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> U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters. What a waste of government time and spending.
How much will it cost to change fonts?
Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri. Here are our CEO Luc(as) de Groot’s thoughts on the matter: The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable. Calibri was specifically designed to enhance readability on modern computer screens and was selected by Microsoft in 2007 to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite…
Damn, the diversity of people one can meet here on HN continues to amaze me. Even after almost 13 years.
> The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable.
The cruelty (in this case, against people with visual impairments) is the actual point, as always, and the appearance of "going back to the good old times" is the visual that's being sold to the gullibles.
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Note that, even if that's all true (and I do agree that studies should have been conducted), the two positions are: a) We made this change because we think it will help certain people and b) We made this change because we fundamentally disagree with attempts to help certain people, whether effective or not I think b) is a lot worse than a). Or, to put it another way, has the current administration demonstrated a bene…
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...
In my opinion, the sole cultural domain in which Republicans are far stronger than Democrats is graphic design.
If you do not have a strong graphic design background, I'd urge you to avoid taking sides on this matter on the basis of party affiliation.
This is good politics from the Republicans.
In my opinion it is disastrous for Democrats to align themselves with mediocre cultural products.
Microsoft has a very close relationship with the US government and over the last 20+ years has demonstrated extremely low quality standards. The US government's shift to using Calibri is clearly a consequence of this close relationship.
Claims about the "readability" of Calibri in comparison to Times New Roman are spurious and unverifiable; very seriously type foundries say things this about every single new typeface released.
Frankly, Calibri is an ugly and poorly designed typeface. It is Microsoft's Vista-era Helvetica dupe. It is inferior to Times New Roman.
If you're defending Calibri over the most popular typeface of all time, I hope it's (somehow) coming from an aesthetically minded place
Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities. While this itself is debatable, that's not the reasoning behind the font switch. The mere attempt at making life easier for disadvantaged people is labeled DEI and as such cannot be tolerated by this administration.
More charitably, the signaling could be: “keep the government as small as possible, but no smaller than that”, i.e. use things that basically mostly work and quit expending resources addressing every edge case, particularly when it’s performative (slight font variations) rather than obvious (a ramp to get into a public building)
And don't get me started about the current meddling of the executive in my private life? I haven't had a more intrusive administration since living in Singapore.
Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities. While this itself is debatable, that's not the reasoning behind the font switch. The mere attempt at making life easier for disadvantaged people is labeled DEI and as such cannot be tolerated by this administration.
> Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities I'd love to know how that was determined. Given that: "If different fonts are best for different people, you might imagine that the solution to the fonts problem would be a preference setting to allow each user to select the font that’s best for them. This solution will not work, for two reasons. First, previous research on user-interface customizati…
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Come to think of it, I vs l vs 1 vs | is one advantage of serif fonts.
Yes and I use the Atkinson font in my emacs (for code) which is proportional and sans serif except for those characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible
I have a couple of thoughts about this. Firstly, I thought sans-serif typefaces were encouraged for digital media because they read better than serif fonts. But now that high pixel density displays have permeated the market, this might be a moot point. On another note, I wonder how much of the hate TNR gets stems from its ubiquity for having been installed on almost all personal computers for the past n decades. Paga…