Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection. Her aim is to preserve and document outstanding examples of mid-20th century commercial art, creating an accessible resource for understanding illustration history.

Glorious collection of mid-century illustrations and graphic design. Also a good follow on Instagram. (Via Dan Cederholm.)

Netflix’s “tadum” is so iconic that it’s the name of their company blog. HBO’s static + chanted om is the OG standard-setter. I suspect the new Apple TV fanfare will be seen in that class. The old one was not.

Finalist is an iOS planner rooted in paper. Originally an index card system, it grew into a love letter to paper planners. You know the kind, leather folders with colored tabs and translucent dividers.

Unlike those old binders, Finalist fills itself with your calendars, reminders and weather forecast. Minimalist? Maybe not, but it’s become a UI playground designed to inspire, and looks great on iPad and Mac too.

Like the gorgeous new Year Planner for roughing in plans with the Highlighter (“intention paintbrush”).

iOS has tons of cool productivity apps. Finalist is a different take, and it might just end up in your dock.

One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”:

Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage.

Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” 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. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.

As Simonson mentions in “The Scourge of Arial”, regarding Helvetica’s enduring popularity:

As it spread into the mainstream in the ’70s, many designers tired of it and moved on to other typographic fashions, but by then it had become a staple of everyday design and printing. So in the early ’80s when Adobe developed the PostScript page description language, it was no surprise that they chose Helvetica as one of the basic four fonts to be included with every PostScript interpreter they licensed (along with Times, Courier, and Symbol). Adobe licensed its fonts from the original foundries, demonstrating their respect and appreciation for the integrity of type, type foundries and designers. They perhaps realized that if they had used knock-offs of popular typefaces, the professional graphic arts industry — a key market — would not accept them.

To my mind, Helvetica, Times, and Courier are the three canonical “default” fonts. One modern sans, one modern serif, and one for “typewriter”/code. (When I see Courier in print, at display sizes, my mind immediately wonders if the printer was missing the font that the designer specified in the document file.)

The Symbol font is a different story. It existed and was included with PostScript as one of just four defaults because the 8-bit character encodings of the time only had space for 255 characters. You needed a special font like Symbol to access “exotic” characters like Greek letters, math symbols (e.g. × or ÷), or arrows (↑ ↓ ← →). So there were really only three regular “fonts”, for prose, included with PostScript: Helvetica, Courier, and Times.

Courier and Times were eventually superseded in popular use by rivals that Microsoft licensed for inclusion in Windows: Courier New and Times New Roman, respectively. Times was from Linotype, Times New Roman from Monotype. Both versions of Times are legitimate digital interpretations of the 1929 hot metal design of Times Roman, and their differences are minor. Courier New, on the other hand, is so ugly — anemically thin and weak — that it hurts my teeth whenever I encounter it.

Typographer Mark Simonson, all the way back in 2001:

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.

Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

This is the exegesis on Arial. There’s also an exemplary illustrated sidebar, “How to Spot Arial”, which shows in detail how to tell the fucking bastard from Helvetica. If you want to be like me, cursed to notice Arial each time it appears in life, study that, and take note how every single way that it’s different from Helvetica is in the direction of making it uglier.

I’ve referenced “The Scourge of Arial” a few times over the years here at DF, but the recent contretemps over Times New Roman’s return at the US State Department has the general topic of “default fonts” at top of mind. For me, at least.

One of the old posts in which I linked to “The Scourge of Arial” was this gem from September 2007: “Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica”. This was so early in the iPhone era — just three months after the original iPhone shipped — that we were calling its operating system “mobile OS X”, and none of it was protected in any way, so you could do what I did and delete the Marker Felt font (Merlin Mann: “Comic Sans with a shave and a breath mint”) and then use a hex editor to modify the Mobile Notes app so it would fall back to Helvetica instead of cursed Arial after Marker Felt was deleted. Good times.