Quick, think of a company you associate with
fonts. Maybe you thought of Adobe, the makers of
Photoshop and other design software. Or perhaps you thought of Apple who've dominated
the creative industry on desktop for many years. I doubt the Microsoft was the first company
that came to mind. But imagine for a moment three alternative
universes: one where we have no Adobe... One with no Apple and one without Microsoft. Between these three universes, which one typographically
speaking would look the most different from our own? In this video, I'm going to look at how and
why Microsoft have had a bigger impact on typography than any other company in the last
half century through 10 of their most famous and infamous fonts. [Intro music]
First of all, just what is typography? Typography is everything about written communication
that is visual. Analogies help. So let's use music. In music we have the composition, which is
the pure information of the song's notes and what order they're played in. To make that audible, a musician plays that
composition using an instrument. We call that the musical performance. In written communication we also have pure
information called the text. To make that visible a designer type sets
that text using a font. We call this typography. Technically, font and typeface are different
terms. But for this video, it's not important. Of course, there's more to typography than
just picking a font just like there's more to performing music than picking an instrument. But this gives us a basic framework. The second key concept in this video is democratisation. In my music analogy, not all music is played
by professional musicians and definitely not all typesetting is done by designers. In fact, a tiny minority of typesetting these
days is handled by professionals. A better analogy for this concept is photography. When you take a casual photo with your phone,
chances are you're not thinking about f-stop, ISO, aperture and shutter speed. All of these settings still need to be calibrated,
just not by you. It's done for you invisibly by software. Just as photography was once the exclusive
domain of skilled professionals. Typography has also been democratised. When you create a new document or shoot off
an email, you're probably not conscious of tracking, kerning and leading. You don't manually pick the page margin and
most of the time you don't even pick a font. All of these choices have been automated away. These changes all happened relatively recently. Up until the 1990s, When people wrote they
generally used a pen or a typewriter. Now the former is a forgotten skill and the
latter is a vintage throwback. Neither handwriting nor typewriting are actually
typesetting. That wouldn't happen until the mass adoption
of the computer and with it, word processing software. While Microsoft may not have pioneered all
of the underlying technology or had all of the most original designs, their sheer market
dominance meant that their influence was unavoidable through the era of the desktop PC. It's easy to forget in 2020 that Microsoft
was once considered the biggest of all big tech companies and sued as a monopoly under
US antitrust laws. For multiple decades, nearly everything important
in computing was either instigated by or was made in reaction to Microsoft. In this video, we'll look at 10 major Microsoft
system fonts, love them or hate them, it's impossible to deny their significance. We'll attempt to look past their familiarity
and dive deep into their origins, design, usage and legacy over time. On the way we'll stop at some of the major
shifts in technology that shaped that trajectory before summing up and asking what comes next. But to begin, let us start. Our most recent font came bundled with Windows
7 onwards. It's the font used for all of Microsoft's
branding, including their corporate logo, Windows, Office, Surface and - as the name
suggests - the user interface, from the start menu to the file manager, in Windows 10. Perhaps the most notable thing about its design
is its shady origin. After licencing the design from Monotype,
Microsoft tried to trademark the design in the EU where they were blocked by objections
from Linotype, a rival type foundry (that is a company that designs and distributes
fonts). Linotype objected to its similarity to Frutiger,
a well known font of theirs that dates back to the 1970s. Now I'm not a lawyer, but a key difference
between the intellectual property law in the US and the EU is their protection for font
designs. In the US, you can trademark the name of a
font and copyright will protect the specific code of the font files, but you cannot the
design itself. Briefly, here's why: to simplify for our purposes
font files contain instructions like a recipe, of how to draw the shapes that create the
design itself. Now two different recipes can give the same
end result. For example, I can draw a semicircle using
two points, or three points. The outcome is the same but under US law,
despite being visually identical copyright would not recognise these as the same recipe
and therefore provide no protection. In Europe, a design itself may be trademarked,
and that was the thing which Linotype disputed Microsoft over. The EU Intellectual Property Office sided
with Linotype and denied Microsoft the designed trademark. Coincidentally Monotype who created this knockoff
design, Segoe - and the biggest rival to Linotype through 120 years of history - finally bought
Linotype out in 2006, just two years after the trademark dispute. Monotype will feature many times in this video
as they are Microsoft's main type partner and supplier. Design wise there are very few differences
to Frutiger. Here's Frutiger next a modernised version
with true italics produced by Linus hype overlaid on sego with a few key differences highlighted. There are quite a few more differences in
the italic alphabet than in the Roman. Being as such, it inherits all of its virtues
from Frutiger, a font designed eponymously by influential Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger
for Charles de Gaulle International Airport. Like Helvetica, another Swiss design, it's
a neutral, humanist, sans serif. Humanist in this context, meaning its lines
follow traditional forms from classical Roman inscriptions and calligraphy, as opposed to
the rigid pure geometry of a font like Futura. Being designed for signage with the goal of
legibility from a distance Frutiger inadvertently mirrored the design challenge for onscreen
legibility at low resolutions. So despite being designed in 1971, it shares
many traits with purpose made screen fonts. A large x-height and open apertures. We'll cover both of those in depth at a later
point in the video. This makes it extremely legible for both on
and off screen despite coming from the pre-digital era. For that reason, and its neutrality Frutiger
and its copycats have been hugely popular for corporate branding. In fact, for a few years, Microsoft and Apple
were both simultaneously using Frutiger-likes as their corporate typefaces. From 2002 to 2017 Apple's corporate font was
Myriad (also the default font in Adobe's Creative Cloud). Myriad heavily borrowed from Frutiger, though
slightly less blatantly than Segoe did. The uppercase proportions are narrower, and
you can always spot Myriad by the sloping verticals on the uppercase M.
Italic, lowercase g. Quite elegant. The unnecessarily concavity of this numeral
4, purely thrown in to throw you off the scent of its copycat origins. The clearly pregnant ampersand. Calibri first appeared in Windows Vista, and
remains the default font for Microsoft Word and Office. It was part of the Cleartype Font Collection,
created to showcase a new sub-pixel font rendering technology that came with Vista. This was a group of six fonts that were commissioned
from well respected type designers, including (forgive my pronunciation), Luc(as) de Groot,
the Dutch designer behind this font. Then all the fonts were given a name that
begins with C, so that nobody can ever remember which is which. Most of us have been desensitised to this
design by repeated exposure. But when we make an effort to look a little
bit harder, you'll notice it's quite an unlikely default font. It's hardly flavourless and neutral. The first thing which jumps out about its
design is the rounded edges. The designer apparently proposed versions
with and without the rounded corners. And this is the version that Microsoft preferred. Bear with me for a minute, but we're about
to dive deep on rounded fonts. While not entirely common, rounded fonts have
been around for a while. One of the most popular is VAG Rounded, designed
for Volkswagen. And up until recently, it was the font used
on all of Apple's keyboards. But VAG has true rounded stroke terminals. That is, the strokes in each glyph all end
in a circular shape. The same is true of fonts like Gotham Rounded
and Bryant. But the terminals in Calibri are not circular. They're rectangular with rounded corners. And this was, until pretty recently, a rare
quirk in sans-serif fonts. Apart from the century old display font, Bertold
Block and Neo Sans by Seb Lester, it was difficult to find examples that predate Calibri. But after 2007 we see an explosion in this
style of rounded font. Searching for the term round or rounded on
Myfonts brings up dozens of designs all post-dating Calibri. And it's a perfect example of the subconscious
influence that Microsoft system fonts can have. Something that was once quite rare and quirky
suddenly feels common overnight, because suddenly it's seemingly everywhere. The letterforms themselves are not particularly
unusual. They have some of the inherited features of
previous Microsoft screen fonts that we'll dig into later. But apart from the slight convex curve on
the italic v, w, and y, there aren't that many strange choices. But rounded corners are a strong choice. It's kind of like corduroy, you can take a
perfectly forgettable suit, but make it all corduroy, suddenly, that's a bold choice. Which is why it's so perplexing that this
is the default font for Microsoft Word. If it was just one of the other five Cleartype
fonts beginning with C, I wonder how often people would actually end up using it? Fully rounded fonts we tend to associate with
children. The roundness feels friendly and informal. Contrast that with the previous default font
for word, Times New Roman, which we'll get to later on. But there's a huge shift in tone switching
from this, to this. It's like moving from a stuffy Victorian print
shop into suddenly a "nobody wears ties here, dude" tech hub. A huge number of startups from the so called
"web 2.0" era (many of which disappeared after the 2008 financial crisis) used rounded fonts
in all lowercase in their logos to project friendliness and approachability. Skype, owned by Microsoft, now looks like
this. But their old logo was a famous example of
this style. In 2020 it's decidedly passe. But that cultural association still lingers,
and I suspect in a decade or two, it may come back again with a new twist. But when it comes to Calibri, despite these
quirks and associations, to most people it's practically invisible. It's the font that conveys only two things:
You didn't manually pick a font, and you used a Microsoft product. This unique position has made Calibri a unique
data point of forensic evidence. Most famously, in the case of corruption charges
against the Prime Minister of Pakistan. His daughter provided documents supposedly
dated from February 2006 to support the argument that she had not bought luxury properties
in London with illegitimately sourced funds, but the documents were set in Calibri, which
was not publicly available until Windows Vista was released in January 2007. Pointing to the documents being a fraud. The jaunty angle of the non crossing strike
through the dollar sign. The way this line in the italic lowercase
y goes from convex to straight as it crosses the base line. The playful, rounded-square at symbol. Before we discuss our remaining fonts we need
to talk about fonts on the web. In 2020 we are spoiled for choice, embedding
custom fonts online can be done in a few clicks, and hundreds of fonts are available for free,
the early web could not have been more different. Have you ever opened a document which used
the font you didn't have installed? You can tell because the layout looks weird
and broken. Well, that was pretty much the early web when
people tried to specify a font. Web designers could and did try. But there was no way to tell which fonts a
user visiting the site might have installed on their system. It was chaos! For years the Holy Grail was a universal standard
for embedding custom fonts. So a site would look the same on an iPhone
as it did in a browser on your laptop. But it was a long journey to get there. And it wasn't really a reality until the 20-teens. With Microsoft one of the last companies dragging
their feet to support this in Internet Explorer. Back in 1996, Microsoft proposed an interim
solution: since they had the biggest market share, everyone should just use their fonts. Which they made free to download. These were the "Core fonts for the web", but
they were really a greatest hits compilation mixing older and newer Microsoft system fonts
together. Our remaining eight fonts all come from this
collection. It's easy to forget how the web looked a dozen
years ago, but it was strikingly different. For the better part of 20 years, a handful
of Microsoft fonts were the de-facto standard for every site on the internet. Sure, this was partly thanks to market forces. But one thing that all these fonts shared
in common was a technical superiority to other fonts that was difficult to compete with. This is going to become technical, but please
stay with me because I think it's something most people have never heard of before. We're going to cover a lot of technical history
very quickly. I'll try to keep it simple and I'm sure I'll
mess up a technicality or two, so feel free to leave any corrections down in the comments. The first operating systems with graphical
user interfaces used bitmap a.k.a. pixel fonts. These were created by manually designing each
letter, pixel by pixel. This also meant the alphabets had to be drawn
again and again for each point size available, and the design could look radically different
at different sizes. When high resolution laser printers came onto
the scene, it became clear that bitmap fonts weren't really up to the task. The only available fonts suitable were Adobe's
PostScript fonts, which were a proprietary format at the time, and Adobe wanted licence
fees from software makers, including Apple and Microsoft to be allowed to use them. Apple then developed a competing format called
TrueType which was released with System 7 for Macintosh in May 1991. They licenced the technology to Microsoft
for free to put pressure on Adobe and their licencing fees. Microsoft included TrueType with Windows 3.1
(in 1992). And Adobe eventually opened up the competing
Type 1 format and lowered their fees as a result. One key technology of TrueType was hinting
and nobody invested more into the technology than Microsoft. Both TrueType and Adobe's Type 1 fonts are
what are called outline fonts. They don't contain any pixel specific instructions,
only vector outlines. Like in our analogy before, these instructions
are like recipes. Unfortunately, that gives you much less control
over what the font will render like at different sizes on screen. For example, how do you take a capital E and
shrink it so it's only five pixels high? Well, that's easy. But how do you shrink it down to four pixels
high? Does the middle arm go in the second row or
the third? Extrapolate this across hundreds of characters
at dozens of sizes, and it adds up. Hinting was a solution to this problem. It was an extra layer of instructions on how
to adjust those outlines at particular resolutions. The only problem was that this was extremely
laborious and technical work much more so than simply drawing bitmap fonts and multiple
sizes. Oftentimes, it was more work than designing
the typeface itself. Only a handful of companies had the available
resources to commit to this expensive task, and most famous among them was Monotype, especially
in the case of Microsoft system fonts. Did it make a difference? Absolutely. Pixels today aren't the same as pixels from
the past. A mid range smartphone has pixels nearly 40
times smaller than the average computer monitor from 1995. Also, CRT monitors from the past didn't produce
the crisp, sharp pixels we see on modern LCD panels. Here's the difference between a well hinted
font, Arial and an unhindered font around the same vintage. Microsoft knew that their system fonts would
be used daily by millions of people. And went the extra mile to ensure good screen
rendering of their bundled fonts. In 2020, things are different. Font smoothing technology – first anti-aliasing,
then sub-pixel rendering – have made hinting pretty much obsolete. In fact, except for Windows, modern operating
systems on mobile and desktop just ignore font hinting entirely. But while the technology may be outdated,
these considerations had a huge impact on the design aesthetic, as well as the successful
spread and adoption of, these fonts. While they might look ugly to modern eyes
on modern screens, these fonts are often a cut above anything else available at the time
of their release. This font was designed by Vincent Connare,
perhaps most famous for designing another font on this list, Comic Sans. Trebuchet feels the most unique of all these
fonts, but unfortunately, also the most dated. It just evokes a particular point in time,
the late 90s to early 2000s. It's so distinctive, it's like the PT Cruiser
of fonts. Let's talk about why this design is so quirky. To me there is a clear design influence on
Trebuchet and that is Erik Spiekermann's FF Meta released in 1991. Logo designers loved it, you can still see
it in a good number today. Meta was both innovative and influential. It broke a lot of rules with its distinctive
design. Trebuchet is in no way a copycat of Meta,
but there are definitely a number of key influences on display. Firstly, the lowercase g. Now there are two main styles of g. Single storey and double storey. In the case of double storey designs like
this, the upper half is called the bowl and the bottom half is called the loop. Both Meta and Trebuchet have the rare and
unusual feature of having an unclosed loop. Secondly, Meta has a unique motif of kinked
vertical stems seen that the ascenders of certain letters, but this also results in
angled spurs. Both at the top and the base of other characters. This is a signature of Spiekermann's style. One of his earlier fonts - 1990's ITC Officina
Sans – features similar spurs. In Trebuchet's italic, the a, m and n character
followed this same template. But in the Roman form, they use (different)
angular spurs. It's strangely inconsistent. But given the time period and the distinctness
and popularity of Meta, its influence on Trebuchet – conscious or not – is pretty clear. Sadly, Trebuchet just has so many stylistic
quirks it was destined to age poorly. Like a guy with spiked bleach tips, wallet
chain, cargo shorts, and a Smash Mouth t-shirt. There's the Et style ampersand, and the low
crossbar of the cap A. The elongated tail of the Q. The slightly truncated points of
the v's, w's and z's. The tapered spur of the lowercase a. The high ear on the g. Single-serifed i and j. The unorthodox italic g and y. And for some reason the italic lowercase k
is the only character which has a stroke terminated at an angle. I feel a little bad critiquing this font,
because I feel Vincent Connare has already received more criticism than any other font
designer in history. Despite its flaws, I still like Trebuchet
for its nostalgic charm. It's a product of its time, but it certainly
was not forgettable. You can still see this font in the logo for
NPR, National Public Radio. The italic lowercase E.
The Broken vertebrae in the neck of the italic lowercase G. The vertex of the uppercase M truncates below
the baseline. Released concurrently but designed a few years
prior to Trebuchet is Georgia by Matthew Carter. It was hinted by Tom Rickner, who was lead
typographer at Apple for many years and supervised their first TrueType fonts. Georgia is quite unique amongst these fonts
for being a serif font designed specifically for on screen usage. One of the most influential, if not the first,
Carter was working on this design as a print font before Microsoft contacted him, and he
released the print version as a typeface called Miller. So informatively, we can do a little comparison
between the two to see how the design was changed for improved rendering on screen. Both these fonts were modelled after serif
fonts produced by the Miller type foundry of Edinburgh, Scotland in the 19th century. But clearly, of the two, the numerals in Georgia
have been modernised and simplified for the screen. Georgia is unusual in using this style of
numbers called text figures or non-lining figures. Most pre-installed fonts come with lining
figures as the default, Georgia being the exception. I've highlighted some of the key differences
between the letterforms on screen, but the most important change is to the italics. Miller's italics are much skinnier, more ornate
and they also have much finer extended acute terminals. In Georgia these are flattened to a minimum
and the letters are much wider to enlarge the counters or internal negative space. The letterforms are simplified to make them
more recognisable to a modern reader. Aesthetically, I personally prefer the look
of the print font, it feels more period accurate and letterforms are more interesting. I love for example Miller's, italic v. However,
good typography is not about beautiful letters. It's about beautiful and readable words. By that metric, Georgia's italics are much
better designed for the task. I think Matthew Carter really understood what
he was doing and he didn't let stylistic authenticity get in the way of legibility. As a type designer, that's a difficult thing
to do. I mean, look at that 19th century ampersand
- it's gorgeous! But it's not practical for a modern screen
font. Georgia is still popular today because there
just aren't many fonts like it. Despite a plethora of screen optimised sans-serifs. Serif fonts designed for on-screen text are
still thin on the ground. There are a handful of exceptions. Merriweather, Bitter, Recia, and Bookerly
commissioned by Amazon exclusively for use on Kindle devices. Most new serif fonts tend to be revivals of
old metal type or decorative headline type and that's fine, but there should be room
for more loose interpretations like Georgia which put function ahead of formalism. So despite the web not being bound to 10 fonts
anymore, Georgia still remains somewhat relevant. The perfectly recurring detail of this tiny
diagonal chamfer on the top right corner of glyphs stems. Italic lowercase I.
Matthew Carter's offset numeral eight. Impact has a strange origin. It was cut by a British type designer in the
1960s to imitate a German display font which wasn't available in the UK market. So he made his own version. This was produced as metal type and sold by
Stevenson Blake of Sheffield, England. An industrial town, known for its steel production. It was later digitised and rights were bought
by Monotype, who then licenced it to Microsoft. Impact being a display font is an outlier
in this group. It was never intended for long blocks of small
text, but instead for large, short headlines. In fact it's intended to use was for print
advertising. The designer said his goal was to use up as
much ink as possible. We see that reflected in the design. The counters – the internal negative space
– are extremely narrow. The forms are very boxy, though not particularly
quirky. But there are a few details worth pointing
out. Impact has an unusually short ampersand. Most ampersands are set at cap-height, not
x-height. So that's definitely unusual. The fact that the hash and at symbol don't
match the weight of the alphanumeric characters mark it clearly as a pre-digital font. Since these symbols were pretty rarely used
in display type in the 1960s. A design detail that was lost in its transition
from metal to digital type where these rhomboid dots on the I and the J. Impact may have ended
up with the most undignified of fates: used in Microsoft Word Art and internet memes. Thankfully, both of these phenomena seemed
to have ended for now and Impact can enjoy a little dignity in its retirement years. I made a whole separate video investigating
which fonts people are actually using an image macro memes in 2020. If you'd also like to see me do a video on
the history of Word Art, please let me know down in the comments. This majestic pound sterling symbol. The symbols which don't quite match. The cantilevered question mark. Verdana is perhaps the screen font, but before
we dissect it we need to talk about its older brother Tahoma. Both were designed by Matthew Carter and hinted
by Tom Rickner, the same team that worked on Georgia. Tahoma is a bit of a puzzle, the most glaring
difference between it and Verdana is the fitting (the space between the letters). It's much tighter than Verdana, and therefore
less legible. It was used for the default interface font
in Windows 2000 and XP. And for that, the tighter spacing makes sense. But it wasn't used in Windows 95, when it
was released at the same time as Verdana, which is much more fleshed out in many ways. Tahoma feels like Verdana beta. Tahoma has no italic or oblique version. There are subtle differences as well, in the
proportions and linework. But Verdana and its brother both have the
same fundamental form. It's reminiscent of fonts like Frutiger, but
the curves are much boxier. Imagine inflating a balloon inside a shoe
box. This was to create as much interior space
as possible to improve rendering at small sizes. It has that large x-height, so proportionally,
the lowercase letters have very short ascenders and descenders. Think about rendering a lowercase k in a six
by six pixels square. If you have a very tall ascender and relatively
short x-height, it's not going to be very clear. But if you reduce the amount of space you
need for the ascender proportionately, it becomes a lot easier to make it legible. It also features wide, open apertures. Compared the C from Helvetica, and Verdana. In Helvetica, the aperture is quite tight
and at small sizes it visually looks close to an O. Whereas in Verdana, this space is
opened up, which means it renders much more distinctly. This is also true for other letterforms. Another defining trait is the jump in weight
from regular to bold. Remember, these were intended for usage without
anti-aliasing. So pixels were binary, either on or off, no
shades of grey. For example, how would you take a lowercase
l that is one pixel wide and make it bold? Well, you have to make it two pixels wide. Which means the stroke thickness effectively
doubles. This is a much more dramatic shift between
regular and bold than with fonts designed for print. As far as the letterforms themselves, there
isn't much quirkiness going on, it's straightforward and minimal. The only extraneous detail is unmatched serif
on the lower case J which is missing from the lowercase I. But this may have been done intentionally
to make them more visually distinctive at low resolution. Verdana was the most legible font for small
text usage online, up until the 20-teens and it's the only neutral sans serif font in the
core web font pack that was designed for screen first. I'd say it even defines its own genre of sans-serif
type, separate from previous classifiers. This design was born out of technical necessity,
not out of stylistic convention. One of the most notable public font outrages
in the last 20 years was when IKEA changed its font from Futura to Verdana in 2009. Even non designers were vocal in their disapproval. Articles were written in the New York Times
and Time magazine – about a font! In 2019 without anywhere near as much fanfare,
IKEA switched over to a custom version of Noto, an open-licenced font commission by
Google from Monotype. Noto does a much better job of working across
both sides of the digital divide. But it was also free of many of the technical
constraints that Verdana was designed under. The rationale for both fonts was the same. IKEA wanted a consistent brand typeface in
both print and web. But technology was just different in 2009. The reaction against Verdana was a combination
of font snobbery and cultural dissonance. The idea that IKEA, a design focus company,
would move from a stalwart classic of 20th century modernism like Futura to a comment
system font from Microsoft, messed with people's expectations. And in the case of IKEA, people feel emotionally
invested with the brand. They use IKEA products to furnish their homes
and therefore it becomes a reflection of their own good taste. So when IKEA switch to a font they think is
ugly or mundane it hurts people's self image, evoking a strong reaction. That Matthew Carter figure eight. The redundant and confusing existence of Tahoma. The flat horizontal bridge or joining the
a and loop in the at symbol. You knew this was coming right? The world's most notorious font - Comic Sans. I'd venture to say more words have been written
about this font than any other typeface in history, and that's its own kind of achievement. Comic Sans was designed for one particular
use case: for text in dialogue boxes for a Clippy-like virtual assistant, in a programme
designed for children, Microsoft Bob. It then ended up as a bundled font with Windows
95. I'm not much of one for flogging the corpses
of horses, so I'm going to leave the critique on this one. If we compare it to a true comic book lettering
font from Comicraft or Blambot, of course, Comic Sans falls short. But it was never intended to be an accurate
comic book font. More bizarre to me is the fact that Apple,
perhaps due to the sheer popularity of Comic Sans, made its own blatant ripoff called Chalkboard. Yet it continues to distribute both Chalkboard
and Comic Sans with Mac OS. One aspect of lettering design, which dyslexic
people struggle with is the consistency of letterforms, especially the repeating shapes
across letters. Inadvertently, the inconsistency of letter
shapes between characters and Comic Sans might make it easier to read for people with dyslexia,
as far as system fonts go. That's the positive. On the negative side being exposed to the
public at large, there have been a lot of uses of Comic Sans that have been - let's
describe them as, "less than optimal". There is a lot to unpack in the social dynamics
between the love and hatred of Comic Sans and the sneering that comes along with some
of that mockery. Needless to say, there is a time and a place
For Comic Sans: it's 2pm. At Timmy's birthday party. He's turning six and everybody just wants
to have a good time. For every other time and place, there exists
an alternative, more appropriate, choice of font. But many people who choose Comic Sans aren't
aware of those alternatives. But that's a different video. The lowercase b is pretty acceptable. The bad kerning. You know it when you see it. At last, we reached the original trinity. Now, if you remember earlier, I mentioned
that Apple develop the TrueType format and gave it away to Microsoft, but they didn't
give them their fonts. At the time Apple was licencing fonts from
Linotype amongst others, which is why their first three TrueType fonts were: Helvetica
(a Linotype exclusive), Times Roman (no new) and Courier (also no new). Microsoft, on the other hand was working with
Monotype. And so they ended up with three fonts that
were compatible with, but not the same as the system fonts from the Mac. Firstly, there's Times New Roman. Now, the Times in Times New Roman comes from
the Times newspaper of London. It was commissioned by the paper from Stanley
Morrison back in 1931. Back then, newspapers were printed with metal
type and there were two competing technologies, one from Monotype and one from Linotype. The Times newspaper used both for different
purposes. So each type foundry ended up with a different
version of the typeface in their catalogue, and that is how Mac and Windows ended up with
two versions of the same core design. Although nearly identical, there are a few
differences: the percentage and the at sign. Bold uppercase j, as well as the italic cap
A, V, W and lowercase z. More importantly though, the Monotype version
(Times New Roman) was designed to be metrically compatible with the Linotype version which
was released first. A font's metrics are it's spatial attributes:
how much space is given to each letter and how much space each pair of letters have between
them. Metric compatibility basically means you can
substitute the two fonts, one for the other, and text will not move or reflow. All three of these last Microsoft fonts – Times
New Roman, Courier New and Arial – are all metrically compatible with their Apple counterparts. As for the letterforms themselves, to our
21st century eyes, these just look like normal serif type. But in fact, Times has a mishmash of features
from different schools of thought in serif type design, dating quite a few centuries
apart. Here are three typefaces cited as models for
the design of Times New Roman, each from a different period. There's Plantin – an Old Style serif, Baskerville
– a Transitional and Didot – a modern serif. Categorising type is as much art as science
so we'll leave a detailed breakdown of what those labels mean for a different video. Overall, the glyph designs in Times New Roman
borrow inspiration from all three. Though particularly in the lowercase and uppercase
Roman, we see a leaning towards the stroke contrast and forms of Baskerville with a stroke
stress closer to that of Plantin. In the italic forms, Perpetua – a typeface
Morrison had previously worked on with Eric Gill at Monotype – shows its influence. As well as a general leaning towards a simpler,
slanted Roman approach over that more calligraphic compressed form of older styles. The mixed usage of italic and roman together
for emphasis and titles was not common until the 17th century, and Morrison was a staunch
critic of the poor harmonisation between roman and italic forms in older typefaces. While we now take Times' version of these
letters as standard, it was certainly novel back in its day. There are also some features which point at
its newsprint past. The exaggerated, sharpened serifs, which helped
with a less than perfect quality paper it was printed, on as ink tends to spread or
bleed into the paper creating a bolder, thicker appearance than the original type once it
was printed. The uppercase letters are a bit narrower to
help fit more words per line. Also, to help usage at small sizes in print,
the x-height is slightly larger – with shorter ascenders and descenders – than the designs
which inspired it. All of this inadvertently helped it make the
transition to the screen. Times New Roman is so common as to be invisible. Through its unique place as the default font
in Microsoft Word until the introduction of Calibri, it's become institutionally entrenched
in document formatting standards for many academic institutions and government bodies. A viral marketing firm even released a font
called Times Newer Roman, a hacked version with slightly wider glyphs to help students
fake reaching their minimum word count. Nobody's going to do that for Baskerville
or Garamond anytime soon. The italic ampersand is quite handsome. The ear on the G is rounded in Roman but squared
in italic. Absolutely confounding. The italic uppercase Q.
Courier New is a digitization of a typewriter font developed for IBM in the 1950s. IBM did not trademark the name and because
the US system doesn't protect designs, this Monotype version could blatantly copy both. The bold versions postdate IBM's design. Not all typewriter fonts have serifs. Courier does and they're rounded slab serves,
which is quite distinctive. Typewriters were restricted to monospaced
(also known as fixed width) fonts, due to how they worked mechanically – at least
until the very late models. This means that every letter and character
including punctuation are the same width, a capital M gets the same space as a comma. This is where the practice of double spacing
after a full stop or period became popularised. By the way if you're watching this, please
don't double space except when using a monospace font. Every time you do a designer somewhere gets
carpal tunnel syndrome. Anyway, this leads to some particular characteristics. You see the lowercase I has a very wide serif
to fill as much space as possible. While this serif on the M is barely there. These are things we expect to see in a fixed
width font. Some particular quirks of Courier – the
lowercase X has serifs that are basically all but internalised, and the dot on the lowercase
j is offset from the main stem, but it's not the case with the I. The Monotype version we’re familiar with
has been criticised by many who are forced to use it in print for its very light stroke
weight. Compare it with the version by Bitstream made
for Apple, and it’s visibly a lot lighter. Those people who might need to use it include
screenwriters, as the film and television industry have settled on 12-pt Courier as
the standard formatting. Specialised screenwriting software, Final
Draft, even has its own proprietary version of Courier that comes bundled. There have been a number of alternative versions
made, including an open-licensed version called Courier Prime which has true italics. Uppercase J, quite distinct, though the Bitstream
cut is more elegant. Overbite on the bold, lowercase C.
Uppercase Q. At last, Arial. We end this list as we started it, with the
rivalry between Linotype and Monotype. Linotype had exclusive rights to Helvetica
which was well loved and relatively well known as far as typefaces went in the pre-digital
era. Monotype was contracted to provide fonts to
IBM for their early printers, and sub-licensed Helvetica from Linotype as one of these fonts. Sometime after this, Arial was developed as
a metric-compatible replacement which they substituted to avoid continuing to pay Linotype
for the rights to Helvetica. And thus, a copycat was born. First, how can we tell one from the other? There are a some key give away characters:
For Helvetica, look for the spurred lowercase a, the beard on the uppercase G and the curved
leg on the uppercase R. For Arial, look for the wavy tail on the capital Q, and for the
diagonal terminal on top of the lowercase T. Arial uses diagonal terminals throughout,
but the t is the easiest place to spot it. Helvetica’s terminals are always at 90-degree
angles. There are other subtler differences too, but
these are the ones which you can spot at a glance. On the whole, it has the same strengths and
weaknesses as Helvetica. Though the changes to the uppercase letters
in particular, make it a little less elegant than its progenitor. It’s a perfectly legible sans serif, with
little flavour of its own. It’s that blandness that makes it hard for
people to hate Arial with the same fervour that Comic Sans seems to provoke. Diagonal terminal on the lowercase f, at least
it’s rational. Awkwardly fluctuation of stroke weight on
the uppercase R. Sharp diagonal terminal on lowercase t. I wanted to end this list with Arial, because
it embodies much of Microsoft’s philosophy in type. If there is a through line this set of 10:
the best ones are those we hardly even notice. It’s the functionalist philosophy of type
– fonts should serve the text. It’s not the instrument, it’s the music. Matthew Carter, the designer of Georgia and
Verdana, understood this principle. In a New Yorker profile on Carter, Alec Wilkinson
connects this to the type scholar Beatrice Warde, who wrote – the most important thing
about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. Warde felt the best type was transparent,
unnoticeable, so that text could shine on its own merits. Her analogy was that a stunning stained-glass
window is a failure as a window. Because a window should be something you look
through, not at. All objects are a product of their time. A lot of the fonts we find ourselves with
today are the result of the technology and business rivalries of the past. Some of them have become obsolete through
changes in technology and now look out of place, perhaps even ugly. But none of that should condemn these as bad
design. Even Comic Sans was a well-designed to meet
its original brief. During their peak, Microsoft did more to democratise
typesetting than any other company, and so the typefaces that came bundled with their
software became the de-facto standard for millions of people. Most people have never downloaded a font in
their life, but they know the difference between Arial and Times New Roman. For an era, these fonts defined what we expected
type to look like. If we see a capital W or a lowercase z that
look different, these are the models we compare them to, consciously or not. Before Microsoft, there was no fixed point
of reference that was culturally shared on such a massive scale. But in 2020, it feels like the era of Microsoft’s
dominance is in the past. And I think we can point to the moment the
torch got passed on. In late 2016, global internet traffic from
mobile devices surpassed traffic from desktop computers for the first time. Since then, mobile traffic has taken the larger
share the majority of the time. Most of the reading we do now is online, and
Windows doesn’t have the market dominance in that space that it had in the past. You can see that under CEO Satya Nadella how
Microsoft have changed tactics in response to this new position – the channel TechAltar
has an excellent video breaking this down which I’ll link down in the description. Truthfully, although Microsoft’s market
dominance meant their presence in our lives felt inescapable over the last 30 years, even
down to the fonts we read on our screens and in our mail, that doesn’t feel like that’s
the world we’re heading into. Typographically speaking, Google now feels
like the presence we can’t escape, even if you don’t own an Android device – chances
are you’re reading Google fonts every day on the web without realising it. Youtube is a Google platform, but even outside
their massive ecosystem, Google Web Fonts have become the default system fonts of the
web. When the dust finally settled on web standards
for font embedding, Google were quick to establish a one-stop repository of open-licensed fonts
that were free to use. But that’s another video – I hope you’ve
enjoyed this one looking back at 10 significant fonts from Microsoft’s history. It’s been a lot of work to put together,
but I feel we often learn the most from looking closer at the things we take for granted. It might be more exciting to talk about the
automotive design of a rare Ferrari or Bugatti, but if you want to learn about the design
that impacts the average person’s experience, there’s a lot more to be gleaned from looking
at a Toyota Camry. If you’ve watched all the way through, thank
you for spending your time with me. Please let me know down in the comments if
you’d like to see a break down like this for Google, Apple or Adobe next – though
I’ll probably do some shorter videos in between. Feel free to ask me a question in the comments,
or you can reach out through my personal site: timesnewboman.com that’s with a B. This channel is still new, as I record this,
I have almost 200 wonderful subscribers, so if you this is the kind of content you enjoy,
why not join us? And if you share it with people you think
will find it interesting, that helps me out immensely. My name is Linus, I’ve been talking way
too long about fonts, and I hope I'll see you in a future video.
48 minutes is a very long meal
I love Verdana for it's extreme legibility in small size. It's my default font for working in excel, where often I need to see as many records as possible. No other font comes close to Verdana.
Also this guy pronounces "Verdana" as "Madonna".