Font power and typography of power
- London, 1931. On behalf of the newspaper The Times, Stanley Morison created a typography that would allow many letters to be inserted into narrow columns and, at the same time, facilitate readers' understanding: Times New Roman. This type of letter was rapidly disseminated in the press, in books and later in digital media, although nowadays this newspaper uses another type.
The typography was called Times New Roman. “Times,” of course, because it was the newspaper’s name. “New”, due to its novelty and the rejection of the Gothic typographies previously used in the press. And “Román,” because it was influenced by the Roman quadrat, or otherwise, because it was serious. These capital letters had on their edges a kind of ornaments called serifas, so that the quadrat used to give the Emperors' rules to citizens carved in stone would represent the power of the Empire for the typographers of modern and contemporary Europe. In fact, although serifas arose for a practical reason. This technique was used in many ancient scriptures, as the chiselling of texts in stone greatly hindered the clean and correct finishing of the letters.
In this sense, Times New Roman was not so new, since since the eighteenth century in the main European countries typefaces with serifas predominate. Coinciding with the flowering of nationalism, each country had its own type of letter. In Italy the letter invented by Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) was mainly used, while in France the invention invented by the engraver Claude Garamond (1490-1561) in the 16th century was used in England the invented by John Baskerville (1706-1775).
Each country claimed that the type of font chosen was best suited to its language, but these three examples are perfectly suited to the other languages, as Bodoni and Garamond are still among the most widely used in any of the languages that today use the Latin alphabet.
But to invent Times New Roman, another typography was spreading in London, clean, sans serif or without serifas. Its name is Underground, as it began to be used in the London Metro signals at the end of the 19th century. In Germany, the Bauhaus movement also opted for the letters without serifas, but when Adolf Hitler closed the Bauhaus school, he also rejected the typography and opted for the ancient Gothic typography Fraktur.
After the end of World War II, it was carried out by Fraktur and gained neutrality. In 1955, the Swiss created a universal typography without serifas that would spread all over the world. But just in case the letter came up when choosing the name they wanted to make clear: Helvetica.
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