Introducing “Times Newer Roman,” a life-improving font by MSCHF (all images courtesy MSCHF)
People sometimes say that technology is devolving us as a species, allowing us to needlessly outsource processes that might cost us more in the exchange than the value they offer in convenience. Nuts to those h8r-ass Luddites, though, because the wacky folks over at MSCHF, a Brooklyn-based new media company that “create[s] easily discoverable and obsessively shareable digital products and experiences for the internet,” just life-hacked your college experience with the introduction of a new font: Times Newer Roman.
Oh, yawn, a new font? Aside from the legion of obsessive graphic design fetishists, who really stands to benefit from a new font? Anyone trying desperately to fill a page count, that’s who.
Times Newer Roman is virtually indistinguishable from Times New Roman, except for the fact that each letter is subtly geared five to 10% wider than the original, generating longer lines in 12-pt type, and therefore enabling savvy consumers of internet to hit their target page count sooner.
That is a 13% savings! You can’t argue with those numbers, especially when you don’t know how numbers work anymore because there’s an app for that.
How much sooner? According to the Times Newer Roman website, where the font can be downloaded for free, the estimated word count for a 15-page, single-spaced document in 12-pt type with Times New Roman is 6,680, compared to a stunning 5,833 using Times Newer Roman. With a word savings like that, you can efficiently shortcut your own education, which leaves more time for what college is all about: drinking and having sex while someone else pays your rent.
“We really just made this a) because we think it’s funny, b) we could all benefit from being able to use fewer words to express ourselves,” stated a representative of MSCHF in an email to Hyperallergic. The email also characterizes this motley group as an anonymous contingent hailing from places like BuzzFeed, Vice, Snap, Twitter, and the Museum of Modern Art, that “simply make ‘internet,’ sometimes for brands, sometimes for ourselves.”
“…and finally, writing assignments with page requirements are the worst,” the MSCHF-maker concluded. One member of the MSCHF team is currently in college, so I guess they’d know!
Get to where you’re going more quickly. By which we mean, that house party you’ve been hearing about all week.
Congrats to MSCHF for this indispensable tool that will help college students everywhere beat the oppressive tyranny of page counts! College students could definitely use less responsibility, and there is no tangible benefit to developing the skill of meeting page counts; here in the professional writing world, they actually assign and count the number of words. Fingers crossed there’s a font to handle that already in production …
Delightful! Thank you! I look forward to sharing this with my community college students who are not comfortable with my concept of “Yeah, three or so pages, that’s good.”
I’m pure (Newark, New Jersey) about getting the MLA format right, though.
– from a part-time adjunct faculty of no academic whatsoever