18 ms·
Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri
- branon 4y agoCalibri is Microsoft-encumbered, no? Shame they didn't use a free font like Liberation Sans.
- antihero 4y agoLiberation Sans would be so on brand for the USA too
- danuker 4y agoMot à mot translation: "Liberation Without" or "Liberation Lacking"
- tohnjitor 4y agoArguably this fits even better.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoYou know that feeling you get when something is just so perfect?
- jerf 4y agoFrisson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson
- diryawish 4y agoNot for the bureaucrats at the state department.
- abudabi123 4y agoThe Microsoft empire is bigger than several nation states. IBM research used to examine UX. The IBM top brass deciding to pay over $35B+ for a UNIX-like when they have an authentic UNIX of their very own which is going to a boneyard in India suggests that kind of UX research isn't front of mind and funded to decide which font is best.
- zitterbewegung 4y agoBuying Red Hat was just to acquire customers . Generally if you don’t really want the product the business / tech then you acquire patents , customers and people. For patents you can sue other competitors.
- mepian 4y agoWhat does AIX have to do with this? It wasn't exactly at the forefront of UX research even before Red Hat existed at all.
- vharuck 4y agoWhat you see as "Microsoft-encumbered," they may see as "default font in Outlook so just go with the font that'll get used anyway."
- input_sh 4y agoThey'd have to install that font to every machine, and Calibri is already there.
- supertrope 4y agoMicrosoft is a domestic company. That's probably a plus for vendor selection.
- hot_gril 4y agoEh, better to name the free fonts something that doesn't give an "I can't afford the name brand" vibe. Nothing about freedom even needs to be in the name. To most people, all fonts are already free cause they cost nothing.
- splatzone 4y agoInteresting that the memo claims that sans serif fonts are preferred to serif fonts for screen reader users and people with disabilities. I thought the exact opposite was true. Is there any definitive research on which type of font is more accessible?
- robin_reala 4y ago“Disabilities” is an extremely wide spectrum, and it’s pointless to try to group people on that scale.
- tomrod 4y agoLet me introduce a term to your venacular that will serve you well: 508 compliance.
- robin_reala 4y agoNot sure I get your point?
- tomrod 4y ago[1] Disabilities may be broad, but it is incumbent upon our profession(s) to be inclusive. [2] It is not pointless to work towards including folks who have a disability. More people than you realize have a form of disability. Ensuring our services and products are accessible is important, whether considered under a legal or an ethical lens.
- robin_reala 4y agoRight yes, agreed with all of that (I’ve been doing we accessibility for over two decades now), I just didn’t get what a US public sector code had to do with my point.
- tomrod 4y ago
- kemitchell 4y agoSans-serif type for printed documents?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 4y agoHmm. Are serif fonts beginning to die out altogether, actually? I definitely feel like I see a lot more sans serif than I used to.
- ImPleadThe5th 4y agoI see them mostly as display fonts.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoI think design trends ebb and flow. We're currently in a period of strong minimalism. But sooner or later some designers will start using serif typefaces in order to stand out and the trend will reverse.
- lopis 4y agoThe last decade was strongly minimalist in terms of design, while this one is showing the opposite direction in many ways.
- tonmoy 4y agoAlthough my brain thinks any serif font document as more “legitimate”, I can’t think of any reason to use serif in a world of such high resolution screens and printers.
- formerly_proven 4y agoI think you got that backwards. The reason why sans serif fonts became popular is because computer displays are low resolution. Before that, they were often used for ads because they were deemed eccentric. On a modern, high resolution display with hundreds of DPIs you can have all the serifs you want.
- techwizrd 4y agoNot everyone has a high resolution screen and printer, and it is still important to communicate to those who cannot afford them. Additionally, I find it hard to discern the difference between 0 and O and I, 1, and l in many sans serif fonts (although the same can be said for some serif fonts).
- generationP 4y agoHow are they planning to deal with the I-l issue? Hope that it never comes up?
- bruce343434 4y agoMy browser renders this in sans serif, but adds serifs to I. I'm on firefox/linux and it's defaulting to the css `sans-serif` and I don't have the energy to research how to find what that defaults to right now.
- chrismorgan 4y agoDev tools → Inspector panel → Fonts subpanel → Fonts Used, and you can hover over each to see highlighted which glyphs are being rendered in that font.
- bruce343434 4y agoTurns out it's Noto Sans Regular, and not DejaVu as another commenter thought!
- nebulous1 4y agoI would imagine that it isn't changing font for the l specifically but just has a sans font that includes a tail on the l. This text box that I'm using, for instance, is Dejavu Sans Mono which does exactly that.
- input_sh 4y agoDefaults on Firefox are all from DejaVu family: https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ Mozilla has a custom font for their branding called Zilla Slab, but I believe that's only serif.
- chrismorgan 4y agoThis is incorrect. Firefox does ship an emoji font, but for the rest it delegates default-selection to fontconfig, and it’s likely to have a very long list of possibilities, depending on its configuration (see /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default for a start) and what’s installed. Run `fc-match --all sans-serif` to see how it resolves. On my machine, Noto Sans gets higher priority than DejaVu Sans (though I’ve configured Concourse 4 as the top preference, in ~/.config/fontconfig).
- _dan 4y agoTh.. that announcement is in Arial... (Edit: and Helvetica)
- okamiueru 4y agoI never understand why someone in charge of making one specific simple choice, ends up making a remarkable dumb decision. Why, unless you are doing things unethically, would you go for a licensed font? It's not like this is a hard problem to solve more than adequately with open and more accessible alternatives.
- ivraatiems 4y agoDo you think Anthony Blinken knows what a licensed or unlicensed font is?
- okamiueru 4y agoI would hope someone who don't know the context or effect of a choice they are making, at the least consults with someone who does? This isn't rocket science to get right.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoFont licensing is an incredibly niche thing to be aware of. I'm highly confident the people involved in this decision simply saw that Calibri was the default font in Microsoft Office and didn't think twice about the availability of it. Perhaps someone farther down the chain of command raised a concern about licensing, but I doubt such a concern would make its way back up the chain. It seems like something only lower level employees, graphic artists, or even IT administrators would be aware of. Anecdotally, the most pressing concern I made to management during my career only ever made its way up two levels in the corporate ladder, not including my manager. I have a feeling the State Department is even more rigid with communication flow.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIt could also be that Microsoft are acknowledging the dominance of mobile devices and that they, as well as State, are optimising for reading on mobile rather than desktop or printed output. This is amongst the few defensible rationales I can conceive of. The OCR argument offered in the Birdsite thread seems ... weak at best. (As I've noted in another comment.)
- zadler 4y agoNow if we can get the Chinese factories to replace the nasty old serif font they use for every label…
- formerly_proven 4y agoI always assumed that's Times New Roman.
- netsharc 4y agoI'm guessing it's because those were the shapes that were delivered for the Latin characters in one of the earliest CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts, the MingLiU: https://www.pickafont.com/fonts/MingLiU.html https://www.pickafont.com/fonts/MingLiU.html I guess us westerners see it a lot because it was much simpler for the manufacturers to just use 1 font file for all the different locales of the gadgets (either the cheapo MP3-player, or the label printer). It was even there on Windows 3.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts
- jamesliudotcc 4y agoWhat I want to know is what they were doing before 2004 when they adopted Times New Roman. Courier? Gothic? Calibri is a nice screen-reading typeface. It is likely that "upstairs" reads on a screen, but I wouldn't bet that much on it. Times New Roman was designed to shove as many letters into a multi-column newspaper page as possible. It's atrocious for anything else, and should be confined to whence it came, print newspapers. It's only the default because it is the default. Good riddance.
- Multicomp 4y agoYeah, Courier (size 12, double-spaced?) because it was very close to typewriters. I can't find a wikipedia source though, so I may be mis-remembering.
- gumby 4y agoJust waiting for this directive to replace last week's gas stove fauxsteria.
- valgaze 4y agoAllegedly during Colin Powell’ time at the State Department there was quite an ordeal to change paper sizes for communication between offices: https://www.govexec.com/magazine/2001/06/the-powell-leadership-doctrine/9193/ https://www.govexec.com/magazine/2001/06/the-powell-leadersh... “correspondence between headquarters and overseas embassies, known as Diplomatic Notes, for years had to be accompanied by a legal-size (8 1/2-inch by 14-inch) cover sheet. That wasn't really a big deal when the notes were drafted on typewriters. But Ted Strickler, head of State's Office of Foreign Missions, found that since the introduction of the desktop computer, his employees were spending a lot of extra time formatting the notes and fiddling with the paper in the printer. He checked to see whether he could use standard 8 1/2-inch by 11-inch paper for the Diplomatic Notes, instead. He was told to submit a formal action memorandum suggesting the change. Strickler submitted the suggestion to his superiors in January 1999. A year went by. He found out his action memorandum had been lost, so he resubmitted it. In early 2001-two years after he recommended the change in the first place-the department approved the use of standard paper. "If anything so innocuous as changing the size of the paper for Diplomatic Notes was so exceedingly difficult, how difficult would it be to make more important changes?" Strickler says.“
- daniel-cussen 4y ago[dead]
- sdflhasjd 4y agoAnd still not even A4
- Joker_vD 4y agoA/B/C paper series formats are based on metrics system and therefore, morally evil and unfit for the US consumption.
- NeoTar 4y agoIn case anyone is unaware, A0 is 1m^2 in size, and each adjacent number is half the size (i.e. A1 = 500 000 mm^2, A2 = 250 000 mm^2, A3 = 125 000 mm^2, A4 = 62 500 mm^2). This has the great advantage of allowing documents to be easily up and down-scaled on a photocopier - i.e. an A3 document can be printed at 50% scale on an A4 sheet. I wonder if anyone ever tried to do something similar with imperial units (AKA English units to the US Americans) - i.e. create sheets of papers with side-length of sqrt(2) : 1, and the largest being 1 square yard or similar.
- skizm 4y agoI imagine this memo reading like that one in Snow Crash about the inter-office toilet paper sharing system, and employees dutifully reading the memo for exactly X number of minutes to ensure their computer's tracking software notes that they've read the article for the appropriate amount of time.
- robbintt 4y agoSo they are upgrading Microsoft Office from 2003 to 2007?
- anticensor 4y agoMore like retiring the last gov installation of Office 2003.
- mistrial9 4y agothis is a 'diplomatic signal' gesture as a demonstration of political power by MSFT
- bilsbie 4y agoI feel like they don’t have enough work to do if they’re worried about fonts. Maybe time to trim some fat?
- pupppet 4y agoFor sure, why improve anything.
- moloch-hai 4y agoMaybe because nobody checked to see if it wasn't a downgrade instead.
- teilo 4y agoWhat a god-awful choice for a replacement.
- fprog 4y agoA shame they didn’t opt for Public Sans, which was designed by the US Web Design System team. Though I see it only supports Latin characters at the moment, which might make it unsuitable for use at State. https://public-sans.digital.gov https://public-sans.digital.gov
- merry_flame 4y agoExtended Latin, including Polish, Vietnamese, etc. Useful enough. Thanks for sharing :)
- uneekname 4y agoI believe that font is primarily intended for interfaces rather than documents. The design decisions are quite different between those contexts, or that's what I've heard.
- unethical_ban 4y agoI wonder "how many fonts we need". Is there a good, open resource for FOSS fonts, to compare them, and preferably a curation? I agree with others on here, though. Everything our government does, and produces, from an IT/development perspective which is not a "competitive advantage" (security, etc.) should be open. Why there would be an official directive to choose a non-open font when so many open fonts exist, is beyond me.
- mistrial9 4y agopolitical signal by MSFT corporate to the US citizen, we will license you the type you read each day; pay here.
- hot_gril 4y agoSerif'd fonts are easier to read.
- aidenn0 4y agoPer TFA they picked a sans font (Calibri) under the mistaken impression that sans serif fonts are easier to read.
- jmbwell 4y agoWhat a case study in the critical importance of sensible defaults, that they could end up enforced as State Department policy.
- kypro 4y agoI've wondered in the past what the cultural influence of font legibility is. I'd imagine someone who grew up reading serif fonts would feel much more comfortable reading a document with a serif typeface than someone like myself who doesn't interact much with serif fonts. For me serif fonts look kind of off and weird. On the other hand monospaced fonts look strangely beautiful to me so I use monospaced fonts on my blog and in other personal writings. I'm guessing that preference isn't biological though, but more likely due to me spending every day reading and writing code. My brain is just best adapted for working with monospaced fonts. I think about questions like this often when it comes to UI/UX decisions because I think some modern UI/UX is arguably objectively bad in a world where there only exists subjective users. For example, the qwerty keyboard is god awful, but does it make sense for the next Apple Macbook to ship with a dvorak keyboard layout to fix querty's UX issues? Probably not.
- aidenn0 4y ago> someone who grew up reading serif fonts would feel much more comfortable reading a document with a serif typeface than someone like myself who doesn't interact much with serif fonts I grew up reading books, so I suppose I count as someone who grew up reading serif fonts. I find sans serif fonts to be incredibly difficult to read. They only are a win for small on-screen text since there aren't enough pixels for serifs. I have a sans-serif font for my window titles. Reading more than a single paragraph in sans is fatiguing to me.
- twobitshifter 4y agoI find any document written in serif feels more professional and well considered. As a result, when I look at older documents, it seems that the past had higher standards for content and presentation. Seeing a Calibri memo from the state department would make me think that it’s illegitimate.
- elzbardico 4y agoI am absolutely convinced that the past had higher standards for content and presentation. The choice of font faces probably is just a consequence.
- midoridensha 4y agoIt's weird because we have far better and more convenient tools for content and presentation now, but we're so lazy that we make poor use of them and so the output is worse.
- warinukraine 4y agoOf course blame "the millennials".
- mayormcmatt 4y agoMissed opportunity to transition into National Park Typeface! I should build a VS Code theme around this... https://nationalparktypeface.com/ https://nationalparktypeface.com/
- Dalewyn 4y agoAs one of the very few moon dwellers who finds Calibri fucking blinding to read, I hate this. Times New Roman all day every day, or any of Arial/Tahoma/Verdana for sans serif.
- generationP 4y agoI don't understand the love for Times New Roman honestly. Any type of antiqua is better if you ask me.
- l- 4y agoIn Times New Roman's name, Roman is a reference to the regular or roman style (sometimes also called Antiqua)
- generationP 4y agoLet me be more precise: more classicist and less cramped forms of antiqua. Palatino, Garamond are the first two that come to my mind.
- int_19h 4y agoIt was the default font in Word for a very long time.
- hot_gril 4y agoI spent probably half an hour figuring out how to make my Google Docs default to Times New Roman for any new docs after. It's a good font. Calibri is trash. Even worse, a widely-used design doc template here uses a title-only font in the body. I was wondering why it's so hard to read, even for a sans serif font, until I noticed that.
- effnorwood 4y ago[dead]
- smm11 4y agoComic Sans FTW.
- fwungy 4y agoSoon enough fonts will be an anachronism. We won't read things serially, we will download information into our brains via cyberneural uploads. Then we can get rid of the dead trees and petrochemicals. Musk says it's only 5-10 years away. /s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aidenn0 4y agoI think they are conflating "serif" with "Times" Times is a very narrow font, which has all sorts of readability issues (it's very readable for the space it takes up, but damn it's narrow). I have yet to see an OCR do better on a serif font that has a bit more girth to it. In particular I see things like "III" as being impossible to read for both OCRs, and (in the absence of context) humans in sans-serif fonts. I'd put up a nice sans typeface with single-storey "g" (the double-storey "g" is hard to read for a lot more people than one might think) against a sans-serif any day.
- geepound 4y agoBut have they relaxed their policy on Comic Sans[1] since Condoleezza Rice's tenure? ;-) https://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007 https://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007
- bsder 4y agoTo be fair, isn't basically any font better than Times? Wasn't the whole point of Times to be legible when printed at super high speed with super cheap ink on super crappy newsprint? If you want maximum legibility, would the solution not be a variant of Century Schoolbook which was explicitly designed to be legible?
- wrp 4y agoYou are right. Times Roman was not originally intended to look how it does when printed now. Originally, the thin lines spread and the pointed serifs contracted so the result looked somewhat like Century. You can see examples of this in technical books published in the 1950s-60s.
- c3534l 4y agoI absolutely hate Calibri. I hate that Microsoft made it the default font and now we're all left with this quirky, unbalanced font as the default.
- petilon 4y agoCalibri was designed for low-res screens [1]. "De Groot created Calibri in the early 2000s, as part of a collection of fonts for enhanced screen reading. “I designed it in quite a hurry,” he says." Even Microsoft is moving on from Calibri! [1] https://www.wired.com/story/calibri-default-font-microsoft-moving-on/ https://www.wired.com/story/calibri-default-font-microsoft-m...
- vondur 4y agoI’d prefer an Old English font on parchment.
- WalterBright 4y agoBoeing uses inches. Not feet, just inches. The drafting scales (rulers) we used were in inches, but divided into tenths and hundredths of an inch. The ball bearing catalog what in inches, but rather strange values, which turned out to be mm translated to inches. I had a hard time recently trying to find a scale in inches and tenths and hundredths. It's just easier to user. I'm kinda sorry I sold my drafting equipment.
- chanandler_bong 4y ago14 point? Does Blinken need glasses? (ignoring the obvious double entendre there).