4 ms·
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 (someth
by derbOac 10mo ago
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.
- halostatue 10mo ago> 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.
- ericmay 10mo ago[flagged]
- jfengel 10mo agoI 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.
- ericmay 10mo agoIf 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.
- donkeybeer 10mo agoBecause 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.
- ericmay 10mo ago
- pseudohadamard 10mo agoNah, 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!
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mananaysiempre 10mo agoOf 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”).
- pseudohadamard 9mo agoWasn't it mostly Hitler's personal dislike for it? That and the fact that readers in the greater Reich (the bits outside Germany) wouldn't be familiar with, or able to read, Fraktur
- dfxm12 10mo agoReactionaryism and vice signaling are par for the course for this administration. This was an opportunity for both, and they took it.
- potato3732842 10mo agoThe 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?