It has been a key player in a corruption scandal and regularly engenders heated debates online and in professional circles. This week, it was in the cross hairs of the State Department.
Yes, we’re talking about Calibri. Yes, the typeface.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reversed a Biden-era directive by ordering American diplomats around the world to stop using Calibri for official work and return to Times New Roman, the State Department’s previous official typeface of nearly 20 years.
When the department switched to Calibri from Times New Roman in 2023, officials said the move was intended to improve accessibility for readers with disabilities, such as low vision and dyslexia, and for people using assistive technologies, like screen readers.
Mr. Rubio cast this week’s reversal as a part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts and as a return to tradition. He blamed “radical” Biden-era diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective typographical switch.
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” Mr. Rubio said in his directive.
Calibri was invented for Microsoft in the early 2000s, one of six typefaces designed for ClearType, a new software technology that made text more shapely and easier to read on screens.
Calibri’s inventor, Lucas de Groot, a font designer in Berlin, has said that Microsoft asked him to submit a proposal for a sans serif typeface — one without the little wings and feet at the edge of many characters.
Mr. de Groot started with some old sketches for a typeface he had previously designed with television broadcasting in mind. He drew letters with their corners and stems subtly rounded, he wrote.
But, thinking that the rounded corners would likely not look good for ClearType, he sent Microsoft two versions, one with the rounded corners and one without.
“I like the look of it, but as you see these rounded tops look real ugly in ClearType; don’t choose this,” he said he told Microsoft, referring to the rounded version. To his astonishment, that was the one Microsoft chose.
In 2007, Microsoft made Calibri the default typeface for its suite of office software. That gave it a large audience; Microsoft Office 365 has over 400 million users, the company said last year. Microsoft has described Calibri as “a general workhorse of a typeface.”
It remained the default for 17 years until Microsoft replaced it with Aptos, a slightly rounder typeface. The creator of Aptos was aiming for a typeface “with the universal appeal of the late NPR newscaster Carl Kasell and the astute tone of ‘The Late Show’ host Stephen Colbert,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post about the change.
The switch to Aptos prompted some complaints on social media, although some users said they liked the new font.
Calibri has also featured in a decades-long debate over whether serif typefaces like Times New Roman or sans serif ones like Calibri are better.
Research increasingly indicates that sans serif fonts are easier to read, though some researchers argue that the feet on serif typefaces help guide readers and can reduce confusion.
Mr. Rubio’s typeface order this week cited the origins of serif typefaces in Roman antiquity, saying that they are “generally perceived to connote tradition, formality and ceremony.” According to the State Department’s policies, other serif and sans serif typefaces — including Arial, Verdana, Garamond, and Courier — are still allowed on its website.
The State Department’s typographical about-face this week was a relatively minor Washington story line. But in Pakistan, Calibri once played a key role in a case that brought down a prime minister.
During a 2017 corruption inquiry into Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister at the time, and his daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif, who was seen as his political heir, investigators said that she produced a trust deed purported to be dated to 2006 that would have exculpated her. They said they determined the deed had been forged because it had been typed in Calibri, which was not commercially available to the public then.
Mr. Sharif stepped down in July 2017 after the Supreme Court ruled that the corruption allegations had disqualified him from office.
As significant as the choice of typeface can be, it is perhaps not the most pressing problem in the world, said Gerhard Bachfischer, a typologist of 40 years in Australia.
“When typefaces become part of the political discourse, one should wonder if there are things we are distracted from that need more attention than picking a typeface,” he said.
Qasim Nauman contributed reporting.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
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