Choose your typeface with extreme care

The US administration has turned its attention to typefaces if not print itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio ruled last week that government printed documents should switch from Calibri, a sans serif face, to Times New Roman, a more traditional serifed font. The stated reason is that Calibri is too woke, in effect that Times New Roman represents traditional American values. Never mind that Stanley Morrison designed the typeface to increase the number of words in a column of newspaper type, nor that Morrison himself would be considered highly woke, this is the pronouncement of the US administration, suitability for the application scarcely comes into it. Designers trying to achieve readability and comprehension for those with visual disabilities certainly do not. Such was the outcry that only a day or so later, the decision is reported to have been reversed.

Fonts have long been associated with different purposes, arousing different emotions and feelings, Comic Sans included. Designers should understand how these work, selecting typefaces for clarity and the message they want to communicate. It doesn’t always work: many in print have encountered 6pt type reversed out of a solid colour on the tail end of a sheet for example. And many will remember what atrocities were committed in the early days of desktop publishing and PostScript when anyone with a computer could choose to use 35 fonts on a page, and unfortunately many did.

Now the US administration is behaving in the same way, using fonts without appreciating the reasons why, or perhaps understanding the reasons perfectly well. Type design has become a political choice rather than a design choice as perhaps happened under Nazi Germany. This new decision risks setting off a chain of other changes in the US administration or those wishing to curry favour with the US government. Will there be some kind of list of acceptable and unacceptable fonts, certain fonts may be declared degenerate compared to solid, trustworthy American designs? In this crazy war on woke, type and print may end up victims.