Remember December 2025, when Marco Rubio ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor's decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move ?
In a choice of either Times New Roman or Calibri, I would think that Times fits the US State Dept better. Calibri is a relaxed, modern typeface, while Times is classical and majestic. (The word "stately" also comes to mind.)
It would probably be better if State Department would get their own typeface -- as opposed to picking one from MS Office defaults -- but even then, I'd argue for Antiqua style (serif). SCOTUS, for one, is using Century Schoolbook.
P.S. I don't care at all about Rubio, Dem-Rep divide, "diversity" vs "wastefulness" debate, or any of the arguments brought from either side in 2023 (when they changed Times to Calibri) or 2025 (when they switched back).
The use of Century Schoolbook by the Supreme Court is more a matter of their accepting the default selection of the Government Printing Office (GPO) --- before they switched to using Adobe InDesign, their updated design manual was available as a PDF typeset by "ACOMP.exe" (anyone know anything about it? Apparently it was a custom typesetting tool which made PDFs from XML?) which was visually indistinguishable from an earlier edition style guide I had printed during WWII (with a note about paper shortages in it).
The reason almost all books and newspapers use serif typefaces is exactly that: serifs help with readability. It could be argued that serifs help our eye by making each letter more unique, or it can be argued that our eyes have been trained since childhood to read serifs -- by almost all books and newspapers we've consumed. Whatever the cause and the consequence is, serif fonts have advantage on the readability front when we talk about printed communication.
On screens every US government agency already uses sans-serif, as required by "Americans with Disabilities" act[0]. This is not in any way affected by neither previous change from TNR to Calibri, nor by this change from Calibri back to TNR.
It's hard to explain, but serif typefaces have centuries of history behind them, with practically all the books (in Europe and America) using some variant of serif since basically the invention of movable type. You can add most of newspapers to this list (notably "Times" part comes from a font being cast for the British newspaper The Times in 1930s.) The Roman Empire is a source of these (just look at the inscription on the Pantheon[0]), so that's for the "Roman" part. Using serif fonts signifies "tradition". Using sans-serif signifies "modernity". Being "stately" is more about the former than the latter.
Interestingly, the building that houses the State Dept[1] has its style defined as "Modern Movement" and "Stripped classical", which is interesting, because it's somewhere in the middle between modern and classical, while not being quite any of them. To me, it looks mostly bland; I'd much rather have an office in Congress building, or Supreme Court building, or the White House, all of which are strictly classical.
Not going to argue about personal interpretations, and everyone's entitled to have one — including people who have interpretations that we personally disagree with.
But to take an extreme example: at least at first glance, how would treat a SCOTUS decision written in Times New Roman versus one written in Comic Sans?
Serif fonts in general are more formal (or "stately"). That's because of the, well, serifs. Sans-serifs visually resemble/evoke handwriting because in handwriting we don't make serifs. Try writing with serifs for everyday stuff and it will quickly reveal to be visually and logistically annoying.
The only question is which brand of formal do you want to evoke. TNR feels very straightforward and no-nonsense to me. So I wouldn't really object to associating it with bureaucratic memos and documents. For something more leisurely I'd go with either Garamond or Georgia. Georgia is my favorite but it's a bit too fancy for long texts. It's better suited for quotes.
As an aside, I hate that Introduction to Algorithms [CORMEN] uses a TNR-like font. It makes it look like a Physics textbook. They could've stayed with default Computer Modern and strengthened my Pavlovian conditioning to it. Whenever I read something in Computer Modern, my heart palpitates a little in the way it did when I sat through my Data Structures exams.
Georgia is nice, but rather recent. Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon, Century are all centuries old. If we're talking about the US State department, it would probably be fitting to look at the fonts that were used for US printing and communication (and are still used.)
> Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics.
[…]
> 2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.^2
Gruber is no fan of the Trump administrator generally, but he thinks in this case it seems that they/Rubio got it right.
He also recently had a post on the various style guides of various US federal courts:
