One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”:
Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to
its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires
enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary
feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar
acts of homage.Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a
book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I
submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not
a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the
blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman
is to gaze into the void.
As Simonson mentions in “The Scourge of Arial”, regarding Helvetica’s enduring popularity:
As it spread into the mainstream in the ’70s, many designers tired
of it and moved on to other typographic fashions, but by then it
had become a staple of everyday design and printing. So in the
early ’80s when Adobe developed the PostScript page description
language, it was no surprise that they chose Helvetica as one of
the basic four fonts to be included with every PostScript
interpreter they licensed (along with Times, Courier, and Symbol).
Adobe licensed its fonts from the original foundries,
demonstrating their respect and appreciation for the integrity of
type, type foundries and designers. They perhaps realized that if
they had used knock-offs of popular typefaces, the professional
graphic arts industry — a key market — would not accept them.
To my mind, Helvetica, Times, and Courier are the three canonical “default” fonts. One modern sans, one modern serif, and one for “typewriter”/code. (When I see Courier in print, at display sizes, my mind immediately wonders if the printer was missing the font that the designer specified in the document file.)
The Symbol font is a different story. It existed and was included with PostScript as one just four defaults because the 8-bit character encodings of the time only had space for 255 characters. You needed a special font like Symbol to access “exotic” characters like Greek letters, math symbols (e.g. × or ÷), or arrows (↑ ↓ ← →). So there were really only three regular “fonts”, for prose, included with Postscript: Helvetica, Courier, and Times.
Courier and Times were eventually superseded in popular use by rivals that Microsoft licensed for inclusion in Windows: Courier New and Times New Roman, respectively. Times was from Linotype, Times New Roman from Monotype. Both versions of Times are legitimate digital interpretations of the 1929 hot metal design of Times Roman, and their differences are minor. Courier New, on the other hand, is so ugly — anemically thin and weak — that it hurts my teeth whenever I encounter it.
