Font wars

Calibri font family

The U.S. Secretary of State demands that American diplomats switch to Times New Roman, and abandon the Calibri font, but the man who designed that font insists it’s the strong, silent typeface.
As It Happens, the Thursday (11 December) edition.
Radio that wants you to know there’s a new serif in town.

Finally!! No More Woke Fonts!
Marco Rubio has spoken—get out of here, Calibri!
By Alexandra Petri
(The Atlantic) Marco Rubio here, with an important announcement: No more Calibri in official State Department communications! Get out of here with your ungarnished lines and provocatively naked terminals! The Biden administration may have shot the serif, switching from Times New Roman on the grounds that serif-less fonts such as Calibri are more accessible to readers with disabilities. That’s all over now. … Now you can read a sentence like “Yes, the United States did just seize an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela! Don’t worry about it,” and bask in the sense of absolute decorum that comes from seeing a little serif on all of the relevant letters.

The designer behind Calibri, the font the State Department is ditching, speaks out
(Yello) Calibri and Times New Roman have been at war for years. And now the two fonts are once again pitted against each other after the U.S. State Department declared it will be swapping its current official typeface, Calibri, for Times New Roman. It’s a full-circle moment, considering the State Department ditched Times New Roman for Calibri in just 2023.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote that switching to Calibri was “wasteful” and “achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence” in an internal department memo obtained by Reuters and The New York Times.
The type designer behind the sans-serif font Calibri tells me Rubio’s decision is “hilarious and regrettable.”
Lucas de Groot designed Calibri in 2007 specifically for readability on computer screens. The width and curvature of its simple letterform was optimized to be easy to read, and it replaced Times New Roman as the default font in Microsoft Office in 2007 before being replaced by Aptos in 2023.

The State Department reinstates an old font, in a typeface about-face
(NPR) Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed diplomats around the world to switch from Calibri to Times New Roman 14-point font in all official documents, starting on Wednesday, the State Department said in a statement to NPR. The difference between the two fonts comes down to a few finishing strokes. … Calibri is a sans serif font, meaning it doesn’t have the decorative tops and tails at the ends of letters that serif fonts like Times New Roman do.
… Times New Roman was designed specifically for the British newspaper The Times in the 1920s and quickly became the favored typeface for many other publications. It was also the default font of Microsoft programs like Word beginning in the 1990s until it was replaced by Calibri — which was designed with screens in mind — in 2007.

9 December
At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke
(NYT) Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department’s official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a “wasteful” sop to diversity.
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
Mr. Rubio’s directive, under the subject line “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” served as the latest attempt by the Trump administration to stamp out remnants of diversity initiatives across the federal government.