Random Origin Stories of Various Fonts (12 items)

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  (#6) Victor Lardent

  • Dec. at 63 (1905-1968)

  Where are our font-heads at? Get ready because it's Times New Roman time! Everyone who has ever seen a computer (which we literally has to assume includes you) is familiar with Times New Roman (or TNR as it is referred to by no one).

  Now one of the most widely used typefaces in the world, Times New Roman was created in 1931 as a commission from the British newspaper The Times. Victor Lardent was the Times designer and draftsman tasked with developing the new font, but recent research by font guru Mike Parker shows that it might not have been Lardent, but aircraft and yacht designer William Starling Burgess who designed the iconic font. It seems like a lot of people are clamoring to take credit for this incredibly popular but also incredibly boring font.
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  (#10) Arial (Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders)

  Created by Nicholas and Saunders for the design firm Monotype Imaging, Arial was created to be metrically identical to Helvetica, so that a document designed in Helvetica could be displayed and printed in Arial - thereby avoiding the need to pay for a Helvetica license (it could be argued that Arial just wanted to be part of your word... document. We're sorry about that, but you try making jokes in an article exclusively about fonts.). From there, Arial took off in a number of different variants, and was chosen by Microsoft as a core font for Windows 3.1. The deal between Monotype and Microsoft was said to be so expensive and complex that Monotype's director claimed the computing giant spent enough money to fund a small country.

  Arial is probably used by more people, but Helvetica is preferred by designers. Nicholas and Saunders have designed a number of other popular fonts, including Bembo, Cambria, and Clarion.
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  (#9) Myriad (Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly)

  Slimbach and Twombly were principle designers at Adobe when they created Myriad, a clean sans-serif font that would become world-famous as the font of choice for Apple, replacing Garamond in 2002. (So if you were wondering where you'd seen it before, it's the font used for the word "iPod").

  It's also the brand font for a number of other major companies, including Rolls Royce and Linkedin, major universities, and the Royal Air Force. Slimbach still runs Adobe's type design department, while Twombly retired shortly after designing Myriad.
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  (#7) Frederic Goudy

  • Dec. at 82 (1865-1947)

  The creator of over a hundred fonts, Goudy was self-taught in printmaking and design. He didn't design his first font until he was in his thirties, and didn't work professionally in design until he was almost 40. After that, he worked for a variety of firms and printing presses, and was also a teacher and author on font design. His most prominent creations were Californian, used by the University of California Press for decades; Goudy Old Style, used by a number of colleges; and Copperplate Gothic, found in stationary and books around the world.
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  (#1) Vincent Connare

  • 58

  It's rare for something as common as a font to evoke hatred, but designer Vincent Connare's creation of Comic Sans has inspired an almost universal revulsion. The intentionally casual font was meant to match the lettering used in popular comic books, to serve as fun alternative to the more formal fonts most people were familiar with. 

  By now it's a walking (typing?) punchline, the go-to font choice of out-of-touch parents sending an e-card, your least favorite coworkers' emails and amateur graphic designers creating a flier for an event you will NOT be attending. The controversy came when people started using the (again, intentionally casual) font in serious documents including blog posts for a law firm and a Dutch war memorial.  People were so angry when the informal font was used on important documents that they asked for a ban on the font in 1999 (it was a simpler time, when font choice was worthy of protest).

  But Connare the designer didn't set out to create an object of derision when he developed the childlike font in 1994 (who would?). He just wanted to make something fun and cute looking, a font that brand new computer users could look at that looked less intimidating than Times New Roman.

  He's proud of his creation, even if nobody else likes it, telling the Wall Street Journal, "If you love it, you don't know much about typography. If you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."
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  (#12) Adrian Frutiger

  • 90

  Swiss-born Frutiger was among the most prominent font designers of the 20th century, creating sans-serif fonts that bridge the post-war and modern eras. His most popular creations were Univers, which was inspired by the clean lines of the Periodic Table; and his own namesake font, a clean and heavily spaced design used for wayfinding signs around the world, due to its legibility at distances.
  

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