Typefaces as clothes

After seeing this news, I have spent an unusual amount of my week thinking and reading about Times New Roman.*1

In an ocean of opinions, mine probably won’t register, but I think the Times New Roman typeface is, by itself, fine. It looks OK. It can even look good in some contexts. The problem with it is not really how it objectively looks, but how we perceive it, due to its misplaced ubiquity.

As the web browser de facto default since what feels like forever, Times New Roman has indeed been used, reused, and abused in every imaginable way, to the point where we now see these documents or pages using it and automatically think that the person behind them doesn’t care in the slightest.

I thought of an analogy that works great for Times New Roman, but also for other typefaces generally in use on text-based websites like mine. Please bear with me.

If typefaces were clothes, what would they be?

Times New Roman

Times New Roman could be any piece of clothes you wear, but on which you forgot to remove the price tag. People will notice it and be embarrassed for you. If it is an accident, people will tell you. But if you always show up with price tags hanging off all of your clothes, people will stop telling you, and they will not take you as seriously as you expect: It won’t matter how good or bad you think the clothes themselves look.

On some minimalistic websites, Times New Roman, or rather the serif browser default, kind of works. You just have to own it and make it obvious it is a deliberate choice, fitting a bare-bones setup. It may work on some blogs, but used on a more complex or ambitious website, Times New Roman will look a bit odd, as if someone didn’t know there were far better options available.

Helvetica & Helvetica Neue

I love Helvetica, and I think a lot of people love it too. It is also widely used, to the point where type design nerds will try to avoid it as much as possible, even if it objectively looks great.

Helvetica is a suit in the 60s. It’s iconic, seemingly everywhere, and everybody who wants to look serious and professional will wear one. Hipsters will of course refuse to wear a suit to be different and edgy, but a suit is the general standard of elegance.

But there are suits, and then there are suits. If you want your suit to look great, you will need a tailor, you will need fine detailing: a quality fabric alone won’t cut it. If you wear a suit that is not adjusted to your body shape and doesn’t pair well with your shirt or your shoes, well, you might as well leave the price tag attached to it.

Helvetica needs refinement to look good, it needs attention, care, and good typography; on its own it can quickly look a bit generic. When I look at typical Swiss graphic design works, what makes them look great is not Helvetica, it’s not the fonts in use, it’s how the typography is crafted, detailed, and fine-tuned, so it doesn’t just look OK, it looks fantastic.

If you’re thinking that without that tailor-made design, Helvetica is just as good as Arial, you’d be right. Except that the Arial suit, unlike the Helvetica one, is made of cheap fabric, was bought at a discount on Amazon, and a good tailor would not even want to work on it in the first place.*2

system-ui

Another CSS value we see a lot on blogs is system-ui. For Apple devices, it will translate to the San Francisco typeface, for Android it will be Roboto, and Segoe UI for Windows.

For me, these typefaces are like clothes from the popular clothing stores. Everybody shops in them, everybody more or less follows the same fashion trends. It’s easy, affordable, comfortable, unobtrusive, inoffensive, and can even look pretty good if well-thought-out. San Francisco would be clothes from a brand like Uniqlo, and Segoe UI would be something coming from stores like Zara or H&M. Roboto would be something coming from a slightly cheaper brand like Primark, or Amazon Basics (just don’t pay attention to details).

These typefaces are OK in terms of how they look, but on their own, they will look very generic, efficient, bland, and will lack on personality and identity.

monospace

I’ve written about why I like monospace fonts before. They make me think of drafts, work in progress, creativity, code, unfinished business. To me, they would be clothes like coveralls or chore jackets: functional, robust, rugged, practical, often poorly fitted.

Monospaced typefaces each have different qualities, different styles, different purposes, but to the world they all look more or less the same. They will very quickly look neglected when taken out of context. It will certainly look very professional but will severely lack elegance, like that guy at the supermarket wearing a boiler suit to buy groceries.

I have now realised that I’ve opened a Pandora’s box with this topic, so I may split it into two or three posts, to avoid a three-thousand-words post that I will never finish.*3

Verdana

As a final entry, I wanted to list Verdana. I have always really liked Verdana, and I would use it on all my sites if it wasn’t already so popular, especially for blogs.

Verdana is very easy to read, has a nice casual look; it is a practical, all-terrain typeface, that is easy to recommend since it comes installed with the most popular operating systems. So what’s not to like? Verdana is great for text, but not so great for titles. It’s good in some cases, but bad in others.

That’s why I think that Verdana is like clothes made by the Levi’s brand. Obviously great for jeans and denim, but I wouldn’t wear other Levi’s clothes, and I would certainly not wear only Levi’s clothes. It may look good on you, and if you like that, go for it, but I personally won’t (and I also prefer other brands of jeans).

¶

So that was my fun and rather entertaining train of thought this week. I’ve thought about many brands that I could map to a typeface: brands like Patagonia, or COS.

Please let me know if you have any similar typefaces analogies, or if you disagree with the ones I made. Full disclaimer, I’m definitely not an expert on any of this, as you can clearly see.