typeface face-off

Times New Roman vs. everything else

Okay, now we’ve gotten that cringe out of our systems. But how could something as simple as a font evoke such a strong and specific reaction? 

Fonts can have a distinct and subconscious psychological effect on us; while it’s usually subtle, when the font is misaligned with the message it conveys, that effect can be more pronounced. Think of those horrid internet blogs that haven’t been updated since the 90s, but somehow still lurk in the obscure corners of the internet. When they were made, the accessibility of a varied range of fonts to the public was still in its infancy, no longer the exclusive forte of marketing agents and publishing houses. We had moved past the era where nontraditional fonts were only used in logos and advertisements, and people who were excited to express themselves with Jokerman and Wingdings and Blackadder ITC may have gone a little overboard, understandably so. 

Nowadays, if you are familiar with the internet and social media, you probably have a general understanding of what fonts are appropriate for different use cases. It’s not inherent, but learned: quirky teenagers change the display font on their iPhones to be cutesy and whimsical, professors pray to receive essay submissions in Times New Roman, and audiences of middle school PowerPoint presentations politely ignore the terrible and inconsistent font choices (and useless gradient animations) resulting from students putting too much effort into the wrong features. Some hapless teenagers may at one time have purchased Abercrombie & Fitch shirts with “ethnic typefaces” ranging from nonsensical faux Cyrillic to offensive wonton fonts. As we mature, we focus on (or default to) fonts that are simple and readable for our emails, resumes, and contracts. But while we may know which of the most popular fonts are suitable for the most common use cases, these days we also consume (and create) an endless slew of content designed to make us click, share, or add to cart; and it’s interesting to think about all the work that goes into optimizing a conversion rate. 

Firstly, there is a difference between typefaces and fonts: the latter is a subset of the former. Typefaces include serif and sans serif; a popular serif font is Times New Roman (with those little strokes attached to each letter) and the default sans serif font is often Calibri (which contains none of these attachments). Other typefaces include slab serif (thicker letterforms), modern sans serif (think of the current Google logo), script (those curly romantic fonts on wedding invitations), and novelty (basically everything else). Each of these are meant to evoke different reactions. The reason these fonts matter is the picture superiority effect, which is a fancy way of saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Since appearance and first impressions are more important to memorability and impact than the content of the message itself, designers use different fonts to appeal to a certain audience or convey a particular tone. This is true not only in advertising — like when a startup uses a modern sans serif font to convey both innovation and professionalism (for the second time on Pacific Dispatch, I’ll reference the mattress startup Casper) — but also in casual content like memes. Think of your typical top text bottom text meme: the font is universal, bold and all-caps and readable and above all, impactful. The font is called Impact, after all.

The tones evoked by the six basic typefaces are generally consistent. Serif fonts are stable, dependable, intellectual, authoritative — used by respectable institutions of heritage and grandeur like banks, law firms, and newspapers. Sans serif fonts are more friendly and approachable because they point to progressiveness and informality, which is especially applicable to startups. Slab serif fonts are bold, masculine, and perhaps even aggressive or confrontational, reminiscent of some car companies and electronics manufacturers. Modern sans serif fonts are like their “unmodern” counterpart but more unique to the situation, with the capability of seeming playful, elegant, futuristic, or minimalist. Script fonts can be naïve and romantic (like childlike cursive writing) or sophisticated and formal (like wedding invitations in unreadable calligraphy). And novelty fonts are an indication of uniqueness and individuality, a way to be decidedly anti-conformist (or at least, as anti-conformist as you can possibly be with a typeface). 

Fonts take brands from unremarkable to instantly recognizable. Google went from a traditional serif font to a modern sans serif font for their logo in 2015; we have speculated that the change was an long-overdue indication of the shift in identity from aspiring to emulate established heritage companies to embracing their Silicon Valley tech startup roots, especially as one of the first and definitely the most well-known company to emerge from that ongoing era. Slab serif fonts can be difficult to recall, but when you hear “Sony,” the thick letterform logo springs to mind immediately. Except for a one-year period in 1890, Coca-Cola has had the same unique script font logo since its inception, invoking both a nostalgic and heritage quality; Disney also has a distinct and distinguishable script font logo, being instead childlike and magical. And possibly the most famous example of a novelty font logo is that of NASA, specifically its red, white, and blue logo incorporating stars, an orbit, and an aeronautic spacecraft wing, the whole of which is colloquially referred to as “the meatball” (a detail we could not in good conscience keep to ourselves). 

Corporate branding strategies have changed a lot since the days when new iPhones actually came with new features, and the shift hasn’t been limited to fonts.

In their infancy, smartphone operating systems developed and strongly adhered to skeuomorphism, a design language in which apps such as clocks, notebooks, and messengers are made to visually resemble their real-life counterparts. This was seen to make navigating then-unfamiliar devices and applications easier for the user — unsurprisingly, famously user-friendly iPhones were a major habitué of skeuomorphism, using it for all of their apps, backgrounds, and even the home screen dock. Six years after the style was debuted, Apple apparently decided users had had enough time to get the hang of things, and iOS 7 brought a major redesign to a flat, simple, uncluttered style. This was the beginning of the end for skeuomorphism, with other apps and websites quickly following Apple’s lead. Flat design became dominant, focusing on efficiency and raw functionality. 

This trend later yielded the art style known as Corporate Memphis (or our favorite variation, “humanist blandcore”), characterized by flat, geometric images suited for a multitude of things, with specific designs loosely originating from the Memphis Group — a sort of postmodern architecture collective originating in Italy that was known for their colorful, abstract, asymmetrical designs. Corporate Memphis is the visual version of lorem ipsum dolor, used when creativity is thrown to the wind and the same thing is reused by everyone. The style is characterized by people with pastel or primary-color skin tones, unnatural and exaggerated body proportions, small heads with minimal facial features, and most notably, long bendy arms (like the sausage fingers in Everything Everywhere All at Once, but for the entire person). These people are often in motion, dancing and jumping and doing cartwheels and reaching on their tiptoes to retrieve sticky notes. It’s simple, cartoony, playful, and most importantly, ubiquitous and deliberately humanistic to the point of saccharine weirdness. It’s as if companies think that we will forget data breaches, labor law violations, environmental issues, and general corporate drudgery because of these cutesy, nostalgic illustrations; they’re trying too hard, and it shows. 

The world is not as uncomplicated as a colorful collection of half-opaque shapes constructed to form a blue person, nor is displaying races of primary-colored people a nod toward diversity in advertising. In trying to appeal to the so-called millennial aesthetic, companies have oversaturated social media, print, and billboard/subway advertising with this uninteresting style made up of inoffensive colors like millennial pink and Instagrammable-houseplant green. Combined with startup-sans-serif fonts, the results are casual and mobile-friendly, but utterly indistinguishable from each other and rather soulless. Employed by Facebook (in the form Alegria, judged summarily on r/fuckalegriaart), LinkedIn, Hinge, Salesforce, Robin Hood, Spotify, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the once-quirky style’s zeitgeist is coming to an end. Slack had perhaps the least weird version of Corporate Memphis, with a more intimate feel and warm tones, unafraid to portray its characters in shades of brown instead of blue; but even still, it seems that the moment is over, save for a meme critique of the style portraying “Saturn devouring his son” in familiar geometric shapes that is enjoyable to this day. 

But back to fonts (we just needed to vent about Corporate Memphis). 

Our discussion of typography wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the business side of the type industry. While U.S. law does not provide for typefaces — the sets of characters designed according to a certain style — to be protected by copyright, it does extend copyright protection to computer fonts — the software representation and packaging of typefaces for digital use. This legal quirk means that digital creative professionals such as graphic designers and web developers must navigate a minefield of licensing issues to use many popular fonts in their work: while some fonts are licenced so that a single purchase allows unlimited use (known as the desktop model), the more common web font licensing charges per number of page views, with costs for popular sites sometimes reaching tens of thousands of dollars or more. The design and printing service Zazzle recently learned this lesson first-hand when it was sued by the author of the Blooming Elegant font: Zazzle used Blooming Elegant as the default font for many of its premade designs, making it ubiquitous across social media, but only purchased a single-user license though a senior network engineer’s account. The font’s author determined that a proper license for corporate offering would have cost the company seventeen dollars per use, and accordingly sued for hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. 

Fed up with these high costs and complicated rules, some creators have teamed up with the free software movement to produce open-source alternatives such as Liberation (which is simply a redraw of Times New Roman indistinguishable from the original, allowed because typefaces themselves can’t be copyrighted) and Ubuntu — these can be used, modified, and distributed royalty-free, allowing them to be packaged with free operating systems such as GNU/Linux as well as used in independent projects.

There is an ongoing conflict (not just in fonts either) between allowing people to freely access images, designs, and various typefaces to maximize creativity and the right of designers to be fairly paid for their work. However the war is settled, we’ve hopefully conveyed that the choice of font is important enough to make or break something as critical and significant as a company’s brand identity.