Times New Roman alternatives and readable serif lettering

Where it came from, and a genuine dispute

Times New Roman was made for The Times of London and first used in the paper on 3 October 1932. It came out of Stanley Morison's criticism of the paper's existing typography; the drawing work is credited to Victor Lardent, a draughtsman in the paper's advertising department, working under Morison's direction. The brief was specific and practical — set narrow to save space, print clearly on newsprint, and stay readable at small sizes.

That is the standard account, and it is the one the historical record supports best. It is worth knowing that it has been contested: the type historian Mike Parker argued from the 1990s that the design originated in a 1904 drawing by the American designer Starling Burgess. Most typographic historians have not accepted the claim, and the evidence for it remains disputed. It is mentioned here because a page about a typeface's history should not present a contested attribution as settled.

What the parts of a serif actually do

Every element in a text serif is doing legibility work rather than decoration.

Drawing a serif by hand

There are two routes, and they produce different results. Writing with a broad-nib pen held at a consistent angle gives you contrast and diagonal stress for free, because the tool produces them — this is where the whole style came from. Drawing outlines and filling them gives you far more control but means you must place the contrast deliberately, which is harder than it sounds.

1. 01If using a broad nib, fix your pen angle at roughly 30 degrees to the baseline and hold it there. Every thick and thin follows from that angle.
2. 02Keep the x-height moderate, and give ascenders and descenders real length.
3. 03Draw the serifs with a slight bracket — a small curve where the serif meets the stem, rather than a hard right angle.
4. 04Keep the contrast consistent across all the letters. Inconsistent contrast is what makes an amateur serif look uneven in text.
5. 05Test at text size early. A serif that looks beautiful at 200 points can turn to mud at 12.

Converting a serif

Serifs are the most demanding thing to convert, because the important details are small. The bracket where the serif meets the stem, and the thin stroke of an o, are exactly the features a tracer is most likely to round away or a threshold most likely to drop.

Raise detail so the fine features survive. Draw at a larger size than feels necessary, so that a hairline is many pixels wide rather than one or two. And take extra care with lighting when you photograph — a thin stroke in a shadowed corner of the page is the first thing to disappear when the ink threshold is applied.

Being realistic about text faces

A hand-drawn serif will have character, and it will not have the optical polish of a face drawn for continuous reading. Professional text faces carry an enormous amount of invisible correction — individual letters adjusted so that no combination produces a dark or light patch in a line.

Use what you draw for headings, titles, covers and short passages, where character is the point. For a novel, use a face designed for the job. Knowing the difference is itself worth the exercise.