Cheltenham (typeface)

Cheltenham was drawn in the 1890s by the architect Bertram Goodhue for Ingalls Kimball's Cheltenham Press, and it was built on a theory of reading. Goodhue lengthened the ascenders and shortened the descenders, betting that the top half of a line does most of the work when the eye recognizes words. The New York Times took it up for headlines in 1906, and in 2003 art director Tom Bodkin commissioned Matthew Carter to rework it into Times Cheltenham, a family the paper owns. That is why a bold, slightly old-fashioned Cheltenham headline now reads as unmistakably Times, even online.