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).
I imagine a 20-strong commission deciding whether to publish them in colibri or times new Roman.
Taxes at work
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.)
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.
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.
Like are we switching fonts because DEI or are we switching fonts because fonts and pretending it's DEI?
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.
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.
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.
It's not libre, but font copyright is weird anyway, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
And nobody thinks of the London Times when he sees Times New Roman. It’s just a default font many used in Word.
But I am southern European so it’s a relatively common sight, I wonder if Americans view them differently.
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.
I personally would’ve liked Georgia since I imagine that’s similarly ubiquitous. People suggesting a custom typeface are out of their mind.
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.
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/)
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.
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.
Yes, but most users wouldn't have a clue that is even an issue or why and how to do the embedding.
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'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 example document is typeset in Century Schoolbook, with the exception of "SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES", which is typeset in Times New Roman.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
That said, for print, I think serif is a better option.
"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.
RETVRN
> 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?)
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.
> 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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Again, the author:
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia.
https://forgotten-shapes.com/gerstner-programm/gerstnerprogr...
> 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”!
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.
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)
> 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.
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".
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.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5affbc175417fc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Mediaeval
(Note that this font predates Donald Trump's rise.)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
(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.)
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.
