone, browse through Google fonts, pick something that represents your organization and stick with it. Even if you are a leasin…

That's... certainly an opinion.

Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#103

Post by mrweasel »

poly2it wrote: post #78
beej71 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually doesn't look horrible to my untrained eye. But the web page mentions accessibility, so I'm a little bit surprised it still exists.

Administered during none other than the first term of Trump, as mentioned in the article!

That just makes it incredibly silly. A good argument from the current administration would have been to pick Public Sans and argue: We paid good money to have a good, generic, license free font developed for the government, and the previous administration went with a font that will cost us money in terms of licensing (not sure how true that might be, but it's potentially true, if used outside Microsoft Word).

But the current Trump administration has a fun way of forgetting everything done during his first presidency. Even the smart choices.

I can't imagine how much all this rebranding is costing the US taxpayers.

Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#104

Post by School-Cotton »

swed420 wrote: post #84
School-Cotton wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN isn’t really for memes and quippy references. That’s the main reason you got downvoted, regardless of whether your substantive political point is a good one or not. The original comment matches the vibe of Reddit or Twitter a lot better than HN.

In that case, we'd better stop saying "Stallman was right"

Yes, we should, that would be great.

Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#106

Post by necovek »

dheera wrote: post #91
tolerance wrote: post #23

This was a terrific, reasonable take on this “controversy”. I have to admit that the correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office. Imagine reading the Warren Commission report set in that. The author seems to settle on the consensus that surrounded TNR before this exchange made the news. It’s banal. At times it signals to its original objectives (e.g., Prof. Dr. style websites […

> correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office In general this is the way I feel about anything written in a Microsoft-, Apple-, or Ubuntu-supplied typeface. If you stick to system fonts you the pinnacle of embodiment of apathy in my book. Have some backbone, browse through Google fonts, pick something that represents your organization and stick with it. Even if you are a leasin…

While I appreciate nice typography like not many do (I decide on what editions of a book — especially classics — to get based on the typography and overall layout), I also appreciate that I may be easily swayed by good typography and land on a crappy outcome (I have several very lousy books that were done really well typographically :)).

So I'd never use that as a metric: yes, I care about typography, and if the content of the message is equivalent, I'll pick the one done better. But I do not expect everyone else to put as much weight on it.

Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#107

Post by willturman »

schmuckonwheels wrote: post #105

In between all the political bitching, no one has ever noted the fact that TNR will render correctly on basically any computer built in the last 30 years, including crusty UNIX workstations from the 90s.

This is mentioned in the post:

> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia. Times New Roman was among the small set of typefaces bundled with early versions of Windows. It was also promoted as “web-safe,” meaning webmasters could reasonably assume it would render properly across platforms. In the early era of digitalization, choosing Times New Roman was often less a deliberate endorsement than a default imposed by limited options. Over time, the habit hardened into a standard, and institutions began to require it without much reflection, effectively borrowing their own authority to confer authority upon the typeface.

Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#109

Post by ericmay »

jfengel wrote: post #101
ericmay wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I do find it faintly ironic that Sort Of Greek Or Roman Or Something architecture was the villain in Ayn Rand's novel. Living here in DC I don't especially mind Federalist Architecture, even though it does look like somebody saw some photos of Rome and Athens and kinda mashed them together. But I don't love insisting that a 19th century view of the second century BC must forevermore be the only possible taste.

If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it. It’s not necessarily about a 19th century view of 2nd century BC architectural concepts (which itself is a bit of a farce of a comment) but more so about anchoring the longevity and legitimacy of governmental institutions to a historical heritage.

Similarly I wouldn’t recommend, say, that the Afghani people or Mongolia for example build federalist or Greco-Roman style architecture for their government buildings as it wouldn’t make much sense and wouldn’t have any basis in their history.

There’s also some science to it and we know the asymmetrical buildings and buildings which make entrances and other expected features hard to find cause measurable levels of stress and anxiety in the observer. Hostile architecture.

Re: Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

#110

Post by necovek »

sgarland wrote: post #39
jamesliudotcc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst is Times New Roman text with Calibri page numbers. A sure sign somebody never learned how to use Microsoft Word.

Does Word not default to switching all typefaces - header, footer, etc.? If so, IMO that’s a bad design that violates the principle of least surprise.

While it is possible to use "semantic" styling and page layouts and templates in Word, I would argue that Word owes its popularity to the fact that no user is surprised when they select text, change the font, it does not change it anywhere else.

It is one of the tools that popularised "WYSIWYG" as an approach, and as we know from many other tools, you lose something when you adopt a tool like that.

Now, I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system (but despite my huge respect for DEK, not Computer Modern family of fonts, even for mathematics), but many struggle with non-visual document entry: it is no surprise scientific community is the only one which standardized on it since inputting mathematics visually is a PITA.

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