Serif tiffs, type gripes and character assassination

WHAT IT IS: The U.S. State Department has spent the last several days at the centre of a font debate, after a Dec. 9 announcement that official department documents would use Times New Roman typeface, ousting the Calibri typeface instituted during the former administration.

For a department accustomed to monitoring serious global conflicts, this “fontroversy” involves considerably smaller stakes.

Still, as history has proven, typeface wars can be hard-fought and fraught, sometimes even vicious.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: The miracle of mass-produced printed language relies on typefaces, which are standardized sets of letters, numbers and symbols. Several factors go into the design of what is estimated to be the roughly 200,000 different typefaces now in use, including shape, spacing, weight and contrast.

There’s also a broad division between serif typefaces — those with small decorative “tails” on some letters — and sans-serif typefaces, which use cleaner, simpler lines.

Most individuals and institutions choose fonts by trying for some sane, sensible balance of form and function.

Still, as with so much of our shared visual culture, typefaces have taken on cultural and political connotations. They have histories. They have personalities. Designers regularly describe typefaces as “boring” or “friendly” or “elegant” or “quirky” or “corporate” or “uncompromising” or “trusty” or “frivolous.” Regular people — not just type nerds — often ardently love them or passionately hate them.

When IKEA went from Futura to Verdana between the 2009 and 2010 catalogues, for example, outraged font fans started a petition.

Comic Sans, a supremely silly typeface, caused a ruckus when the supposedly super-smart folks at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, used it to make a serious scientific announcement about the Higgs boson particle in 2012.

In 2008, some purists set up Papyrus Watch, a website devoted to documenting the misuse of the rough, raggedy typeface that is meant to replicate aged calligraphy on papyrus paper.

This much-maligned typeface was seen most famously in James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar, and later spoofed in a 2017 SNL sketch in which Ryan Gosling plays an ordinary man undone by his spiralling obsession with this primal mystery: Why, why, why did one of the most expensive movies ever made use such an ugly, awful, cheapo font?

Not all typeface drama is hostile. There’s lots of affection out there, too. The Garamond group of typefaces is beloved by writers and readers for its refined, graceful forms and long connection with Penguin Classics. There’s a whole crazed family of fonts associated with heavy metal album covers, which devotees will defend to the death. Courier New, which has regular and very roomy spacing, has long been a boon for undergraduates trying to pad their paper lengths.

Some typefaces end up as magnets for both love and hate. Helvetica is an 80-minute documentary about a single typeface, one that was specifically designed to be neutral but still somehow provokes extreme responses. The 2007 film features designers talking about Helvetica, developed in Switzerland in 1957, with some hyping it as contemporary, cool and liberating, while others denounce it as overused, obvious and rigidly conformist.

The recent State Department kerfuffle involves two popular fonts, but — as we see so often in this polarized period — the fight seems to go beyond purely typographical issues, as some commentators position Times New Roman as MAGA and Calibri as “woke.”

Times New Roman was originally developed for the Times of London newspaper in the 1930s and, as with many serif typefaces, is associated with tradition and formality. It also functions well for physical printed matter.

Calibri, which was used in the State Department during the Biden administration, is a clean-lined and modern sans-serif typeface released in 2006 and designed to be more readable in digital formats, as well as more legible for people with certain vision impairments.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended Times New Roman as a return to seriousness and decorum. He has attacked Calibri as a holdover of Biden-era accessibility programs, denouncing it as wasteful.

Meanwhile, Calibri’s defenders counter that if you want to talk about wastefulness, how about starting with those unnecessary serif-style doodads on the ends of Times New Roman’s letters? And if you want to champion sober, professional typefaces in official settings, maybe have a word with the boss, President Donald Trump, who has recently started using a gilded “Live, Laugh, Love”-style cursive font — associated with wedding invites and twee home goods — for White House signage.

WHY IT MATTERS: Typography matters. Typefaces are first about functionality, but they also convey esthetic preferences, hold emotional associations, suggest historical connections. And crucially — as this latest font skirmish demonstrates — they convey political messages.

In an especially divisive age, then, typefaces will be especially divisive.

Here’s hoping we can get back to a better time, a simpler time, a time when we could all just come together to hate on Papyrus.

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