Using either Calibri or Times New Roman makes it look like you did not put any thought into your brand and chose the default in Microsoft Word. The State department probably has certain constraints (i.e. they likely have to choose one of the fonts that ships with Microsoft Word, and possibly a subset of that that also ships on macOS), but they could definitely choose better than the default.

I find the narrow serif typefaces such as Century Schoolbook a bit harder to read than ones with more normal spacing, and I think the US government should optimize for legibility and accessibility over style in routine communications. Palatino or Garamond would probably be my choices.

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xattt 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s the US government, and it could easily develop their own Liberty- or Freedom-type if the current administration wanted to leave their own mark.

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theandrewbailey 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://public-sans.digital.gov/

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beej71 18 hours ago | parent [-]

That actually doesn't look horrible to my untrained eye. But the web page mentions accessibility, so I'm a little bit surprised it still exists.

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poly2it 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Administered during none other than the first term of Trump, as mentioned in the article!

	▲	mrweasel 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That just makes it incredibly silly. A good argument from the current administration would have been to pick Public Sans and argue: We paid good money to have a good, generic, license free font developed for the government, and the previous administration went with a font that will cost us money in terms of licensing (not sure how true that might be, but it's potentially true, if used outside Microsoft Word). But the current Trump administration has a fun way of forgetting everything done during his first presidency. Even the smart choices. I can't imagine how much all this rebranding is costing the US taxpayers.

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mjmsmith 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Trump Grotesque.

	▲	tmoertel 16 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You joke, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Mediaeval (Note that this font predates Donald Trump's rise.)
	▲	knallfrosch 17 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		All letters have a shiny 3D gold effect you can't turn off.
	▲	treetalker 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		But we repeat ourselves.
	▲	Perceval 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Trump does use Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended as one of his main campaign fonts

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kccqzy 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love Garamond as a style but it wouldn’t be my choice for legibility. Most renditions of Garamond have too little x-height.

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jamesliudotcc 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The worst is Times New Roman text with Calibri page numbers. A sure sign somebody never learned how to use Microsoft Word.

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sgarland 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Does Word not default to switching all typefaces - header, footer, etc.? If so, IMO that’s a bad design that violates the principle of least surprise.

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clan 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Word works very well without surprises if you have learned how to use templating and proper headers - the semantics. Big if!

I will claim most people still just do selections and change font/weight.

So what is good design? Something which enforces our geeky ideas of a base font? Or something which let people easily do what they want to do and get work done? Who should get the least amount of surprise?

Design is taste. Taste leads to principles. Principles makes things easy. Design is also compromise. Compromise is hard. Design is hard.

	▲	renewiltord 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In fact best way to use Word is to write LaTeX in it and then save as .txt and run pdflatex. It is truly an amazing editor capable of great typesetting.

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necovek 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

While it is possible to use "semantic" styling and page layouts and templates in Word, I would argue that Word owes its popularity to the fact that no user is surprised when they select text, change the font, it does not change it anywhere else.

It is one of the tools that popularised "WYSIWYG" as an approach, and as we know from many other tools, you lose something when you adopt a tool like that.

Now, I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system (but despite my huge respect for DEK, not Computer Modern family of fonts, even for mathematics), but many struggle with non-visual document entry: it is no surprise scientific community is the only one which standardized on it since inputting mathematics visually is a PITA.