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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  (#11) Courier (Howard "Bud" Kettler)

  We have a soft spot for Courier and Courier New, because if you had a college paper that needed to reach a minimum page count, Courier New took up just a teensy bit more space, and we needed all the space we could get to pad out the page length.

  Designed to mimic the letters left by a strike-on typewriter, Courier was designed in 1955 by Howard Kettler for IBM. But IBM intentionally didn't trademark it, putting the font in the public domain, available for almost anyone to use. Because of its low cost, Courier became the State Department's font of choice until 2004, and is the industry standard for screenplays and computer code. Despite the success of Courier, Kettler continued working as a staff designer at IBM until he retired, and he died in 1999. We thank him for his service.
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  (#8) Paul Renner

  • Dec. at 78 (1878-1956)

  German typographer and designer Paul Renner created the clean, classic Futura font in the late 1920s as a reaction to what he found to be the degeneracy of modern design and music. Renner was a prominent anti-Nazi, condemning their cultural policy in a self-produced 1932 booklet. Renner was soon dismissed from his teaching post, arrested, and blackballed in the design industry.  He fled to Switzerland, and died in 1956. 

  Futura ended up achieving iconic status by being the go-to font for director Wes Anderson. He uses it in all of his films and it fits is clean, symmetrical, visual style so well. And as far as we know, Wes Anderson is also anti-Nazi, so it looks like the font is in good hands.
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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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  (#4) R. Hunter Middleton

  • Dec. at 87 (1898-1985)

   

  Middleton was born in Scotland, but moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute. He later served as the director of typography at the prestigious Ludlow Typographic Company for almost 40 years. You've likely never heard his name, but everyone knows his iconic Stencil font, the the go-to design for military-themed TV shows and toys, including MASH and The A-Team. He also designed Coronet, which wasn't as influential but was still very popular and can be seen in the signature on the Velvet Underground's first album and the credits for Star Trek.

   
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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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