Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri. Here are our CEO Luc(as) de Groot’s thoughts on the matter:
Back to bad...
Deciding to ditch Calibri as a ‘wasteful diversity’ font is both hilarious and sad. I designed Calibri to make reading on modern computer screens easier, and in 2006 Microsoft chose it to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. Microsoft moved away from Times for good reasons. Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman create more visual disturbance. Although serif fonts work well on high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, the serifs can introduce unnecessary visual noise on typical office screens and be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.
Professional typography can be achieved with serif or sans serif fonts. However, that is not very easy with Times New Roman, a typeface older than the current president. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger-size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at a high quality.
Depending on the situation, fonts with serifs are often considered more classic, but they take more work to get right. While a skilled typographer can produce excellent results with Times New Roman, using the digital default version is not considered professional practice. This font only offers two weights, Regular and Bold, and the Bold version has a very different design that does not fit well. There are many better serif typefaces available. The digital version of Times New Roman, developed in the early days of computing, includes only minimal adjustments to letter pairs. This is particularly noticeable in all-capital words such as ‘CHICAGO’, where the spacing is inconsistent: the letters ‘HIC’ are tightly packed, while ‘CAG’ are spaced too far apart. By contrast, Calibri incorporates extensive spacing adjustments and language-specific refinements.
This decision takes the administration back to the past and back to bad.
(Microsoft could not rectify spacing issues in Times New Roman without altering the appearance of existing documents.)
Personally, I don't have a problem with them changing fonts. I personally think Times isn't a great choice for the reasons articulated in that statement (something open and more legible seems better to me), but I don't think it's a horrible choice either (it's standard and efficient with space). If the State Department wants to use a certain font, it's their prerogative.
What bothers me about the decision is their rationale. If they had just switched without any explanation, it would have seemed more judicious and politic, befitting a department of state. Even better would be to announce a thoughtful font choice with reasoning based on the font itself, without defaulting to some thoughtless option "because that's the way it was done in the past", and moving away from the existing choice "because DEI". As it is, in my opinion, they made themselves look like idiots by obsessing over fonts from the perspective of something like DEI, as if they are paranoid over any possible subatom of DEI infecting their presence. Rubio couldn't just make it about the font, so to speak, he had to get hung up on irrelevant details which makes him (in my opinion) look worse than anything he might be criticizing.
If you read the original announcement, my impression was that the choice of Calibri was because it it made state department functions easier as Calibri was the default in commonly used software (which seems kind of a poor reason to me, but one I can respect on practicality grounds). Legibility was also a concern (as it should be in my opinion). So something functional about Calibri (legibility) becomes "DEI" which is almost like cooties for this administration. Even if you disagree about the legibility of Calibri, denouncing legibility as a criterion per se seems absurd to me.
The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.
> The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.
That would require that the individuals involved actually have taste. Instead, as with everything else from this administration, it's a toot on their favourite dog whistle.
Nah, it's just the US reinventing the German Antiqua-Fraktur dispute from more than a century ago, where only Fraktur was appropriate for expressing serious Germanic ideas. A sans typeface is un-German... ahh, un-American!
Of course, a couple of decades after that, Fraktur was declared too Jewish and thoroughly eradicated, killing among other things the sole remaining independent strain of Latin-script handwriting (other than the dominant one invented as a book-copying aid by the Italian humanists, thus “italic”).
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Donald Trump and, frankly, those around him in general are what poor people think rich people are like, but I wouldn’t exactly be one to claim that the design language used by the Biden Administration, like switching to Calibri, are very tasteful either. In leftist popular culture there is a love for modernist style architecture, minimalism, and a disrespect for building beautiful things that cost a lot of money or time. Rightwing circles have their own problems here too, to be fair.
But mandating Greco-Roman architecture by the Trump administration for federal buildings was actually a huge win for taste and design. Though unfortunately many people have become confused about what good design is or the reason to choose that architecture style can’t be overcome by their distaste for President Trump or his administration, which is very arguably deserved based on their conduct, speech, or mannerisms.
When we take away formality or tradition from governmental institutions you take away pieces of civilization and governmental authority that we, really can’t afford to lose. When government buildings are designed to look like shit, for example, one might come to believe the government is shit too (Democrat or Republican run) and the next thing you know you’re running red lights or flipping off the court because the document they sent you in the mail doesn’t look scary and official.
Secretary Duffy was right too about airline travel. Well, there is another to unpack there. Flying is lame compared to rail unless you’re flying across the country, and being shaken down by the TSA is undignified and thus people dress to meet the lack of dignity and respect the government shows them at the airline terminal.
But he’s not wrong.
When you put more care into how you dress you instinctively put more care into how you treat others and how you dress impacts how others treat you. I’m not suggesting a mandate or anything, but I’ll fly in a suit and tie easily and comfortably all day long over stained sweatpants and bringing my comfort dog on to the flight to annoy everyone. Dress how you want, but if you can’t take care of the basics I’m not sure where else you think society is going other than downhill in a fashion.
I prefer the protestant restrained aesthetic. Spiritual over material. Governmental buildings should be tastefully humble. It is a signal that the government is a servant of the people.
What’s an example that you’re thinking of? I think this can make sense - I mean if you have a town of 5,000 people and a government office there or something you probably don’t need a big, giant, building (unless that’s the message you’re trying to send). It’s also impractical from a cost-standpoint.
Federal buildings though should have gravitas and signify importance. If they don’t, and/or we think the government isn’t important, I’ll take my tax dollars back, thank you very much.
You can liken this to how western countries are leaving Christianity. Who can believe in God when you drive a Jeep to your mega church next to Costco and everyone is wearing sweatpants? (I’m not particularly spiritual but I see the problems here)
In Europe, Protestant churches are generally built much more humble than Catholic ones, because they are built with different philosophies in mind. (I am not familiar with American churches, so no comments there)
Similarly, I prefer government buildings to go for a similar route. It doesn’t mean that buildings have to ugly or small. But similar to Protestant churches it can humble, functional and elegant at the same time.
I do find it faintly ironic that Sort Of Greek Or Roman Or Something architecture was the villain in Ayn Rand's novel.
Living here in DC I don't especially mind Federalist Architecture, even though it does look like somebody saw some photos of Rome and Athens and kinda mashed them together. But I don't love insisting that a 19th century view of the second century BC must forevermore be the only possible taste.
If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it. It’s not necessarily about a 19th century view of 2nd century BC architectural concepts (which itself is a bit of a farce of a comment) but more so about anchoring the longevity and legitimacy of governmental institutions to a historical heritage.
Similarly I wouldn’t recommend, say, that the Afghani people or Mongolia for example build federalist or Greco-Roman style architecture for their government buildings as it wouldn’t make much sense and wouldn’t have any basis in their history.
There’s also some science to it and we know the asymmetrical buildings and buildings which make entrances and other expected features hard to find cause measurable levels of stress and anxiety in the observer. Hostile architecture.
I don’t mind the overall point of your argument, but it’s funny to see a claim that Americans have more reason to use Greco-Roman architecture than a Middle Eastern country. Classical Greek art actually took a lot of influence from the Middle East, and I believe Alexander actually reached te area around Afghanistan (and a Hellenistic kingdom existed there for a while), unlike America.
Well I wouldn’t argue Afghanistan is part of the Middle East culturally or geographically, but even if you did want to argue that, Alexander came and conquered that area for a little bit and then left. It wasn’t ever really culturally Greek.
But the main point isn’t whether afghanistan is Greek; it’s not of course. The main point is that it’s funny to hear an American argue that the US has more of a claim on Greek architecture than Afghanistan.
Because its not real. He is completely right its a 19th century cargo cult of classicism. Its a modern anachronistic mashup of various old styles, I can bet if you asked an actual Greek or Roman era expert they will say these buildings combine elements 500 600 years apart.
I like how it looks but its also lazy and cheesy, I can't blame people who think we need more styles.
You’re missing the point. The styles aren’t meant to be 1-1 matches of Greek or Roman architecture, they’re rather good attempts at building and designing our governments buildings which that they harken to where our legal and cultural traditions hail from. That’s why the Capitol looks the way it does.
I’m not sure how that’s lazy or cheesy. I’m certainly open minded to other styles but they need to be rooted in western civilization. Otherwise you wind up with silly things like replicas of the Eiffel Tower in weirdly designed and inappropriate little French mockup towns, or you wind up with the lowest common denominator - Wal-Mart and strip malls.
Its literally in the name, neoclassicism. All I am saying is why did you say its "farcical" that its a modern view of an old style?
I think it is a lazy copy paste of old tropes. I know because I can see these tendencies in myself too. I like some old styles and if I had my way I could keep listening to newer bands that replicate this style my whole life. But the thing is, without the original inspirational fire behind the style its just a nice copy.
I see you had dissed on brutalism some time before, I really don't understand why. I feel at least in some ways brutalism is a non-pastiche manner achieves things like the imposing sense of grandeur and power of classical architecture.
> If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it.
Carolingian architecture didn't just cargo cult, they literally pilfered Roman columns and integrated them into anachronistic designs. If I recall my art history class correctly, the columns from Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel were "repurposed" (looted) from a Roman temple. [1]
This is also an example of architectural skeuomorphism: designing something in a way reminiscent of an older thing, to borrow the associations people have with it. In this case, Roman authority.
Yea great example and really cool building. Too bad we don’t build nice things anymore. It’s a shame our oligarch class is so uncultured and stupid.
As an European, seeing modern American airports with Greco-Roman architecture makes the environment tacky as hell. As something from Las Vegas.
As an American I think they’re tacky too. That style of architecture for an airport doesn’t make sense really. Well. I bet it could be pulled off. But the “architects” designing the airports are the same people designing Greco-Roman architecture on disfigured American McMansions.
Art Decó, on the other hand, would look pretty Americana and elegant for your buildings.
It's basically the classical American city depiction for Europeans (noir movies, Superman, old comic strips from newspapers...)
Yea I don’t mind Art Deco at all. I think the car company Cadillac, which is based in the Detroit area, which is in my mind where I think of as the home of that style (even if it’s not), started including Art Deco as part of their design language and I think it’s a good use.
The leftists think trump is a dictator. The right thinks trump is an irresponsibly spending warmonger. And everyone thinks the entire damn government is rife with all sorts of bad things.
What Trump and Friends(TM) are doing here is basically stylizing the government to mimic things people associate with legitimacy since that's in short supply to the government these days. Serif fonts that harken back to when documents were for serious things and handwriting was the less formal format. Greco-roman government buildings and other "antique-ish" styles that subtly imply the legitimacy of the institution therein always has been and always will be.
Likewise I would bet a lot of money that over the next 20yr we don't see many/any 1920s-60s government buildings renovated to remove that aesthetic because people associate those decades with government that seemingly was functional.
Your last paragraph has it totally backwards. The government puts on this huge stupid show of looking big and important and fancy in order to distance itself from the fact that at the end of the day it's an organization that's fairly capriciously deploying violence.
Well, to encapsulate your point here - you don’t believe in the legitimacy of government so of course any attempt by the government to legitimize itself you’d find disagreeable. Is that right?
Legitimacy isn't a binary, especially not across a nation of many millions.
Sure but now I don’t know what you’re talking about or what point you’re trying to make.
Projecting an image of legitimacy behooves the government because it makes everything they do (and there is almost always someone who loses dearly whenever the government does something) that much less likely to be resisted. Government is always pushing at the limits of its authority or at least going right up to them so just "seeming" a little more legitimate in the minds of as many people as possible pays back because at the margin that turns into a bunch of fights you don't have to fight, all the work you don't have to do to justify your actions, the appeals that aren't filed, etc, etc.
Think about how HN just takes whatever the EPA says at face value vs scrutinizing ICE. Every office, department, etc, etc, aspires to get the EPA treatment from as much of society as possible. Acting the part is part is part of that.
Reactionaryism and vice signaling are par for the course for this administration. This was an opportunity for both, and they took it.
The reasoning is so absurd I find myself wondering whether the alleged rationales are real or if the political people said "yeah, this recommendation is fine we'll do it but you need to come up with a way to tie it into my talking points"
Like are we switching fonts because DEI or are we switching fonts because fonts and pretending it's DEI?
Verdana is more readable on low-resolution screens than Calibri. I never understood why they didn’t use the former, which already existed, and just extended its character repertoire a bit.
Tbh they should have just mandated it to Aptos for new communications, with TNR and Calibri acceptable for old devices that have not been updated yet. Having people spend effort overriding the default font on their machine is frankly a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Honest question: do you have any financial stake in this? I'm assuming you don't get paid per-document or whatever but do you have any sort of income dependent on Microsoft shipping your font with outlook (whether as the default font or not)?
I don't mean to accuse you of anything but to 99% of the population this is a complete nothingburger and it looks ridiculous that anybody would care (this cuts both ways btw I also think Rubio is being a cringy idiot). I just don't understand what the big deal is here and I really cannot understand why anybody (on either "side") cares.
I am farsighted, which worsens with each passing year. While I get around this online by making full use of browser options to enlarge text for me, etc, because everyone uses different fonts anyway, I can also kinda see the perspective shift to someone looking at this font switch as being just one of many parts of "an attack" on accessibility by the current administration. Their general attitude seems to be that if the change was made in the past to accommodate a particular group of people, in this case, those with poorer eyesight/trouble reading things on screens which were starting to inundate our lives at the time, then it's got to go because it somehow disrupts their status quo.
It's a silly stance for insecure men, which is why the brief uproar this change caused is so wildly ridiculous and adds to the pile of evidence illustrating that they are not serious leaders.
The Department of State switching to a less accessible font is not a nothing burger to all the people who now have more difficulty reading the documents. It reinforces the tone of international relations being put forward by the administration to the detriment of everyone in the country.
You clearly did not read the OP and it shows.
Fyi since your account is new. It’s a faux pas here to have a “company” account.
That’s not true. Sincere engagement is what people expect. A copy-and-paste of a statement is less desirable than, say, Lucas himself coming to post his thoughts, but it is still valuable and not a faux pas. The spirit of HN is: does the post or comment add something of value?
We understand the point you are making. However, it was important for us to contribute to the discussion (not only on HN) about one of our fonts, too. We can’t provide the full picture of the story, but we can at least offer our (typographical) perspective, which could be helpful. Some people have asked about us: we are a small, independent type design studio. And we have no negative or positive financial outcome from this headline. However, we do benefit from free publicity. By the way, we wish you a good 2026 from Berlin!
Says who? I’ve never heard that, and am not even close to new.
It's heavily implied through social observation here on the site. Just like how "memes and quippy references" are frowned upon, which you immediately pointed out in a separate comment. Since you're not new, you just outed yourself as someone who has just enough social awareness to understand a small subset of what's implicitly accepted here, but you haven't fully developed the mental capacity for implications more than one layer deep.
SQLite would like to have a word...
The company may well consist of only the poster himself.
Not so, according to their website.
This was a terrific, reasonable take on this “controversy”. I have to admit that the correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office. Imagine reading the Warren Commission report set in that. The author seems to settle on the consensus that surrounded TNR before this exchange made the news. It’s banal. At times it signals to its original objectives (e.g., Prof. Dr. style websites [1]). But still banal more often than not.
I love Univers. But I don’t think there’s anyone in public office with enough influence and swagger to ever enforce it. At the same time I have a bad feeling about the attention that decisions like this draw and what it may lead to. The article does a great job at portraying the general incompetence in both parties.
I can imagine Beto O’Rourke somewhere dreaming about styling all government communiqués like a page out of Ray Gun. Planning his come back. To set anything issued from Ted Cruz’s office in Zapf Dingbats. War.
The Warren Commission report was set in Century Schoolbook, the Supreme Court's typeface of choice. The appendices are photo reproductions of originals produced on typewriters, so they are in something monospaced.
You can see for yourself. They certainly would not have used Times New Roman.
But I suppose interoffice memoranda are meant to be skimmed, not read, so TNR or Calibri are both fine.
I didn’t mean to suggest that they would’ve. I just named a government document with significant gravity behind it to affect a point similar to the author’s:
> There’s nothing inherently wrong with this style, but one would hardly want an official document or legal contract to appear “warm and soft.”
Consider the response I gave to the other child comment on this thread referring to a different document as a revision if that suits you. [1]
I’m sorry. I don’t know of nor do I have the wherewithal to find any correspondence from the State Department to bolster my argument that “humanist fonts” are not always suited to the tenor of all government correspondence. Oddly, none of the press releases on state.gov are available in PDF as far as I can tell.
Wait.
At least imagine this!
> The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies. As such, I have determined that their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.
It’s already in “Open Sans”, which looks thinner and may have a taller X-height. What do you think of it? Not quite “warm”; certainly “soft”, I think. Should I feel concerned about this news? Or just alright?
Anodyne. That’s the way the words start to look after some time when set like this. How far away is that feeling from “banal”?
If the US wants a truly "traditional" typeface, the choice would be Caslon.
Caslon was used to print the first 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence. Old Caslon was used for Thomas Paine's Common Sense. It was also a favorite of printers throughout the US including Benjamin Franklin.
I also never really liked Calibri for professional stuff. Maybe I'm just a victim of conditionig, but Calibri always had a bit of a "web page" vibe, not official document vibe.
I personally think that Computer Modern/Latin Modern from LaTeX looks a lot better than Times New Roman. I wish they'd standardize on that but it might not be included in Microsoft Office, so I guess Times New Roman it is.
Before the recent post on Public Sans, I was unaware of the typeface myself... I think it's absolutely beautiful myself, I wish it were more complete for use outside US contexts. I like it a bit better than Robot Sans, which has been my go to for web content for about a decade.
That said, I feel the issues come to play with the differences between what is seen on a screen and what persists in physical print. I do wish they'd picked a better font in both cases... My own assumption about the Calibri switch was that it was the MS Office default, meaning one less step, but I guess that default itself has changed since.
My only preference would be for a typeface that has a free/open license for broad usage as a default. Also, given the nature of printed documents would probably lean towards at least some serifs to make reading easier, especially to better distinguish some of the more problematic characters.
> correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office
In general this is the way I feel about anything written in a Microsoft-, Apple-, or Ubuntu-supplied typeface. If you stick to system fonts you the pinnacle of embodiment of apathy in my book.
Have some backbone, browse through Google fonts, pick something that represents your organization and stick with it.
Even if you are a leasing office, pick a good font. That will make me more likely to lease from you because your attention to typography conveys to me that you will also be attentive to details in building maintainence. If you communicate in Times New Roman and Arial it tells me that you probably are apathetic about mold in the walls and electrical code as well.
While I appreciate nice typography like not many do (I decide on what editions of a book — especially classics — to get based on the typography and overall layout), I also appreciate that I may be easily swayed by good typography and land on a crappy outcome (I have several very lousy books that were done really well typographically :)).
So I'd never use that as a metric: yes, I care about typography, and if the content of the message is equivalent, I'll pick the one done better. But I do not expect everyone else to put as much weight on it.
That's... certainly an opinion.
If it's legible, the terms of a lease are way more important than the typeface. Anyone wasting time on the typeface of the contract would worry me more than comfort me with regard to knowing what's important.
Any typefaces you’d recommend?
For serious government communications? Libertinus Serif, Vollkorn, Ibarra Real Nova, Baskerville, Libre Baskerville
I'm sorry, you can't argue the font choice signals banality in the same article in which you argue that readers aren't sophisticated enough on font choice to catch that serifs are supposed to signal professionalism.
Why not? One quality is inherent, the other inherited. The typeface was developed with banality in mind and presumably become popular because of its utility in this respect. The ensuing popularity in word processors and on the Web likely lead to the idea that it’s more professional than others.
Again, the author:
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia.
"The typeface was developed with banality in mind..."
That's completely wrong. Times New Roman was designed for legibility at small sizes, in narrow columns, on absorbent newsprint, printed at high speed. That is, it was designed explicitly for a very specific purpose, which it fills admirably.
None of that should be taken as any kind of comment on the current brouhaha.
I hate for us to have to make it clear that any claim in favor of the typeface’s suitability should not be interpreted as direct support for those responsible for re-instituting it. This isn’t an admonishment, but a lament I hope you may share.
While TNR wasn’t designed to evoke banality in its less desirable connotations I do think the way that you’re describing it match sensibilities that the word “banal” can also carry; Ordinary, commonplace. I admit—it’s a stretch I’m taking. But how far from banal is the utilitarian?
Because font choice outside of large strokes like fantasy fonts is meaningless.
All of this exposition only works if people are literate in typography enough to get it. Most people can't even understand literalist art, say nothing about the symbolism of typography.
It's like how the Victorians invented a whole meaning categorization to different species of flowers and then acted like it was universal law. It's a secret in-crowd code. It has no inherent meaning.
Could you clarify what you mean by “meaningless”?
How you can conceive a literate society that is not affected by type. The fact that general literacy is apparently declining is beside the point but we remain surrounded by letters and words, the shape of which determine how we comprehend what they point out. Planes, signs, screens depend on font choice to be effective. Newspapers and memoranda too.
The degrees may vary but the significance of a font choice just can’t be as simple as you make it seem. Just only to the extent of the value the public ascribes to the type-bearing object. Granted, we may be assigning too much to US State Department documents. But who’s to say?
He can, he did, and we're all here arguing about it, which somehow delights me.
I love Univers as well, but the _Q_ is just _too_ weird by most folks perceptions.
Q, more than any other glyph, is the letter that never fails to look weird in every typeface when I spend too much time looking at it/re-re-re-re-designing it.
Not sure why Beto is catching strays, but I can tell you're from Texas, heh.
I suppose the administration's typo-ridden nonsense formatted with a serif-font MIGHT appear more professional. It's certainly possible, not impossible.
Right. Now imagine something like this:
> In response, based upon the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the President recognized that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations. The President directed the Department of War to conduct operations against them pursuant to the law of armed conflict. The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.
Wow, the sample shows that 15 point Calibri on official government documents was truly awful. In software when we make a mistake that causes some production issue the best first action is almost always to roll back. Maybe 14 pt TNR isn't the best, but rolling back to it is a defensible decision.
The article is completely self-defeating and unintentionally funny.
"Look at this remarkably fugly downgrade. Here's why The Science says it's superior."
That's a pretty good summary of the entire article :)
Shouldn't public documents by the government use a free and libre font? In fact, the mentioned Public Sans developed by the US federal government seems to be a great option, as it actually distinguishes the lowercase l and the uppercase I, something that, ironically, all suggested sans-serif alternatives fail to do.
Public Sans seems like a good candidate for a new "web safe" font. Perhaps one new web safe font per twenty five years is not too much. From there, it can percolate to the word processor and pdfs, and finally: government standard for government workers who just want to open their word processor and get to work, where sourcing even a free font to meet standard is just a snag to annoy.
Times New Roman is available at no cost under the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web. (Microsoft no longer distributes this, but the license allows redistribution and redistribution is popular). AFAIK, Apple explicitly licenses the fonts and most open source OS distributions have a package for these fonts.
It's not libre, but font copyright is weird anyway, and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyright.
and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyright
It's worth noting that most if not all works created by the government are in the public domain. There are some exceptions but PD is the default.
Further, Public Sans was developed by the US govt under the first Trump administration and appears to be an excellent font. That seems to be a wise choice against TNR or Calibri on multiple angles.
You would hope, but changing this font isn't about making anything better, it's that Calibre was apparently a DEI font and had to go. I can't imagine these people thinking highly of an open source (Oooh communism) font that's also designed with accessibility in mind.
Are we still doing the communism thing? I thought the bogeyman is socialism now.
In any case, it would be nice to have some consistency across the government, and if they want to make a change, at least take prior works into account like what the Congress or SCOTUS are doing in their official texts.
"Instead, people first observe that government, academia, and corporate workplaces disproportionately use serif faces — or are trained to use them — and only then infer that serifs must mean professionalism and authority."
This is an aside, but many people would benefit from appreciating what is observed here, because it impacts an enormous numbers of preferences and perceptions people hold.
A good example is 24 FPS in cinema, which we generally attribute to high quality movies, baked in our value system via a technical/financial limit imposed a century ago. If a movie is presented any higher it gets mentally mapped with soap operas and low quality sitcoms, and it is disorienting to people. The Hobbit tried upping to 48FPS and it was described as "resembling low-budget video like American daytime soap operas rather than cinematic film". Higher quality TV dramas shoot at 24 FPS, intentionally forcing the 3:2 pulldown for TV presentation to signal "no, compare me to a movie not those other TV shows".
There are many areas in our life where we're judging things by this signalling criteria, and not by any real objective measure, yet people will often invent objective measures to assuage themselves that their values aren't so easily manipulated. Bring up 24FPS being a baked in limitation rather than some pinnacle of film making and many will start contriving why no, they actually prefer it because... It's all just noise.
The correct typeface for the current U.S. administration would of course be Comic Sans or perhaps Comic Serif for double-super-serious documents.
And Wingdings for classified material!
Of course, just as the highlight tool is used for redaction, wingdings is used for encryption!
> Martin Bormann issued a circular (the "normal type decree") to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use.
I don't know if you meant to invoke pro/anti-Nazi associations with this typeface but it's unfortunate that such a fantastic lettering style carries around a poisonous historical connotation.
I am aware (of the Judenlettern decree). The reference to exactly this was intentional.
(Edit to make this really obvious: The joke here is that "fraktur = nazis" became such a meme that the nazis themselves were annoyed by it and forbade its use, but this is exactly the kind of thing the present administration would either be unaware of or simply ignore and then use fraktur intentionally to pander to neo-nazis.)
Thanks for spelling it out. I had a feeling that's the point you were making, but that level of subtlety has a hard time getting through, even on highbrow hn. Hence I like to err on the side of spelling things out, especially since I'm much more often a reader than a writer.
Why is that poisonous? It sounds like Fraktur was rejected by Nazi Germany which isn’t a bad thing at all.
Do you know anything about the Nazis, other than that they are bad?
They used Fraktur extensively before 1941 and it's closely associated with Nazi imagery. This is all explained in that link I posted.
I prefer to think of Lie groups, but it's rife in the Nazi propaganda of the 30s, official documents etc.
Fraktur would be apt as the oldest existing typeface. This administration and its supporters are so backward, it makes the 1600s look like mega-liberal ultra-modern science fiction. I’m just waiting for an executive order reintroducing cuneiform.
:-/
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No, Comic sans is too woke.
In seriousness: Comic Sans seems to be a good font for dyslexic people and helps them read.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Dropping Calibri was done precisely because it was associated with a reason like this, so you're entirely right.
> The general public doesn’t perceive serif typefaces as professional and authoritative, a priori, before prioritizing their use in formal settings. Instead, people first observe that government, academia, and corporate workplaces disproportionately use serif faces — or are trained to use them — and only then infer that serifs must mean professionalism and authority.
A difficult to stomach claim followed up with evidence that I think supports the opposite than the author intended: the font being in used in The Times of London, which is indeed authoritative and professional despite it being written on cheap paper.
On another note, I would throw up if I had to read legal documents all day in a sans-serif font.
I too stopped when I read that sentence. It's like saying someone can't tell the difference in professionalism between someone in a well tailored three piece suit vs. a sweater and jeans until they've been taught.
Ornateness itself is associated with being attentive to detail and likely more wealthy.
And even if you take them at their word, it's a distinction without a difference. Serif is known to be more professional.
But! As many have pointed out, and he does about TNR in the article: the default font for documents tends to suggest apathy. That argument against TNR is just as strong for Calibri. And there are far better looking, more functional fonts than either of these two.
Completely agree. This statement is immediately disproven by the authors following points. Eg pointing out that the supreme court, and other authoritative bodies exclusively use serif fonts...
Of course there is no "a priori", the general public doesn't know what a letter is "a priori" until they are taught. At the same time they are taught which fonts are formal and authoritative and which are not.
Everyone knows Comic Sans is not appropriate for a legal brief. No matter if that is "a priori" or not.
The font was used by the London Times until 1972.
And nobody thinks of the London Times when he sees Times New Roman. It’s just a default font many used in Word.
My first immediate mental connection from serif fonts is the signs in ancient Roman or Roman inspired monuments.
But I am southern European so it’s a relatively common sight, I wonder if Americans view them differently.
Using either Calibri or Times New Roman makes it look like you did not put any thought into your brand and chose the default in Microsoft Word. The State department probably has certain constraints (i.e. they likely have to choose one of the fonts that ships with Microsoft Word, and possibly a subset of that that also ships on macOS), but they could definitely choose better than the default.
I find the narrow serif typefaces such as Century Schoolbook a bit harder to read than ones with more normal spacing, and I think the US government should optimize for legibility and accessibility over style in routine communications. Palatino or Garamond would probably be my choices.
It’s the US government, and it could easily develop their own Liberty- or Freedom-type if the current administration wanted to leave their own mark.
That actually doesn't look horrible to my untrained eye. But the web page mentions accessibility, so I'm a little bit surprised it still exists.
Administered during none other than the first term of Trump, as mentioned in the article!
That just makes it incredibly silly. A good argument from the current administration would have been to pick Public Sans and argue: We paid good money to have a good, generic, license free font developed for the government, and the previous administration went with a font that will cost us money in terms of licensing (not sure how true that might be, but it's potentially true, if used outside Microsoft Word).
But the current Trump administration has a fun way of forgetting everything done during his first presidency. Even the smart choices.
I can't imagine how much all this rebranding is costing the US taxpayers.
(Note that this font predates Donald Trump's rise.)
All letters have a shiny 3D gold effect you can't turn off.
But we repeat ourselves.
Trump does use Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended as one of his main campaign fonts
I love Garamond as a style but it wouldn’t be my choice for legibility. Most renditions of Garamond have too little x-height.
The worst is Times New Roman text with Calibri page numbers. A sure sign somebody never learned how to use Microsoft Word.
Does Word not default to switching all typefaces - header, footer, etc.? If so, IMO that’s a bad design that violates the principle of least surprise.
Word works very well without surprises if you have learned how to use templating and proper headers - the semantics. Big if!
I will claim most people still just do selections and change font/weight.
So what is good design? Something which enforces our geeky ideas of a base font? Or something which let people easily do what they want to do and get work done?
Who should get the least amount of surprise?
Design is taste. Taste leads to principles. Principles makes things easy. Design is also compromise. Compromise is hard. Design is hard.
In fact best way to use Word is to write LaTeX in it and then save as .txt and run pdflatex. It is truly an amazing editor capable of great typesetting.
While it is possible to use "semantic" styling and page layouts and templates in Word, I would argue that Word owes its popularity to the fact that no user is surprised when they select text, change the font, it does not change it anywhere else.
It is one of the tools that popularised "WYSIWYG" as an approach, and as we know from many other tools, you lose something when you adopt a tool like that.
Now, I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system (but despite my huge respect for DEK, not Computer Modern family of fonts, even for mathematics), but many struggle with non-visual document entry: it is no surprise scientific community is the only one which standardized on it since inputting mathematics visually is a PITA.
This blog post has good fundamentals but ends up missing the mark. Is Times New Roman the perfect serif? Obviously not. Is it better than Calibri? Yes. Is “hey go back to how things were before” the simplest plan to execute? Also yes.
I personally would’ve liked Georgia since I imagine that’s similarly ubiquitous. People suggesting a custom typeface are out of their mind.
I took a close look at Georgia a few years back, and found myself surprised by how much I liked it.
Unfortunately both Georgia and Calibri are owned by Microsoft. You aren't going to find them easy to obtain for Linux for example; calling them "ubiquitous" is a mistake. Times New Roman is much older and easier to obtain.
Sure, Times New Roman is not a great font and comes with many negative connotations. But having official government communication look like a highschoolers first digital essay is even worse.
One thing that I don’t see much mentioned in the article or the comments is that for Word documents at least, Times New Roman may be a more portable default if you want the document to render identically across platforms. Not everyone has Word and Word proprietary fonts installed. Times is proprietary but available on Linux and MacOS and has a metric compatible substitute in the open source. Not sure about Calibre.
Yes, fonts can be bundled with a document but that might impose legal considerations as well as technical.
Using more "standard" fonts like Times New Roman might thus help fight against the word processing monopoly.
Most font licenses allow one to embed it into a document and then use that document as intended (to print, view...), but do not extend the license to the document recipient to extract the font and use it in newly created documents.
Using a common font like Times-compatible (metrics-wise) does help to an extent, but it can still fall off quickly with different ligatures, Unicode-combining character support etc. To be honest, I've never seen a Word document that looks exactly the same when opened on two Windows computers, even if those two computers should be roughly the same (corporate managed computers): I remember it used to be affected by print settings back in the day, but not sure what triggers it today.
Admittedly, I only use Windows computers and Word documents the last few days at work, as I've been in the Linux world for the last ~27 years otherwise.
> Most font licenses allow one to embed it into a document and then use that document as intended (to print, view...), but do not extend the license to the document recipient to extract the font and use it in newly created documents.
Yes, but most users wouldn't have a clue that is even an issue or why and how to do the embedding.
The argument here doesn't hold up for me.
The author states "The formality and authority of serif typefaces are largely socially constructed, and Times New Roman’s origin story and design constraints don’t express these qualities."
Yes, formality and authority are both, quite literally, social constructs. There is NO "natural" or "universal" formality or even authority without human social input.
I would also argue that, though most users cannot distinguish between a serif and sans serif font, they DO understand the serif fonts connote formality. eg in high school they were told to submit their papers in a serif font, or where they read a court opinion they also read serif (even if not the same font).
Sure, the State Department could have selected a different serif font. But a reversion to what was previously used seems completely normal.
Secondarily, I do think Calibri looks far too casual for the State Department. Its what I would use if I were quickly printing out my notes...
I agree with the critique on the "socially constructed" part of this article.
I'd also add that since it was literally The Times newspaper which created the font, and it was considered one of the papers of record for the time (no pun intended), the font was probably designed to have a sense of accuracy, truth and authority. In other words, the institution that created the font is very much part of the socially constructed aspect of this font. In this case giving it that air of authority via it's relationship with a newspaper of record.
> The Supreme Court’s […] opinions are typeset in Century Schoolbook from that family. Originating in the 19th century, the typeface features more expansive proportions, balanced stroke contrast, and an elegant form, exuding a far more assertive presence than Times New Roman. As the name suggests, it also began life as a textbook face, optimized for legibility. With proper typesetting, it reads far better than a haphazardly produced Word document set in Times New Roman.
The example document is typeset in Century Schoolbook, with the exception of "SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES", which is typeset in Times New Roman.
Well, the correct traditional font for State should really be Courier, because “Real America” used typewriters for all correspondence.
I was sort of thinking that these 'cables' ought really to be rendered in a teletypewriter font[1], but then having lower case would be anachronistic.
My teacher training (quite a few decades ago) suggested that for people with dyslexia you should set large quantities of text;
# right ragged so inter-word spacing constant;
# without hyphenation;
# with line spacing larger than word spacing;
# and broken up into sections with headings that describe the content of the section.
(As it happens I rarely need to use large chunks of text in basic maths teaching)
Documents in handwritten Jeffersonian calligraphy as a service.
As for Calibri, even Microsoft has moved on. They designed a successor font family for even better readability, and that happened before the State Department changed to Calibri. It also has serif variants.
Since TNR was designed for print and thus it seems they expected the ink to "bleed" and make the characters appear thicker than they would have been for the actual (leaded?) type face, was this taken into account when turning it into a digital type face?
From reading the article, it appears the answer is no. Has anyone made a TNR digital font that would account for how it would look if printed on 1900's newsprint?
It seems to me that you'd need to create something with a different name that supported more appropriate weight settings for screen and modern printing.
That said, as soon as you head down this path, more variance will occur and in the end you'll have something even more different than just accounting for what happens to the text on news paper print.
I might have suggested Roboto Serif or another OFL (or other open licensed) font face myself.
It's so frustrating. We already created a font for government communication, Public Sans. It looks great, it's very strong, neutral, readable, and respectable. Clearly a lot of effort went into making it accessible etc.
But we have to throw that away because the wrong party was in charge when it happened.
I'm so sick of this RETVRN crap happening seemingly everywhere. Yes, public buildings and typefaces and etc are uglier than they used to be. That's not because our aesthetic standards changed; it's because we financialized and technologized the entire economy and made it impossible to make an honest living as a plasterworker, typesetter, designer, etc. Those old buildings are beautiful because they were made by human beings who were allowed to develop their skills and aesthetic preferences outside of a completely efficientized, marketized, computerized system.
When we RETVRN by telling the machine to output different aesthetic preferences, it will emit a cheap simulacra of the beauty of the past. Which imo is infinitely more depressing than any of the modern crap we have now. Think Kentucky suburb McMansions, everywhere, forever. That's what these guys want.
I think flushing out Public Sans as well as creating a Serif variant (akin to Roboto Serif) would be a great move. It really needs to fill in a lot of the international characters for more broad use, but probably enough for general use in Govt documents.
That said, for print, I think serif is a better option.
Public Sans was created during Trump's first term tho.
Tangential but did not see it mentioned: Calibri must have been the Microsoft Word default at some point, at least in some parts of the world, because seeing it makes me think this is a Word document by a person that did not change the default font.
It absolutely was, from Office 2007 up to Office 365 where they switched to Aptos (2023-ish?)
The last paragraph nails it:
"Between the two, Times New Roman may be the lesser evil: it is more widely recognized, and it doesn’t clash with the official context as overtly as Calibri does. Still, [...] [t]here was no need to dress up a political gesture with faux-erudite claims or to lavish praise on a mediocre typeface."
Times may not be great, but the choice of Calibri was one step away from Comic Sans.
The serious piece, that wants to be taken seriously, is written in a serif font. That's my takeaway.
More precisely, Lyon Text Web.
At some point in the past I read that serif fonts are better for readability, as the supports at the base of the letters form a line and help the eye stay “on track”. This is never mentioned in TFA, so I assume it’s an urban legend? Personally I much prefer serif fonts when reading longer texts.
I was once taught that serif fonts are better in print, and sans-serif is better on a screen.
This was definitely true in the days before hi-res screens and good anti-aliasing, simply because the serifs get lost or become noise in lower-resolution settings. It’s probably less true today.
Of course, in terms of accessibility, there are any number of reasons why someone might prefer to read content in any number of typefaces. Certain typefaces are better for folks with dyslexia. Others may be better for certain folks with ADHD. People with low vision may just prefer a larger typeface.
We have these amazing machines we’ve invented that can display the same text in any number of different ways. At this point, it seems ridiculous to need to mandate a specific typeface for electronic usage. Sure, pick a well-regarded default, but if we want to mandate something, it should be that software provides tools to allow users to adjust textual elements of documents they are reading to suit their own needs.
Thanks for that. I thought the same as phantom784 and never updated my opinion for hi-res screens.
Related to choosing defaults: I like these tips for evaluating the legibility of a body typeface: https://prowebtype.com/selecting-body-text/ They mention one serif advantage, that "most serif typefaces are often ideal choices for reading text due to the noticeable strokes in their ascenders and descenders."
Are hi-res screens really that common-place? Resolutions have gone up, but so have screen sizes. I don't think Windows has seen the need to change their default DPI assumption from 96 in at least 20 years.
Yeah right. Times New Roman rendered using late 1990s software on monitors of that era certainly looked awful. These days text on screens can reasonably look like print.
As indicated in the article, serifs come from how original letters were carved into stones: they were an artifact of the tool in use.
Calligraphy developed similar traits by virtue of using a tool that produced an oval shape, and that you had to take care not to leave marks when pen/feather leaves the paper.
With the printing press, when we became able to put many books out, we did start also doing some research about what makes a book easy to read. Not least of because we could now easily put many characters on a single line and print it in the thousands.
Serif or cursive fonts were the default "content" type, and sans-serif was reserved for titles, shop names and other "short texts" as a more "modern", cleaner look: serifs do indeed allow one to more easily track a single long line of text, as you can more clearly see the "baseline" and not accidentally skip into the line above or below.
The next challenge is switching to the next line once you are done with the one you are on: while serifs help there too, the more important thing is the line length. Thus the famous (is it? :) 60-70 word limit for a line, and why you also see many web pages that only take like 20% of our modern 32"+ screens when browsers are made full screen.
Now, columnar layout as popularized by newspapers does not really come from the same desire: like TMR, it actually comes from the desire to fit more on one page to save on costs. With a wider column of text, all the last lines of paragraphs would average out at being half-empty, which is quite a bit with a wide column.
Sure, low resolution screens made sans-serif inevitable even for documents, but compare that with the earliest segmented LCD screens: font was what you could get rendered with as little electronics as possible :)
But today, serif fonts on high resolution screens (though there are still 32" Full HD screens which are not really high-resolution), or with the use of subpixel rendering (antialiasing is no match, as you can see by connecting a modern Mac to a non-high res screen) are a great choice if you want to limit the space you use and maintain great readability.
However, sans-serif fonts can work as well, and you may only need to go with a larger line spacing or shorter lines. The trick is to aim for a number of words/letters, and not "pixels", though modern CSS treats them as a scalable unit.
(Sorry for all of this being a bit rambly, just wanted to share a bit of the history along with how we can best apply it today)
> Typographic decisions should be made for a purpose. The Times of London chose the typeface Times New Roman to serve an audience looking for a quick read. Lawyers don’t want their audience to read fast and throw the document away; they want to maximize retention. Achieving that goal requires a different approach—different typefaces, different column widths, different writing conventions. Briefs are like books rather than newspapers. The most important piece of advice we can offer is this: read some good books and try to make your briefs more like them.
This is somewhat ironic as, if I'm not mistaken, it is written by lawyers and uses Times New Roman. (Does the 8th circuit want the reader to read fast and throw the document away?)
This document is typeset in New Century Schoolbook.
Hrm, interesting: I couldn't tell the difference.
You're not alone. My wife just assumes anything with serifs is Times New Roman, and she's a lot more normal than I am.
In between all the political bitching, no one has ever noted the fact that TNR will render correctly on basically any computer built in the last 30 years, including crusty UNIX workstations from the 90s.
This is mentioned in the post:
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia. Times New Roman was among the small set of typefaces bundled with early versions of Windows. It was also promoted as “web-safe,” meaning webmasters could reasonably assume it would render properly across platforms. In the early era of digitalization, choosing Times New Roman was often less a deliberate endorsement than a default imposed by limited options. Over time, the habit hardened into a standard, and institutions began to require it without much reflection, effectively borrowing their own authority to confer authority upon the typeface.
And Times is one of the three original Postscript core typefaces, along with Helvetica and Courier.
Best as I can tell, Windows 3.1 only really shipped with TNR and Courier. Weird that I don’t see Helvetica anywhere on that list.
MS went with Arial as a metrics-compatible substitute for Helvetica.
When I jumped into my GNU/Linux journey in late 90s, TNR was nowhere to be found, and I believe is only available through "ms-ttcorefonts" or whatever the package is called (IOW, Times New Roman actually comes from Microsoft).
I believe "Times" is the venerable standard, and has been present on Unices and Macs since... forever. Now, TNR is the same metrics-wise IIRC, and thus it was always a recommendation to use a fallback line of the form "Times New Roman, Times, serif".
It's a bit more complex than that! The font made by Monotype for The Times in 1931 was always called Times New Roman - it was, after all, a new Roman-style typeface for The Times.
Linotype then made their own variant simply called Times Roman, which differed mostly in having slanted serifs. The Times switched to this in 1982.
Both Monotype and Linotype produced digital versions, but Linotype's was initially slightly cheaper and thus more popular. In 1984, Adobe licensed it for inclusion in the core Postscript font set, and for a while became the "default" proportional serif typeface.
As WYSIWYG word processing and DTP took off, lots of knock-offs appeared, often called something like "Thymes", "London", or just plain "Roman". At some point, Monotype reduced their prices but by the late 80s Times New Roman was sadly neglected, seen almost as just another clone (after all, The Times itself was using the Linotype version by then!).
TNR became one of the core fonts in Truetype (initially an Apple/Microsoft collaboration, intended to break Adobe's stranglehold on computer typography), so was included by default in Windows 3.1 and Apple's System 7, leading to a resurgence in its popularity.
The Times then moved to Monotype's Times Modern (which features serifs that are even more slanted than Linotype's Times Roman) when they moved to tabloid format in the early 2000s. Monotype bought Linotype at around the same time, so all three fonts are now available from the same source at the same price.
I think this whole thing could be summed up by: this is an acceptable change made with wildly bad rationale.
Enemies of this administration have no idea how to pick their battles.
TLDR; Not only is the new choice of font unfortunate at best -- the formatting reveals another level of amateurishness so very unbefitting to the ernestness one might assume the sender of the letter wanting to convey. ;)
Basic typography: a paragraph starts with indentation if there is no blank line of any height after the previous one. And if it is not the first paragraph. In short: indent or put vertical space. Never both.
The old TNR version gets this right: if you put blank lines between paragraphs, you don't indent.
Then the date -- dangling god-knows-where, aligned with nothing.
In the old version the only formatting faux-pas is the alignment of 'Sincerely' and if you're picky the outdent of the seal in the top left is a tad much (outside optical axis).
Sadly, all that matters is it's free of any "DEI" connotations.
Why does the government not use PT Sans? A font created by Russian company ParaType to honor Tsar Peter the Great. Maybe that would finally convince Putin to make a peace deal and stop the war in Ukraine. At least PT Sans has great support for cyrillic script, which Trump will soon introduce because latin script is too woke.
I guess this is the thing preventing the release of the Epsteins files…
I imagine a 20-strong commission deciding whether to publish them in colibri or times new Roman.
Taxes at work
[flagged]
A few HN commenting guidelines might apply here:
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Eschew flamebait.
Arguably the OP borders on flamebait if that's the standard.
> Avoid generic tangents.
OP encapsulates an example of my comment, and is not a generic tangent.
> Omit internet tropes.
meme != trope
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Like the first point, all or nothing.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Point taken.
HN isn’t really for memes and quippy references. That’s the main reason you got downvoted, regardless of whether your substantive political point is a good one or not. The original comment matches the vibe of Reddit or Twitter a lot better than HN.
In that case, we'd better stop saying "Stallman was right"
Yes, we should, that would be great.
I bet the temporarily embarrassed millionaires/billionaires subset of HN would agree.
Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri. Here are our CEO Luc(as) de Groot’s thoughts on the matter:
Back to bad...
Deciding to ditch Calibri as a ‘wasteful diversity’ font is both hilarious and sad. I designed Calibri to make reading on modern computer screens easier, and in 2006 Microsoft chose it to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. Microsoft moved away from Times for good reasons. Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman create more visual disturbance. Although serif fonts work well on high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, the serifs can introduce unnecessary visual noise on typical office screens and be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.
Professional typography can be achieved with serif or sans serif fonts. However, that is not very easy with Times New Roman, a typeface older than the current president. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger-size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at a high quality.
Depending on the situation, fonts with serifs are often considered more classic, but they take more work to get right. While a skilled typographer can produce excellent results with Times New Roman, using the digital default version is not considered professional practice. This font only offers two weights, Regular and Bold, and the Bold version has a very different design that does not fit well. There are many better serif typefaces available. The digital version of Times New Roman, developed in the early days of computing, includes only minimal adjustments to letter pairs. This is particularly noticeable in all-capital words such as ‘CHICAGO’, where the spacing is inconsistent: the letters ‘HIC’ are tightly packed, while ‘CAG’ are spaced too far apart. By contrast, Calibri incorporates extensive spacing adjustments and language-specific refinements.
This decision takes the administration back to the past and back to bad.
(Microsoft could not rectify spacing issues in Times New Roman without altering the appearance of existing documents.)
Personally, I don't have a problem with them changing fonts. I personally think Times isn't a great choice for the reasons articulated in that statement (something open and more legible seems better to me), but I don't think it's a horrible choice either (it's standard and efficient with space). If the State Department wants to use a certain font, it's their prerogative.
What bothers me about the decision is their rationale. If they had just switched without any explanation, it would have seemed more judicious and politic, befitting a department of state. Even better would be to announce a thoughtful font choice with reasoning based on the font itself, without defaulting to some thoughtless option "because that's the way it was done in the past", and moving away from the existing choice "because DEI". As it is, in my opinion, they made themselves look like idiots by obsessing over fonts from the perspective of something like DEI, as if they are paranoid over any possible subatom of DEI infecting their presence. Rubio couldn't just make it about the font, so to speak, he had to get hung up on irrelevant details which makes him (in my opinion) look worse than anything he might be criticizing.
If you read the original announcement, my impression was that the choice of Calibri was because it it made state department functions easier as Calibri was the default in commonly used software (which seems kind of a poor reason to me, but one I can respect on practicality grounds). Legibility was also a concern (as it should be in my opinion). So something functional about Calibri (legibility) becomes "DEI" which is almost like cooties for this administration. Even if you disagree about the legibility of Calibri, denouncing legibility as a criterion per se seems absurd to me.
The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.
> The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.
That would require that the individuals involved actually have taste. Instead, as with everything else from this administration, it's a toot on their favourite dog whistle.
Nah, it's just the US reinventing the German Antiqua-Fraktur dispute from more than a century ago, where only Fraktur was appropriate for expressing serious Germanic ideas. A sans typeface is un-German... ahh, un-American!
Of course, a couple of decades after that, Fraktur was declared too Jewish and thoroughly eradicated, killing among other things the sole remaining independent strain of Latin-script handwriting (other than the dominant one invented as a book-copying aid by the Italian humanists, thus “italic”).
Donald Trump and, frankly, those around him in general are what poor people think rich people are like, but I wouldn’t exactly be one to claim that the design language used by the Biden Administration, like switching to Calibri, are very tasteful either. In leftist popular culture there is a love for modernist style architecture, minimalism, and a disrespect for building beautiful things that cost a lot of money or time. Rightwing circles have their own problems here too, to be fair.
But mandating Greco-Roman architecture by the Trump administration for federal buildings was actually a huge win for taste and design. Though unfortunately many people have become confused about what good design is or the reason to choose that architecture style can’t be overcome by their distaste for President Trump or his administration, which is very arguably deserved based on their conduct, speech, or mannerisms.
When we take away formality or tradition from governmental institutions you take away pieces of civilization and governmental authority that we, really can’t afford to lose. When government buildings are designed to look like shit, for example, one might come to believe the government is shit too (Democrat or Republican run) and the next thing you know you’re running red lights or flipping off the court because the document they sent you in the mail doesn’t look scary and official.
Secretary Duffy was right too about airline travel. Well, there is another to unpack there. Flying is lame compared to rail unless you’re flying across the country, and being shaken down by the TSA is undignified and thus people dress to meet the lack of dignity and respect the government shows them at the airline terminal.
But he’s not wrong.
When you put more care into how you dress you instinctively put more care into how you treat others and how you dress impacts how others treat you. I’m not suggesting a mandate or anything, but I’ll fly in a suit and tie easily and comfortably all day long over stained sweatpants and bringing my comfort dog on to the flight to annoy everyone. Dress how you want, but if you can’t take care of the basics I’m not sure where else you think society is going other than downhill in a fashion.
I prefer the protestant restrained aesthetic. Spiritual over material. Governmental buildings should be tastefully humble. It is a signal that the government is a servant of the people.
What’s an example that you’re thinking of? I think this can make sense - I mean if you have a town of 5,000 people and a government office there or something you probably don’t need a big, giant, building (unless that’s the message you’re trying to send). It’s also impractical from a cost-standpoint.
Federal buildings though should have gravitas and signify importance. If they don’t, and/or we think the government isn’t important, I’ll take my tax dollars back, thank you very much.
You can liken this to how western countries are leaving Christianity. Who can believe in God when you drive a Jeep to your mega church next to Costco and everyone is wearing sweatpants? (I’m not particularly spiritual but I see the problems here)
In Europe, Protestant churches are generally built much more humble than Catholic ones, because they are built with different philosophies in mind. (I am not familiar with American churches, so no comments there)
Similarly, I prefer government buildings to go for a similar route. It doesn’t mean that buildings have to ugly or small. But similar to Protestant churches it can humble, functional and elegant at the same time.
I do find it faintly ironic that Sort Of Greek Or Roman Or Something architecture was the villain in Ayn Rand's novel.
Living here in DC I don't especially mind Federalist Architecture, even though it does look like somebody saw some photos of Rome and Athens and kinda mashed them together. But I don't love insisting that a 19th century view of the second century BC must forevermore be the only possible taste.
If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it. It’s not necessarily about a 19th century view of 2nd century BC architectural concepts (which itself is a bit of a farce of a comment) but more so about anchoring the longevity and legitimacy of governmental institutions to a historical heritage.
Similarly I wouldn’t recommend, say, that the Afghani people or Mongolia for example build federalist or Greco-Roman style architecture for their government buildings as it wouldn’t make much sense and wouldn’t have any basis in their history.
There’s also some science to it and we know the asymmetrical buildings and buildings which make entrances and other expected features hard to find cause measurable levels of stress and anxiety in the observer. Hostile architecture.
I don’t mind the overall point of your argument, but it’s funny to see a claim that Americans have more reason to use Greco-Roman architecture than a Middle Eastern country. Classical Greek art actually took a lot of influence from the Middle East, and I believe Alexander actually reached te area around Afghanistan (and a Hellenistic kingdom existed there for a while), unlike America.
Well I wouldn’t argue Afghanistan is part of the Middle East culturally or geographically, but even if you did want to argue that, Alexander came and conquered that area for a little bit and then left. It wasn’t ever really culturally Greek.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom
But the main point isn’t whether afghanistan is Greek; it’s not of course. The main point is that it’s funny to hear an American argue that the US has more of a claim on Greek architecture than Afghanistan.
Because its not real. He is completely right its a 19th century cargo cult of classicism. Its a modern anachronistic mashup of various old styles, I can bet if you asked an actual Greek or Roman era expert they will say these buildings combine elements 500 600 years apart.
I like how it looks but its also lazy and cheesy, I can't blame people who think we need more styles.
You’re missing the point. The styles aren’t meant to be 1-1 matches of Greek or Roman architecture, they’re rather good attempts at building and designing our governments buildings which that they harken to where our legal and cultural traditions hail from. That’s why the Capitol looks the way it does.
I’m not sure how that’s lazy or cheesy. I’m certainly open minded to other styles but they need to be rooted in western civilization. Otherwise you wind up with silly things like replicas of the Eiffel Tower in weirdly designed and inappropriate little French mockup towns, or you wind up with the lowest common denominator - Wal-Mart and strip malls.
Its literally in the name, neoclassicism. All I am saying is why did you say its "farcical" that its a modern view of an old style?
I think it is a lazy copy paste of old tropes. I know because I can see these tendencies in myself too. I like some old styles and if I had my way I could keep listening to newer bands that replicate this style my whole life. But the thing is, without the original inspirational fire behind the style its just a nice copy.
I see you had dissed on brutalism some time before, I really don't understand why. I feel at least in some ways brutalism is a non-pastiche manner achieves things like the imposing sense of grandeur and power of classical architecture.
> If you have another architectural style for western civilization which bases its institutions on Greece and Rome, I’d be interested in learning more about it.
Carolingian architecture didn't just cargo cult, they literally pilfered Roman columns and integrated them into anachronistic designs. If I recall my art history class correctly, the columns from Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel were "repurposed" (looted) from a Roman temple. [1]
This is also an example of architectural skeuomorphism: designing something in a way reminiscent of an older thing, to borrow the associations people have with it. In this case, Roman authority.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatine_Chapel,_Aachen#/media...
Yea great example and really cool building. Too bad we don’t build nice things anymore. It’s a shame our oligarch class is so uncultured and stupid.
As an European, seeing modern American airports with Greco-Roman architecture makes the environment tacky as hell. As something from Las Vegas.
As an American I think they’re tacky too. That style of architecture for an airport doesn’t make sense really. Well. I bet it could be pulled off. But the “architects” designing the airports are the same people designing Greco-Roman architecture on disfigured American McMansions.
Art Decó, on the other hand, would look pretty Americana and elegant for your buildings. It's basically the classical American city depiction for Europeans (noir movies, Superman, old comic strips from newspapers...)
Yea I don’t mind Art Deco at all. I think the car company Cadillac, which is based in the Detroit area, which is in my mind where I think of as the home of that style (even if it’s not), started including Art Deco as part of their design language and I think it’s a good use.
The leftists think trump is a dictator. The right thinks trump is an irresponsibly spending warmonger. And everyone thinks the entire damn government is rife with all sorts of bad things.
What Trump and Friends(TM) are doing here is basically stylizing the government to mimic things people associate with legitimacy since that's in short supply to the government these days. Serif fonts that harken back to when documents were for serious things and handwriting was the less formal format. Greco-roman government buildings and other "antique-ish" styles that subtly imply the legitimacy of the institution therein always has been and always will be.
Likewise I would bet a lot of money that over the next 20yr we don't see many/any 1920s-60s government buildings renovated to remove that aesthetic because people associate those decades with government that seemingly was functional.
Your last paragraph has it totally backwards. The government puts on this huge stupid show of looking big and important and fancy in order to distance itself from the fact that at the end of the day it's an organization that's fairly capriciously deploying violence.
Well, to encapsulate your point here - you don’t believe in the legitimacy of government so of course any attempt by the government to legitimize itself you’d find disagreeable. Is that right?
Legitimacy isn't a binary, especially not across a nation of many millions.
Sure but now I don’t know what you’re talking about or what point you’re trying to make.
Projecting an image of legitimacy behooves the government because it makes everything they do (and there is almost always someone who loses dearly whenever the government does something) that much less likely to be resisted. Government is always pushing at the limits of its authority or at least going right up to them so just "seeming" a little more legitimate in the minds of as many people as possible pays back because at the margin that turns into a bunch of fights you don't have to fight, all the work you don't have to do to justify your actions, the appeals that aren't filed, etc, etc.
Think about how HN just takes whatever the EPA says at face value vs scrutinizing ICE. Every office, department, etc, etc, aspires to get the EPA treatment from as much of society as possible. Acting the part is part is part of that.
Reactionaryism and vice signaling are par for the course for this administration. This was an opportunity for both, and they took it.
The reasoning is so absurd I find myself wondering whether the alleged rationales are real or if the political people said "yeah, this recommendation is fine we'll do it but you need to come up with a way to tie it into my talking points"
Like are we switching fonts because DEI or are we switching fonts because fonts and pretending it's DEI?
Verdana is more readable on low-resolution screens than Calibri. I never understood why they didn’t use the former, which already existed, and just extended its character repertoire a bit.
Tbh they should have just mandated it to Aptos for new communications, with TNR and Calibri acceptable for old devices that have not been updated yet. Having people spend effort overriding the default font on their machine is frankly a waste of taxpayer dollars.
repost ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46229533
Honest question: do you have any financial stake in this? I'm assuming you don't get paid per-document or whatever but do you have any sort of income dependent on Microsoft shipping your font with outlook (whether as the default font or not)?
I don't mean to accuse you of anything but to 99% of the population this is a complete nothingburger and it looks ridiculous that anybody would care (this cuts both ways btw I also think Rubio is being a cringy idiot). I just don't understand what the big deal is here and I really cannot understand why anybody (on either "side") cares.
I am farsighted, which worsens with each passing year. While I get around this online by making full use of browser options to enlarge text for me, etc, because everyone uses different fonts anyway, I can also kinda see the perspective shift to someone looking at this font switch as being just one of many parts of "an attack" on accessibility by the current administration. Their general attitude seems to be that if the change was made in the past to accommodate a particular group of people, in this case, those with poorer eyesight/trouble reading things on screens which were starting to inundate our lives at the time, then it's got to go because it somehow disrupts their status quo.
It's a silly stance for insecure men, which is why the brief uproar this change caused is so wildly ridiculous and adds to the pile of evidence illustrating that they are not serious leaders.
The Department of State switching to a less accessible font is not a nothing burger to all the people who now have more difficulty reading the documents. It reinforces the tone of international relations being put forward by the administration to the detriment of everyone in the country.
You clearly did not read the OP and it shows.
Fyi since your account is new. It’s a faux pas here to have a “company” account.
That’s not true. Sincere engagement is what people expect. A copy-and-paste of a statement is less desirable than, say, Lucas himself coming to post his thoughts, but it is still valuable and not a faux pas. The spirit of HN is: does the post or comment add something of value?
We understand the point you are making. However, it was important for us to contribute to the discussion (not only on HN) about one of our fonts, too. We can’t provide the full picture of the story, but we can at least offer our (typographical) perspective, which could be helpful. Some people have asked about us: we are a small, independent type design studio. And we have no negative or positive financial outcome from this headline. However, we do benefit from free publicity. By the way, we wish you a good 2026 from Berlin!
Says who? I’ve never heard that, and am not even close to new.
It's heavily implied through social observation here on the site. Just like how "memes and quippy references" are frowned upon, which you immediately pointed out in a separate comment. Since you're not new, you just outed yourself as someone who has just enough social awareness to understand a small subset of what's implicitly accepted here, but you haven't fully developed the mental capacity for implications more than one layer deep.
SQLite would like to have a word...
The company may well consist of only the poster himself.
Not so, according to their website.
This was a terrific, reasonable take on this “controversy”. I have to admit that the correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office. Imagine reading the Warren Commission report set in that. The author seems to settle on the consensus that surrounded TNR before this exchange made the news. It’s banal. At times it signals to its original objectives (e.g., Prof. Dr. style websites [1]). But still banal more often than not.
I love Univers. But I don’t think there’s anyone in public office with enough influence and swagger to ever enforce it. At the same time I have a bad feeling about the attention that decisions like this draw and what it may lead to. The article does a great job at portraying the general incompetence in both parties.
I can imagine Beto O’Rourke somewhere dreaming about styling all government communiqués like a page out of Ray Gun. Planning his come back. To set anything issued from Ted Cruz’s office in Zapf Dingbats. War.
[1]: https://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/
The Warren Commission report was set in Century Schoolbook, the Supreme Court's typeface of choice. The appendices are photo reproductions of originals produced on typewriters, so they are in something monospaced.
You can see for yourself. They certainly would not have used Times New Roman.
But I suppose interoffice memoranda are meant to be skimmed, not read, so TNR or Calibri are both fine.
I didn’t mean to suggest that they would’ve. I just named a government document with significant gravity behind it to affect a point similar to the author’s:
> There’s nothing inherently wrong with this style, but one would hardly want an official document or legal contract to appear “warm and soft.”
Consider the response I gave to the other child comment on this thread referring to a different document as a revision if that suits you. [1]
I’m sorry. I don’t know of nor do I have the wherewithal to find any correspondence from the State Department to bolster my argument that “humanist fonts” are not always suited to the tenor of all government correspondence. Oddly, none of the press releases on state.gov are available in PDF as far as I can tell.
Wait.
At least imagine this!
> The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies. As such, I have determined that their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.
<https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...>
In “Carlito”!
It’s already in “Open Sans”, which looks thinner and may have a taller X-height. What do you think of it? Not quite “warm”; certainly “soft”, I think. Should I feel concerned about this news? Or just alright?
Anodyne. That’s the way the words start to look after some time when set like this. How far away is that feeling from “banal”?
[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/SAP-SJ...
If the US wants a truly "traditional" typeface, the choice would be Caslon.
Caslon was used to print the first 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence. Old Caslon was used for Thomas Paine's Common Sense. It was also a favorite of printers throughout the US including Benjamin Franklin.
I also never really liked Calibri for professional stuff. Maybe I'm just a victim of conditionig, but Calibri always had a bit of a "web page" vibe, not official document vibe.
I personally think that Computer Modern/Latin Modern from LaTeX looks a lot better than Times New Roman. I wish they'd standardize on that but it might not be included in Microsoft Office, so I guess Times New Roman it is.
Before the recent post on Public Sans, I was unaware of the typeface myself... I think it's absolutely beautiful myself, I wish it were more complete for use outside US contexts. I like it a bit better than Robot Sans, which has been my go to for web content for about a decade.
That said, I feel the issues come to play with the differences between what is seen on a screen and what persists in physical print. I do wish they'd picked a better font in both cases... My own assumption about the Calibri switch was that it was the MS Office default, meaning one less step, but I guess that default itself has changed since.
My only preference would be for a typeface that has a free/open license for broad usage as a default. Also, given the nature of printed documents would probably lean towards at least some serifs to make reading easier, especially to better distinguish some of the more problematic characters.
> correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office
In general this is the way I feel about anything written in a Microsoft-, Apple-, or Ubuntu-supplied typeface. If you stick to system fonts you the pinnacle of embodiment of apathy in my book.
Have some backbone, browse through Google fonts, pick something that represents your organization and stick with it.
Even if you are a leasing office, pick a good font. That will make me more likely to lease from you because your attention to typography conveys to me that you will also be attentive to details in building maintainence. If you communicate in Times New Roman and Arial it tells me that you probably are apathetic about mold in the walls and electrical code as well.
While I appreciate nice typography like not many do (I decide on what editions of a book — especially classics — to get based on the typography and overall layout), I also appreciate that I may be easily swayed by good typography and land on a crappy outcome (I have several very lousy books that were done really well typographically :)).
So I'd never use that as a metric: yes, I care about typography, and if the content of the message is equivalent, I'll pick the one done better. But I do not expect everyone else to put as much weight on it.
That's... certainly an opinion.
If it's legible, the terms of a lease are way more important than the typeface. Anyone wasting time on the typeface of the contract would worry me more than comfort me with regard to knowing what's important.
Any typefaces you’d recommend?
For serious government communications? Libertinus Serif, Vollkorn, Ibarra Real Nova, Baskerville, Libre Baskerville
I'm sorry, you can't argue the font choice signals banality in the same article in which you argue that readers aren't sophisticated enough on font choice to catch that serifs are supposed to signal professionalism.
Why not? One quality is inherent, the other inherited. The typeface was developed with banality in mind and presumably become popular because of its utility in this respect. The ensuing popularity in word processors and on the Web likely lead to the idea that it’s more professional than others.
Again, the author:
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia.
"The typeface was developed with banality in mind..."
That's completely wrong. Times New Roman was designed for legibility at small sizes, in narrow columns, on absorbent newsprint, printed at high speed. That is, it was designed explicitly for a very specific purpose, which it fills admirably.
None of that should be taken as any kind of comment on the current brouhaha.
I hate for us to have to make it clear that any claim in favor of the typeface’s suitability should not be interpreted as direct support for those responsible for re-instituting it. This isn’t an admonishment, but a lament I hope you may share.
While TNR wasn’t designed to evoke banality in its less desirable connotations I do think the way that you’re describing it match sensibilities that the word “banal” can also carry; Ordinary, commonplace. I admit—it’s a stretch I’m taking. But how far from banal is the utilitarian?
Because font choice outside of large strokes like fantasy fonts is meaningless.
All of this exposition only works if people are literate in typography enough to get it. Most people can't even understand literalist art, say nothing about the symbolism of typography.
It's like how the Victorians invented a whole meaning categorization to different species of flowers and then acted like it was universal law. It's a secret in-crowd code. It has no inherent meaning.
Could you clarify what you mean by “meaningless”?
How you can conceive a literate society that is not affected by type. The fact that general literacy is apparently declining is beside the point but we remain surrounded by letters and words, the shape of which determine how we comprehend what they point out. Planes, signs, screens depend on font choice to be effective. Newspapers and memoranda too.
The degrees may vary but the significance of a font choice just can’t be as simple as you make it seem. Just only to the extent of the value the public ascribes to the type-bearing object. Granted, we may be assigning too much to US State Department documents. But who’s to say?
He can, he did, and we're all here arguing about it, which somehow delights me.
I love Univers as well, but the _Q_ is just _too_ weird by most folks perceptions.
Q, more than any other glyph, is the letter that never fails to look weird in every typeface when I spend too much time looking at it/re-re-re-re-designing it.
What do you think about Gerstner-Programm?
https://forgotten-shapes.com/gerstner-programm/gerstnerprogr...
It's fine, but I'm not seeing that it has the wonderful width and breadth and depth of variations which Univers is noted for:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5affbc175417fc...
Not sure why Beto is catching strays, but I can tell you're from Texas, heh.
I suppose the administration's typo-ridden nonsense formatted with a serif-font MIGHT appear more professional. It's certainly possible, not impossible.
Right. Now imagine something like this:
> In response, based upon the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the President recognized that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations. The President directed the Department of War to conduct operations against them pursuant to the law of armed conflict. The United States has now reached a critical point where we must use force in self-defense and defense of others against the ongoing attacks by these designated terrorist organizations.
<https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/SAP-SJ...>
In “Carlito”!
<https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Carlito>
Wow, the sample shows that 15 point Calibri on official government documents was truly awful. In software when we make a mistake that causes some production issue the best first action is almost always to roll back. Maybe 14 pt TNR isn't the best, but rolling back to it is a defensible decision.
The article is completely self-defeating and unintentionally funny.
"Look at this remarkably fugly downgrade. Here's why The Science says it's superior."
That's a pretty good summary of the entire article :)
Shouldn't public documents by the government use a free and libre font? In fact, the mentioned Public Sans developed by the US federal government seems to be a great option, as it actually distinguishes the lowercase l and the uppercase I, something that, ironically, all suggested sans-serif alternatives fail to do.
Public Sans seems like a good candidate for a new "web safe" font. Perhaps one new web safe font per twenty five years is not too much. From there, it can percolate to the word processor and pdfs, and finally: government standard for government workers who just want to open their word processor and get to work, where sourcing even a free font to meet standard is just a snag to annoy.
Times New Roman is available at no cost under the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web. (Microsoft no longer distributes this, but the license allows redistribution and redistribution is popular). AFAIK, Apple explicitly licenses the fonts and most open source OS distributions have a package for these fonts.
It's not libre, but font copyright is weird anyway, and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyright.
and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyright
It's worth noting that most if not all works created by the government are in the public domain. There are some exceptions but PD is the default.
Further, Public Sans was developed by the US govt under the first Trump administration and appears to be an excellent font. That seems to be a wise choice against TNR or Calibri on multiple angles.
You would hope, but changing this font isn't about making anything better, it's that Calibre was apparently a DEI font and had to go. I can't imagine these people thinking highly of an open source (Oooh communism) font that's also designed with accessibility in mind.
Are we still doing the communism thing? I thought the bogeyman is socialism now.
In any case, it would be nice to have some consistency across the government, and if they want to make a change, at least take prior works into account like what the Congress or SCOTUS are doing in their official texts.
"Instead, people first observe that government, academia, and corporate workplaces disproportionately use serif faces — or are trained to use them — and only then infer that serifs must mean professionalism and authority."
This is an aside, but many people would benefit from appreciating what is observed here, because it impacts an enormous numbers of preferences and perceptions people hold.
A good example is 24 FPS in cinema, which we generally attribute to high quality movies, baked in our value system via a technical/financial limit imposed a century ago. If a movie is presented any higher it gets mentally mapped with soap operas and low quality sitcoms, and it is disorienting to people. The Hobbit tried upping to 48FPS and it was described as "resembling low-budget video like American daytime soap operas rather than cinematic film". Higher quality TV dramas shoot at 24 FPS, intentionally forcing the 3:2 pulldown for TV presentation to signal "no, compare me to a movie not those other TV shows".
There are many areas in our life where we're judging things by this signalling criteria, and not by any real objective measure, yet people will often invent objective measures to assuage themselves that their values aren't so easily manipulated. Bring up 24FPS being a baked in limitation rather than some pinnacle of film making and many will start contriving why no, they actually prefer it because... It's all just noise.
The correct typeface for the current U.S. administration would of course be Comic Sans or perhaps Comic Serif for double-super-serious documents.
And Wingdings for classified material!
Of course, just as the highlight tool is used for redaction, wingdings is used for encryption!
Not Cyrillic?
> Comic Serif
https://www.hvdfonts.com/fonts/hvd-comic-serif
Fraktur.
> Martin Bormann issued a circular (the "normal type decree") to all public offices which declared Fraktur (and its corollary, the Sütterlin-based handwriting) to be Judenlettern (Jewish letters) and prohibited their further use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur
I don't know if you meant to invoke pro/anti-Nazi associations with this typeface but it's unfortunate that such a fantastic lettering style carries around a poisonous historical connotation.
I am aware (of the Judenlettern decree). The reference to exactly this was intentional.
(Edit to make this really obvious: The joke here is that "fraktur = nazis" became such a meme that the nazis themselves were annoyed by it and forbade its use, but this is exactly the kind of thing the present administration would either be unaware of or simply ignore and then use fraktur intentionally to pander to neo-nazis.)
Thanks for spelling it out. I had a feeling that's the point you were making, but that level of subtlety has a hard time getting through, even on highbrow hn. Hence I like to err on the side of spelling things out, especially since I'm much more often a reader than a writer.
Why is that poisonous? It sounds like Fraktur was rejected by Nazi Germany which isn’t a bad thing at all.
Do you know anything about the Nazis, other than that they are bad?
They used Fraktur extensively before 1941 and it's closely associated with Nazi imagery. This is all explained in that link I posted.
I prefer to think of Lie groups, but it's rife in the Nazi propaganda of the 30s, official documents etc.
Fraktur would be apt as the oldest existing typeface. This administration and its supporters are so backward, it makes the 1600s look like mega-liberal ultra-modern science fiction. I’m just waiting for an executive order reintroducing cuneiform.
:-/
No, Comic sans is too woke.
In seriousness: Comic Sans seems to be a good font for dyslexic people and helps them read.
https://dyslexichelp.org/why-is-comic-sans-good-for-dyslexia...
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Dropping Calibri was done precisely because it was associated with a reason like this, so you're entirely right.
> The general public doesn’t perceive serif typefaces as professional and authoritative, a priori, before prioritizing their use in formal settings. Instead, people first observe that government, academia, and corporate workplaces disproportionately use serif faces — or are trained to use them — and only then infer that serifs must mean professionalism and authority.
A difficult to stomach claim followed up with evidence that I think supports the opposite than the author intended: the font being in used in The Times of London, which is indeed authoritative and professional despite it being written on cheap paper.
On another note, I would throw up if I had to read legal documents all day in a sans-serif font.
I too stopped when I read that sentence. It's like saying someone can't tell the difference in professionalism between someone in a well tailored three piece suit vs. a sweater and jeans until they've been taught.
Ornateness itself is associated with being attentive to detail and likely more wealthy.
And even if you take them at their word, it's a distinction without a difference. Serif is known to be more professional.
But! As many have pointed out, and he does about TNR in the article: the default font for documents tends to suggest apathy. That argument against TNR is just as strong for Calibri. And there are far better looking, more functional fonts than either of these two.
Completely agree. This statement is immediately disproven by the authors following points. Eg pointing out that the supreme court, and other authoritative bodies exclusively use serif fonts...
Of course there is no "a priori", the general public doesn't know what a letter is "a priori" until they are taught. At the same time they are taught which fonts are formal and authoritative and which are not.
Everyone knows Comic Sans is not appropriate for a legal brief. No matter if that is "a priori" or not.
The font was used by the London Times until 1972.
And nobody thinks of the London Times when he sees Times New Roman. It’s just a default font many used in Word.
My first immediate mental connection from serif fonts is the signs in ancient Roman or Roman inspired monuments.
But I am southern European so it’s a relatively common sight, I wonder if Americans view them differently.
Using either Calibri or Times New Roman makes it look like you did not put any thought into your brand and chose the default in Microsoft Word. The State department probably has certain constraints (i.e. they likely have to choose one of the fonts that ships with Microsoft Word, and possibly a subset of that that also ships on macOS), but they could definitely choose better than the default.
I find the narrow serif typefaces such as Century Schoolbook a bit harder to read than ones with more normal spacing, and I think the US government should optimize for legibility and accessibility over style in routine communications. Palatino or Garamond would probably be my choices.
It’s the US government, and it could easily develop their own Liberty- or Freedom-type if the current administration wanted to leave their own mark.
https://public-sans.digital.gov/
That actually doesn't look horrible to my untrained eye. But the web page mentions accessibility, so I'm a little bit surprised it still exists.
Administered during none other than the first term of Trump, as mentioned in the article!
That just makes it incredibly silly. A good argument from the current administration would have been to pick Public Sans and argue: We paid good money to have a good, generic, license free font developed for the government, and the previous administration went with a font that will cost us money in terms of licensing (not sure how true that might be, but it's potentially true, if used outside Microsoft Word).
But the current Trump administration has a fun way of forgetting everything done during his first presidency. Even the smart choices.
I can't imagine how much all this rebranding is costing the US taxpayers.
Trump Grotesque.
You joke, but...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Mediaeval
(Note that this font predates Donald Trump's rise.)
All letters have a shiny 3D gold effect you can't turn off.
But we repeat ourselves.
Trump does use Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended as one of his main campaign fonts
I love Garamond as a style but it wouldn’t be my choice for legibility. Most renditions of Garamond have too little x-height.
The worst is Times New Roman text with Calibri page numbers. A sure sign somebody never learned how to use Microsoft Word.
Does Word not default to switching all typefaces - header, footer, etc.? If so, IMO that’s a bad design that violates the principle of least surprise.
Word works very well without surprises if you have learned how to use templating and proper headers - the semantics. Big if!
I will claim most people still just do selections and change font/weight.
So what is good design? Something which enforces our geeky ideas of a base font? Or something which let people easily do what they want to do and get work done? Who should get the least amount of surprise?
Design is taste. Taste leads to principles. Principles makes things easy. Design is also compromise. Compromise is hard. Design is hard.
In fact best way to use Word is to write LaTeX in it and then save as .txt and run pdflatex. It is truly an amazing editor capable of great typesetting.
While it is possible to use "semantic" styling and page layouts and templates in Word, I would argue that Word owes its popularity to the fact that no user is surprised when they select text, change the font, it does not change it anywhere else.
It is one of the tools that popularised "WYSIWYG" as an approach, and as we know from many other tools, you lose something when you adopt a tool like that.
Now, I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system (but despite my huge respect for DEK, not Computer Modern family of fonts, even for mathematics), but many struggle with non-visual document entry: it is no surprise scientific community is the only one which standardized on it since inputting mathematics visually is a PITA.
This blog post has good fundamentals but ends up missing the mark. Is Times New Roman the perfect serif? Obviously not. Is it better than Calibri? Yes. Is “hey go back to how things were before” the simplest plan to execute? Also yes.
I personally would’ve liked Georgia since I imagine that’s similarly ubiquitous. People suggesting a custom typeface are out of their mind.
I took a close look at Georgia a few years back, and found myself surprised by how much I liked it.
Unfortunately both Georgia and Calibri are owned by Microsoft. You aren't going to find them easy to obtain for Linux for example; calling them "ubiquitous" is a mistake. Times New Roman is much older and easier to obtain.
Sure, Times New Roman is not a great font and comes with many negative connotations. But having official government communication look like a highschoolers first digital essay is even worse.
The obvious solution is doing what many large companies, as well as other governments are doing. Create your own Font. (e.g. https://styleguide.bundesregierung.de/sg-de/basiselemente/sc... https://www.ibm.com/plex/)
One thing that I don’t see much mentioned in the article or the comments is that for Word documents at least, Times New Roman may be a more portable default if you want the document to render identically across platforms. Not everyone has Word and Word proprietary fonts installed. Times is proprietary but available on Linux and MacOS and has a metric compatible substitute in the open source. Not sure about Calibre.
Yes, fonts can be bundled with a document but that might impose legal considerations as well as technical.
Using more "standard" fonts like Times New Roman might thus help fight against the word processing monopoly.
Most font licenses allow one to embed it into a document and then use that document as intended (to print, view...), but do not extend the license to the document recipient to extract the font and use it in newly created documents.
Using a common font like Times-compatible (metrics-wise) does help to an extent, but it can still fall off quickly with different ligatures, Unicode-combining character support etc. To be honest, I've never seen a Word document that looks exactly the same when opened on two Windows computers, even if those two computers should be roughly the same (corporate managed computers): I remember it used to be affected by print settings back in the day, but not sure what triggers it today.
Admittedly, I only use Windows computers and Word documents the last few days at work, as I've been in the Linux world for the last ~27 years otherwise.
> Most font licenses allow one to embed it into a document and then use that document as intended (to print, view...), but do not extend the license to the document recipient to extract the font and use it in newly created documents.
Yes, but most users wouldn't have a clue that is even an issue or why and how to do the embedding.
The argument here doesn't hold up for me.
The author states "The formality and authority of serif typefaces are largely socially constructed, and Times New Roman’s origin story and design constraints don’t express these qualities."
Yes, formality and authority are both, quite literally, social constructs. There is NO "natural" or "universal" formality or even authority without human social input.
I would also argue that, though most users cannot distinguish between a serif and sans serif font, they DO understand the serif fonts connote formality. eg in high school they were told to submit their papers in a serif font, or where they read a court opinion they also read serif (even if not the same font).
Sure, the State Department could have selected a different serif font. But a reversion to what was previously used seems completely normal.
Secondarily, I do think Calibri looks far too casual for the State Department. Its what I would use if I were quickly printing out my notes...
I agree with the critique on the "socially constructed" part of this article.
I'd also add that since it was literally The Times newspaper which created the font, and it was considered one of the papers of record for the time (no pun intended), the font was probably designed to have a sense of accuracy, truth and authority. In other words, the institution that created the font is very much part of the socially constructed aspect of this font. In this case giving it that air of authority via it's relationship with a newspaper of record.
> The Supreme Court’s […] opinions are typeset in Century Schoolbook from that family. Originating in the 19th century, the typeface features more expansive proportions, balanced stroke contrast, and an elegant form, exuding a far more assertive presence than Times New Roman. As the name suggests, it also began life as a textbook face, optimized for legibility. With proper typesetting, it reads far better than a haphazardly produced Word document set in Times New Roman.
The example document is typeset in Century Schoolbook, with the exception of "SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES", which is typeset in Times New Roman.
Well, the correct traditional font for State should really be Courier, because “Real America” used typewriters for all correspondence.
I was sort of thinking that these 'cables' ought really to be rendered in a teletypewriter font[1], but then having lower case would be anachronistic.
My teacher training (quite a few decades ago) suggested that for people with dyslexia you should set large quantities of text;
# right ragged so inter-word spacing constant;
# without hyphenation;
# with line spacing larger than word spacing;
# and broken up into sections with headings that describe the content of the section.
(As it happens I rarely need to use large chunks of text in basic maths teaching)
[1] https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2021/04... Kennan's notorious cable from 1946 looks as if it would have severe consequences to me.
Documents in handwritten Jeffersonian calligraphy as a service.
As for Calibri, even Microsoft has moved on. They designed a successor font family for even better readability, and that happened before the State Department changed to Calibri. It also has serif variants.
https://microsoft.design/articles/a-change-of-typeface-micro...
No knock on Calibri, which I admire.
(edited to put the link on its own line.)
This was discussed in the article.
Since TNR was designed for print and thus it seems they expected the ink to "bleed" and make the characters appear thicker than they would have been for the actual (leaded?) type face, was this taken into account when turning it into a digital type face?
From reading the article, it appears the answer is no. Has anyone made a TNR digital font that would account for how it would look if printed on 1900's newsprint?
It seems to me that you'd need to create something with a different name that supported more appropriate weight settings for screen and modern printing.
That said, as soon as you head down this path, more variance will occur and in the end you'll have something even more different than just accounting for what happens to the text on news paper print.
I might have suggested Roboto Serif or another OFL (or other open licensed) font face myself.
It's so frustrating. We already created a font for government communication, Public Sans. It looks great, it's very strong, neutral, readable, and respectable. Clearly a lot of effort went into making it accessible etc.
But we have to throw that away because the wrong party was in charge when it happened.
https://public-sans.digital.gov/
I'm so sick of this RETVRN crap happening seemingly everywhere. Yes, public buildings and typefaces and etc are uglier than they used to be. That's not because our aesthetic standards changed; it's because we financialized and technologized the entire economy and made it impossible to make an honest living as a plasterworker, typesetter, designer, etc. Those old buildings are beautiful because they were made by human beings who were allowed to develop their skills and aesthetic preferences outside of a completely efficientized, marketized, computerized system.
When we RETVRN by telling the machine to output different aesthetic preferences, it will emit a cheap simulacra of the beauty of the past. Which imo is infinitely more depressing than any of the modern crap we have now. Think Kentucky suburb McMansions, everywhere, forever. That's what these guys want.
I think flushing out Public Sans as well as creating a Serif variant (akin to Roboto Serif) would be a great move. It really needs to fill in a lot of the international characters for more broad use, but probably enough for general use in Govt documents.
That said, for print, I think serif is a better option.
Public Sans was created during Trump's first term tho.
Tangential but did not see it mentioned: Calibri must have been the Microsoft Word default at some point, at least in some parts of the world, because seeing it makes me think this is a Word document by a person that did not change the default font.
It absolutely was, from Office 2007 up to Office 365 where they switched to Aptos (2023-ish?)
The last paragraph nails it:
"Between the two, Times New Roman may be the lesser evil: it is more widely recognized, and it doesn’t clash with the official context as overtly as Calibri does. Still, [...] [t]here was no need to dress up a political gesture with faux-erudite claims or to lavish praise on a mediocre typeface."
Times may not be great, but the choice of Calibri was one step away from Comic Sans.
The serious piece, that wants to be taken seriously, is written in a serif font. That's my takeaway.
More precisely, Lyon Text Web.
At some point in the past I read that serif fonts are better for readability, as the supports at the base of the letters form a line and help the eye stay “on track”. This is never mentioned in TFA, so I assume it’s an urban legend? Personally I much prefer serif fonts when reading longer texts.
I was once taught that serif fonts are better in print, and sans-serif is better on a screen.
This was definitely true in the days before hi-res screens and good anti-aliasing, simply because the serifs get lost or become noise in lower-resolution settings. It’s probably less true today.
Of course, in terms of accessibility, there are any number of reasons why someone might prefer to read content in any number of typefaces. Certain typefaces are better for folks with dyslexia. Others may be better for certain folks with ADHD. People with low vision may just prefer a larger typeface.
We have these amazing machines we’ve invented that can display the same text in any number of different ways. At this point, it seems ridiculous to need to mandate a specific typeface for electronic usage. Sure, pick a well-regarded default, but if we want to mandate something, it should be that software provides tools to allow users to adjust textual elements of documents they are reading to suit their own needs.
Thanks for that. I thought the same as phantom784 and never updated my opinion for hi-res screens.
Related to choosing defaults: I like these tips for evaluating the legibility of a body typeface: https://prowebtype.com/selecting-body-text/ They mention one serif advantage, that "most serif typefaces are often ideal choices for reading text due to the noticeable strokes in their ascenders and descenders."
Are hi-res screens really that common-place? Resolutions have gone up, but so have screen sizes. I don't think Windows has seen the need to change their default DPI assumption from 96 in at least 20 years.
Yeah right. Times New Roman rendered using late 1990s software on monitors of that era certainly looked awful. These days text on screens can reasonably look like print.
As indicated in the article, serifs come from how original letters were carved into stones: they were an artifact of the tool in use.
Calligraphy developed similar traits by virtue of using a tool that produced an oval shape, and that you had to take care not to leave marks when pen/feather leaves the paper.
With the printing press, when we became able to put many books out, we did start also doing some research about what makes a book easy to read. Not least of because we could now easily put many characters on a single line and print it in the thousands.
Serif or cursive fonts were the default "content" type, and sans-serif was reserved for titles, shop names and other "short texts" as a more "modern", cleaner look: serifs do indeed allow one to more easily track a single long line of text, as you can more clearly see the "baseline" and not accidentally skip into the line above or below.
The next challenge is switching to the next line once you are done with the one you are on: while serifs help there too, the more important thing is the line length. Thus the famous (is it? :) 60-70 word limit for a line, and why you also see many web pages that only take like 20% of our modern 32"+ screens when browsers are made full screen.
Now, columnar layout as popularized by newspapers does not really come from the same desire: like TMR, it actually comes from the desire to fit more on one page to save on costs. With a wider column of text, all the last lines of paragraphs would average out at being half-empty, which is quite a bit with a wide column.
Sure, low resolution screens made sans-serif inevitable even for documents, but compare that with the earliest segmented LCD screens: font was what you could get rendered with as little electronics as possible :)
But today, serif fonts on high resolution screens (though there are still 32" Full HD screens which are not really high-resolution), or with the use of subpixel rendering (antialiasing is no match, as you can see by connecting a modern Mac to a non-high res screen) are a great choice if you want to limit the space you use and maintain great readability.
However, sans-serif fonts can work as well, and you may only need to go with a larger line spacing or shorter lines. The trick is to aim for a number of words/letters, and not "pixels", though modern CSS treats them as a scalable unit.
(Sorry for all of this being a bit rambly, just wanted to share a bit of the history along with how we can best apply it today)
From the linked https://federalcourt.press/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Eighth...
> Typographic decisions should be made for a purpose. The Times of London chose the typeface Times New Roman to serve an audience looking for a quick read. Lawyers don’t want their audience to read fast and throw the document away; they want to maximize retention. Achieving that goal requires a different approach—different typefaces, different column widths, different writing conventions. Briefs are like books rather than newspapers. The most important piece of advice we can offer is this: read some good books and try to make your briefs more like them.
This is somewhat ironic as, if I'm not mistaken, it is written by lawyers and uses Times New Roman. (Does the 8th circuit want the reader to read fast and throw the document away?)
This document is typeset in New Century Schoolbook.
Hrm, interesting: I couldn't tell the difference.
You're not alone. My wife just assumes anything with serifs is Times New Roman, and she's a lot more normal than I am.
In between all the political bitching, no one has ever noted the fact that TNR will render correctly on basically any computer built in the last 30 years, including crusty UNIX workstations from the 90s.
This is mentioned in the post:
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia. Times New Roman was among the small set of typefaces bundled with early versions of Windows. It was also promoted as “web-safe,” meaning webmasters could reasonably assume it would render properly across platforms. In the early era of digitalization, choosing Times New Roman was often less a deliberate endorsement than a default imposed by limited options. Over time, the habit hardened into a standard, and institutions began to require it without much reflection, effectively borrowing their own authority to confer authority upon the typeface.
And Times is one of the three original Postscript core typefaces, along with Helvetica and Courier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typefaces_included_wit...
Best as I can tell, Windows 3.1 only really shipped with TNR and Courier. Weird that I don’t see Helvetica anywhere on that list.
MS went with Arial as a metrics-compatible substitute for Helvetica.
When I jumped into my GNU/Linux journey in late 90s, TNR was nowhere to be found, and I believe is only available through "ms-ttcorefonts" or whatever the package is called (IOW, Times New Roman actually comes from Microsoft).
I believe "Times" is the venerable standard, and has been present on Unices and Macs since... forever. Now, TNR is the same metrics-wise IIRC, and thus it was always a recommendation to use a fallback line of the form "Times New Roman, Times, serif".
It's a bit more complex than that! The font made by Monotype for The Times in 1931 was always called Times New Roman - it was, after all, a new Roman-style typeface for The Times.
Linotype then made their own variant simply called Times Roman, which differed mostly in having slanted serifs. The Times switched to this in 1982.
Both Monotype and Linotype produced digital versions, but Linotype's was initially slightly cheaper and thus more popular. In 1984, Adobe licensed it for inclusion in the core Postscript font set, and for a while became the "default" proportional serif typeface.
As WYSIWYG word processing and DTP took off, lots of knock-offs appeared, often called something like "Thymes", "London", or just plain "Roman". At some point, Monotype reduced their prices but by the late 80s Times New Roman was sadly neglected, seen almost as just another clone (after all, The Times itself was using the Linotype version by then!).
TNR became one of the core fonts in Truetype (initially an Apple/Microsoft collaboration, intended to break Adobe's stranglehold on computer typography), so was included by default in Windows 3.1 and Apple's System 7, leading to a resurgence in its popularity.
The Times then moved to Monotype's Times Modern (which features serifs that are even more slanted than Linotype's Times Roman) when they moved to tabloid format in the early 2000s. Monotype bought Linotype at around the same time, so all three fonts are now available from the same source at the same price.
I think this whole thing could be summed up by: this is an acceptable change made with wildly bad rationale.
Enemies of this administration have no idea how to pick their battles.
TLDR; Not only is the new choice of font unfortunate at best -- the formatting reveals another level of amateurishness so very unbefitting to the ernestness one might assume the sender of the letter wanting to convey. ;)
Basic typography: a paragraph starts with indentation if there is no blank line of any height after the previous one. And if it is not the first paragraph. In short: indent or put vertical space. Never both.
The old TNR version gets this right: if you put blank lines between paragraphs, you don't indent.
Then the date -- dangling god-knows-where, aligned with nothing.
In the old version the only formatting faux-pas is the alignment of 'Sincerely' and if you're picky the outdent of the seal in the top left is a tad much (outside optical axis).
Sadly, all that matters is it's free of any "DEI" connotations.
I think they should have used Bastard. Here's a sample: https://museumcrush.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/letter-on...
RETVRN
Why does the government not use PT Sans? A font created by Russian company ParaType to honor Tsar Peter the Great. Maybe that would finally convince Putin to make a peace deal and stop the war in Ukraine. At least PT Sans has great support for cyrillic script, which Trump will soon introduce because latin script is too woke.
I guess this is the thing preventing the release of the Epsteins files…
I imagine a 20-strong commission deciding whether to publish them in colibri or times new Roman.
Taxes at work
[flagged]
A few HN commenting guidelines might apply here:
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Eschew flamebait.
Arguably the OP borders on flamebait if that's the standard.
> Avoid generic tangents.
OP encapsulates an example of my comment, and is not a generic tangent.
> Omit internet tropes.
meme != trope
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Like the first point, all or nothing.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Point taken.
HN isn’t really for memes and quippy references. That’s the main reason you got downvoted, regardless of whether your substantive political point is a good one or not. The original comment matches the vibe of Reddit or Twitter a lot better than HN.
In that case, we'd better stop saying "Stallman was right"
Yes, we should, that would be great.
I bet the temporarily embarrassed millionaires/billionaires subset of HN would agree.