The Times New Roman font | 30 typefaces – their look, history & use

Times New Roman is a serif typeface that has become a classic since it was first put to use in the British newspaper The Times in 1932. It simply has to be present in any list of interesting fonts.

What does Times New Roman look like?

Times New Roman MT CondensedTimes New Roman MT CondensedTimes New Roman RegularTimes New Roman RegularTimes New Roman ItalicTimes New Roman ItalicTimes New Roman BoldTimes New Roman BoldTimes New Roman Bold ItalicTimes New Roman Bold Italic

What do you use Times New Roman for?

Times New Roman lends itself for body text in any publication that needs to have a classic yet practical look. Combining excellent legibility with good economy, it is used a lot for books and newspapers. Times New Roman is not very suitable for on-screen usage although it is one of the web-safe fonts judged to be available on every computer worldwide.
Even though nobody ever got fired for using Times, it is one of those typefaces that have been used so much that it annoys some people. Plantin and Musee are interesting alternatives to Times. Georgia is very similar but somewhat wider.

The history of Times New Roman

Stanley Morison together with Starling Burgess and Victor Lardent designed Times New Roman for the British newspaper The Times. Although initially created for newsprint, it quickly became the leading type for books on Monotype, Linotype, and Intertype typesetting machines. Over the years, many variants were added, such as a version for small type (Times Ten), one for office use (Times Europa Office) or for headlines (Times Eighteen).
Its success in the digital era started off with Adobe including a version in the base fonts that shipped with PostScript. Microsoft has also included a version of Times New Roman produced by Monotype with every copy of Microsoft Windows since version 3.1. The version that ships with Windows Vista is a greatly expanded version that contains over 3300 glyphs.

Trivia

True to the somewhat stuffy nature of this font, I couldn’t find any amusing stories or anecdotes involving Times New Roman.

Other sources of information

There is obviously a Wikipedia page.