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.
↫ Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz at The New York Times
To clarify things for people who missed the original switch, here’s another excerpt:
I thought serif fonts are supposedly easier to read for longer texts?
If you think they swapped typefaces because they care about accessibility, you’re either gullible, stupid, or disingenuous. lol
As opposed to what? I assume they’re already paying for Microsoft Office either way.
Switching to Calibri seems perfectly in line with the kind of “ultimately meaningless, progressive-looking” gestures the democrats engage in to pander to their voters instead of addressing problems that would hurt their rich donors like affordability in healthcare and housing.
That’s what I get for posting angry about other things. I misread your original post @ssokolow and thought you were defending the Times New Roman switch using accessibility.
My apologies for what it’s worth.
guess double tapping boats ain’t getting them the *wins* they are looking for. This one seems solid.
As someone who lives outside the US I don’t recall hearing about the switch to Calibri in 2023.
Hearing about it now, the absurd politicking doesn’t surprise me, but the argument for the original switch does. My understanding is that the evidence suggests little difference in legibility between Serif or Sans Serif typefaces.
This book, which is an excellent read and I found convincing, goes into a lot of detail on the topic:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-90984-0
Without wanting to spoil it, the book concludes (page 130):
Microsoft switched the default font in Office to Aptos a couple of years ago. I tend to prefer Times New Roman for documents that are going to be printed.
Yeehaaa! Let’s go!
I am partial to Times New Roman, not because I care about fonts, but because it’s very old and will enter the public domain much sooner than Calibri.
I think people should be able to replicate government texts without having to buy a font license (either directly or by purchasing a product whose price includes such a license) or having to use “metrically-compatible” substitute fonts (which makes the replication imprecise).
Seriously, why does interacting with the government so often requires buying some kind of IP license from a private monopoly? I mean, the need to have an IP license from the company that owns either the iOS monopoly or the Play Services monopoly, just to download government “verification” apps, is yet another such case.
I understand the need to use patented standards such as DVB-T2 and HEVC for the government’s Parliament channel (for those countries that have such a channel), since spectrum efficiency matters and broadcasters have to use FRAND standards (this means no VP9 or AV1), but forcing people to use a recent proprietary font or a proprietary OS? That’s just taking the piss!
So, I am with the current administration on this one: Forcing a relatively recent proprietary font on people to achieve highly dubious accessibility benefits and giving the private company that owns the font a convenient licensing revenue for decades in the process is wasteful. Don’t agree with the wording though.