Notice anything about The Times today? We have changed our face. The headlines are more compact, making room for more letters. There is a new sans serif typeface to distinguish the goats of comment from the sheep of news. The masthead has been freshened and the livery cleared.

The relationship between The Times and its readers is curiously personal for a mass-market publication. In the past a thousand pens might have leapt from their inkwells to protest about a facelift to a familiar friend. But few of our readers today read us at leisure in leather armchairs. We, too, must move with the times, from the age of stiff collars into an age of relaxed formality.

The compact size is more convenient in the crowded, contemporary hurly-burly of life. The typographic changes today continue the process. Times New Roman has become the world’s most popular type. But it was designed for the pounding of hot metal and the rotary press. It came to look spidery when set by computer and printed offset. The new founts of Times Modern are more condensed and legible on a compact page.

This is not a radical redesign, but the evolution of a tradition. You can trace the Times Modern of today back to our founding fathers, to the first steam rotary press invented for The Times, to logography, which set several letters at once instead of singly, and to the faces cut by Aldus Manutius and Claude Garamond at the dawn of print. We have cut our own type, and engraved the lion and the unicorn. It would have been simpler and cheaper to buy new computer type off the shelf. But that is not Times style. We lead from the front, in the continual quest to spread the word as fast and as clearly as possible.