Picture gallery: the Times mastheads
Designers Neville Brody and David Driver answer your questions
The Times is changing. A simple sentence, but one that heralds a new
era for the national daily first published in 1785. In a move that is more
evolutionary than revolutionary, the newspaper is firmly embracing the
compact shape with the introduction of a new headline fount and a makeover
that improves clarity.
The new fount, Times Modern, blends the traditional and functional lines of
the existing Times New Roman and melds them with sharp angular details to
give a condensed face that perfectly fits the smaller-sized newspaper.
Working under the direction of Neville Brody, the award-winning designer, Luke
Prowse has fashioned the new fount to meet the demanding criteria of
legibility and modernity that readers of The Times demand.
Mr Brody said: “Times Modern is a contemporary answer to the needs of compact
newspapers. With pinched proportions, it allows more copy in the headline
without compromising legibility. It is both authoritative and elegant, while
robust at smaller sizes.”
The Daily Universal Register was founded in 1785 by John Walter as an
advertising sheet to publicise a new typesetting process. Logography was a
system of setting several letters at once, in the days when all type was set
laboriously by hand. Within three years Walter had renamed his paper The
Times and in 1814 his successor was able to announce: “Gentlemen, The
Times is already printed — by steam.”
The greatest change in presentation came in 1932 under the direction of
Stanley Morison, the distinguished typographer. When planning a typeface
suitable for the impeccable presswork and high quality newsprint, he wrote
that it had to be “worthy of The Times — masculine, English,
direct, simple, not more novel . . . and absolutely free from faddishness
and frivolity”.
Morison’s solution was Times New Roman, a typeface of classic elegance that
has become the most widely used type in the world.
October 9, 1972, Walter Tracy, Morison’s successor as type adviser to The
Times, produced Times Europa, a less delicate, less classical and
rather beefier fount, better able to withstand longer print runs.
Europa was replaced by Times Roman on August 30, 1982. In January 1986, The
Times moved away from Fleet Street, from hot metal composition and into
the age of electronics..
The computer typesetting equipment supplied had Times Roman but, being crudely
computer-drawn, it was a pale and inelegant shadow of Morison’s original.
The page width was also smaller, enabling The Times to share
presses with tabloid productions.
So, a decade on, in 1991, the face was revisited. All display and body faces
were redrawn by Gunnlaugur Briem on the instructions of Aurobind Patel,
composing manager of News International. The result was named Times
Millennium. The work on it used modern Apple Computer graphics, taking
typography from the age of hot metal to that of digital design.
The most noticeable characteristic of the fount was a more flowing line with
less prominent lower-case ascenders and descenders. The serifs were angular
rather than horizontal.
After a decade of further progress came the introduction of Times Classic, in
February 2002, designed by Dave Farey and Richard Dawson to meet the latest
production system in which all the pages were designed and set by computer.
This was a painstaking two years of dedicated work, in which 1,200 letters
were drawn on tracing paper and then digitised. A new typeface requires 120
letters per face, 26 in capitals and lower case; plus all those @, *, &
and £ signs. And there are ten sizes — bold, light, demi, italic, and so on.
The overall effect of Classic was to make the print bolder and darker but
with more space within and without the letter.
In 2004 it was decided to produce a “compact” version of The
Times alongside the broadsheet. Over the following year it was
essential that both papers looked the same, but in the compact form it was
recognised that the display founts needed to be reconsidered in a more
condensed form.
The Times Modern introduced today allows a better shaped headline with extra
characters per line. This allows for more articulation in the process of
writing. The change is not reckless impulse, but reading conditions for many
people have become less leisurely. Newspaper typography should evolve to
meet technological innovations and The Times is once again at the
sharp end.
The Times Crest
The Times masthead and insignia, were introduced when the paper was
first published on January 1, 1785, under the title Daily Universal
Register. This was because Printing House Square, the site from which
the paper was published, had originally been the site of the King’s Printing
House and the building bore the royal coat of arms on its pediment. There
was no patent or warrant for its use, but a tradition of newspapers using
the royal coat of arms was already established.
In 1953 Reynolds Stone created a robust and dynamic new title piece.
On May 3, 1966, in a momentous change of format, The Times began to
print news on the front page in place of classified advertisements. As part
of this change the royal coat of arms was dropped, and the title piece was
redrawn by Berthold Wolpe. The Times was congratulated by Anthony
Wagner, Garter King of Arms, on the disappearance of the coat of arms,
“which so long and misleadingly suggested that The Times had
an official character”.
On July 30, 1981, to commemorate the wedding of the Prince and Princess of
Wales, the arms were reinstated. With the introduction of the Times Classic
typeface in 2002, the title piece was developed from the new fount. From
today the centre of the masthead is a new coat of arms designed by the wood
engraver Edwina Ellis.
She said: “The history of depicting creatures and beasts that the artist and
cutter had never seen has produced some extraodinary guesses. A daunting
task turned into a feeling of empathy with all those, with the same (now
archaic) tools in hand, making a lion, unicorn, shield and garter fit
between the titling of the newspaper.
“The lion has particularly suffered from the jobbing engravers’ attempts.
“It was interesting to join a long line of engravers and artists who had
wrestled with exactly the same problem.
“It is very difficult to make a facing lion fierce — or even faintly cross.
They can weep, grin and hold door-knocker rings quite easily, but in
comparison to the unicorn with its horn, goat-beard, spiky ears and flowing
mane, their silhouette is lumpen. I pitied the poor engravers who had no
more seen a lion than a unicorn.”
Ellis’s work can currently be seen on our one-pound coins. In 2002 she was
invited by the Royal Mint to produce designs for the “Bridge” series in
competition. The designs are lino cuts.
She also produced, in 1996, a series of nine engravings of modern London
buildings for London Transport posters.
