Beyond Calibri: Finding Microsoft’s next default font | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Calibri: Finding Microsoft’s next default font

microsoft.com

37 pointsiruoy20 comments

> Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve.

My first question is "why". That doesn't seem to be answered anywhere in this blog post. I don't see any limitation with the current fonts. Changing the default seems like a solution looking for a problem.

I think OP explains it, actually:

"Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve."

"Erin and Wei: After years of Calibri—known for soft corners and narrow proportions—we were craving something very round, wide, and crisp, and the geometric genre felt like the right direction."

Note: not, 'the users'. Not 'the readers'. There's nothing about inadequate multilingual support, performance optimizations from Variable Fonts, improved legibility as established by experiments, unusual design requirements like uniwidth or light traps, none of that. They are just yet another sans font. (Would even typographers be able to distinguish these 5 new fonts from the vast, enormous, groaning backlog of bland sans fonts which already exist?)

It's all about we, the designers, being bored.

I've become convinced after my past few years of reading design & typography material (like the last 3 decades of 'I Love Typography') that the real reason for most fonts being commissioned or purchased is simply because designers crave the novelty and are bored with their usual fonts, and it's essentially a kind of fringe benefit - like software developers going to conferences or being allowed to use the weird new language du jour for side projects. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you shouldn't take all of the dressed-up justifications much more seriously than, say, wine tasting descriptions.

> I think OP explains it, actually:

> Note: not, 'the users'. Not 'the readers'. There's nothing about inadequate multilingual support, performance optimizations from Variable Fonts, improved legibility as established by experiments, unusual design requirements like uniwidth or light traps, none of that. They are just yet another sans font. (Would even typographers be able to distinguish these 5 new fonts from the vast, enormous, groaning backlog of bland sans fonts which already exist?)

> It's all about we, the designers, being bored.

Yes because office 365 is a finished product and there are no more bugs to be fixed. But it really shows how microsoft works: instead of fixing years old bugs they change the default font.

> I've become convinced after my past few years of reading design & typography material (like the last 3 decades of 'I Love Typography') that the real reason for most fonts being commissioned or purchased is simply because designers crave the novelty and are bored with their usual fonts, and it's essentially a kind of fringe benefit - like software developers going to conferences or being allowed to use the weird new language du jour for side projects. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you shouldn't take all of the dressed-up justifications much more seriously than, say, wine tasting descriptions.

Fully agree. All those fonts look the same and anyway, people just use templates.

The Wired article https://www.wired.com/story/calibri-default-font-microsoft-m... is even blunter! The product manager explicitly says the only problem with Calibri was that it was boring.

(I was amused when, discussing the new fonts on IRC and whether boredom/novelty does indeed drive most sales/commissions/redesigns, someone recommended Butterick's Triplicate as a better font for coding, and the other person bought it then & there - and then said they'd review how much they liked it, just as soon as they figured out how to install new fonts...)

The argument for Calibri was documents were being consumed more on the screen than on paper. Serif’d fonts were considered more legible on paper but not on low res screens of the day.

An argument could be made that with high res screens now common we should return to the more legible serif’d fonts. Unfortunately serifs are seen as old fashioned so I doubt that will happen.

An awful lot of users also still use lo-res displays, and that won’t be changing much because it will remain the cheaper option.

Change is progress! And progress is good! Please don't ask what we're progressing towards though. That's just rude.

If you don't refresh your look every few years, you just start to look "old". I think it also drives upgrades--people stuck on old versions see a different look that seems "fresher" and they'll want to upgrade, too.

The fact that you have to have a Microsoft 365 subscription to be able to use "Cloud Fonts" to try out these fonts is... hilarious. Presumably it'll be a handful of months until they find themselves in a Windows release, I'd hope, but especially considering they have a way to install Fonts via UWP and the Microsoft Store, this feels like a failure of distribution limitations.

Does anyone actually care about this? The samples look effectively identical, both to each other and to other existing fonts that work just fine. I assume they will not be open. If there is anyone who finds this exciting, perhaps they can explain what I'm missing.

Many, many people care about fonts!

Why not just use a font that works everywhere instead of reinventing the wheel? It's gone from stupid to annoying to tiresome over the years opening documents created in Windows on other platforms and having proprietary font problems.

If the web can do it, why can't Microsoft?

well tbf, somehow their cloud fonts at least fixes a big problem. if you are 365 subscriber and deal with people on windows who create word documents your online experience will lack, because of the missing calibri font. this will at least fix it.

I'm also pretty sure that word/excel/powerpoint/outlook for linux will be a big seller.

So you're saying Microsoft can't even get its own existing fonts to work correctly across it's own products?

well at the moment if a font does not exist on your system, it goes through their cloud fonts endpoint. consider you are on a mac with no office suite installed and want to use "Blackadder ITC" it will call: GET https://fs.microsoft.com/fs/4.9/rawguids/35330309812

which is basically the ttf file for blackadder itc.

btw. there is also a list endpoint with all the "guids": https://fs.microsoft.com/fs/4.9/listAll.json (but it's encoded, so that you can't download all of them as easily)

While I don't have much hope for it, I pray MS makes these fonts available under an open license. Is there any indication whether they plan to do this?

Yeah, Microsoft commissioned Cascadia Code to be an open licensed font, so I'd also hoped this blog post ended with links to GitHub repos.

Found a link with a meaningful type sample for each of the new possibilities: https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/microsoft-365/249574/microsof...

They did not think it through and will create a major usability problem for many users. Remember, the default action for paste on many platforms is to copy the font styles too. Consistency of default font across different documents allowed to copy and paste text as easy as Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. With this change users will have to either paste without formatting (not everywhere there is a shortcut for it) or to manually change the formatting.

Does entertaining a bored designer really worth it?..

Tenorite's giving me some Futura vibes. I dig it.

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