Times New Roman
Print/Illustration | 2019 | Individual project
About the Project
The purpose of this project was to research a the typeface, Times New Roman, and learn about its history. In addition the presentation of the typeface was an opportunity to experiment with various typeface features such as scale, weight, line spacing, indentation, color, tone, value and texture. Furthermore, the final piece was intended to communicate a unique quality of the typeface to the viewer. The project was to be completed with mainly type and shapes, and should avoid illustrations. In addition, it should include three levels of hierarchy and two weights of the font.
Project Process
After researching the origin of Times New Roman as newspaper typeface, many of my ideas were focused on using only black and white to create the poster. I considered some playful themes such as the balloons and suit ideas, but felt they did not communicate the essence of the font in any way, so I attempted to use simple shapes to portray its professional use in academia and print.
However, my experience with Times New Roman has always been a dull one, considering that throughout my education I have always been forced to use the font, which made writing essays an even more dreary experience. While researching, I found a quote that shared my sentiment towards the typeface, “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”.
So, I decided to create an inky black hole that would suck up the type on the poster. The shape of the black hole was an attempt to represent the shape of paper if one were to pinch the center of it and crumple it up. In one of my earlier iterations, I kept some of the designs from the first idea, but also included some lines that alluded to line paper and school work. After reflecting on this iteration, I was convinced by the design because it felt crowded and didn’t communicate my main idea very well.
In the following iterations, I kept a similar layout, but decided to strictly use black and white as a reference to the newspaper background of the typeface. I wanted to distort the font and make it more interesting and fun, to contrast the negative perspective of the quote. Later on through a peer critique, I realized the idea of a black hole was not translated well through the design and the lack of actual Times New Roman, seemed to contradict the purpose of the project.
In my final iterations, I considered these issues and decided to keep “Times” and “Roman” in the traditional typeface, while distorting the word new in a bold italic to both connect the font with the imagery in the poster and acknowledge this “new” perspective of the typeface. In an attempt to improve the black hole, I experimented with a more pinched looking center, but found that the thin lines did not correlate well with the rest of the image. So, through the suggestion of one of my peers, I used the comma from the typeface to represent the center and had three commas rotated in effort to subtly suggest the swirling nature of the black hole.
