121–130 of 184 posts
It's so frustrating. We already created a font for government communication, Public Sans. It looks great, it's very strong, neutral, readable, and respectable. Clearly a lot of effort went into making it accessible etc. 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 buil…
The correct typeface for the current U.S. administration would of course be Comic Sans or perhaps Comic Serif for double-super-serious documents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fyi since your account is new. It’s a faux pas here to have a “company” account.
Says who? I’ve never heard that, and am not even close to new.
> The general public doesn’t perceive serif typefaces as professional and authoritative, a priori, before prioritizing their use in formal settings. Instead, people first observe that government, academia, and corporate workplaces disproportionately use serif faces — or are trained to use them — and only then infer that serifs must mean professionalism and authority. A difficult to stomach claim followed up with evid…
But I am southern European so it’s a relatively common sight, I wonder if Americans view them differently.
This was a terrific, reasonable take on this “controversy”. I have to admit that the correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office. Imagine reading the Warren Commission report set in that. The author seems to settle on the consensus that surrounded TNR before this exchange made the news. It’s banal. At times it signals to its original objectives (e.g., Prof. Dr. style websites […
> correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office 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 leasin…
This was a terrific, reasonable take on this “controversy”. I have to admit that the correspondence set in Calibri looks like something dispatched from a leasing office. Imagine reading the Warren Commission report set in that. The author seems to settle on the consensus that surrounded TNR before this exchange made the news. It’s banal. At times it signals to its original objectives (e.g., Prof. Dr. style websites […
The Warren Commission report was set in Century Schoolbook, the Supreme Court's typeface of choice. The appendices are photo reproductions of originals produced on typewriters, so they are in something monospaced. 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.
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.
This blog post has good fundamentals but ends up missing the mark. Is Times New Roman the perfect serif? Obviously not. Is it better than Calibri? Yes. Is “hey go back to how things were before” the simplest plan to execute? Also yes. 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.
Shouldn't public documents by the government use a free and libre font? In fact, the mentioned Public Sans developed by the US federal government seems to be a great option, as it actually distinguishes the lowercase l and the uppercase I, something that, ironically, all suggested sans-serif alternatives fail to do.
Times New Roman is available at no cost under the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web. (Microsoft no longer distributes this, but the license allows redistribution and redistribution is popular). AFAIK, Apple explicitly licenses the fonts and most open source OS distributions have a package for these fonts. It's not libre, but font copyright is weird anyway, and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyr…
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.
Shouldn't public documents by the government use a free and libre font? In fact, the mentioned Public Sans developed by the US federal government seems to be a great option, as it actually distinguishes the lowercase l and the uppercase I, something that, ironically, all suggested sans-serif alternatives fail to do.