alt Hacker NewsIn 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).
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> I would think that Times fits the US State Dept better.
Any government communication should prioritise readability over “brand alignment”.
they actually did create their own font for public state affairs, and ist open on GitHub: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans
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).
See:
https://www.govinfo.gov/collection/gpo-style-manual
and contrast 2000 to 1984 and earlier.