It's kinda fitting that this type of content-free designer-fluff is published on Medium, but also weird to not be published under a microsoft.com domain. How do I know this isn't a random imposter?
> Principal Program Manager for fonts and Typography, Microsoft Office Design. Formerly Senior Lead PM for fonts and icons, Microsoft Operating Systems Group.
It does seem totally bizarre to me to make a big product announcement on a third party's website.
(Maybe they maxed out their user account quota on Jira and couldn't post a ticket to get someone to publish their article. Not that anything this silly could happen in a multinational corporation. I'm surely imagining experiencing that.)
Go to https://www.microsoft.com/design
Scroll to the bottom.
Look for the set of social media links; the first one is an “M”.
I totally agree though when it comes to longreads of some over funded startup that redesigned their “brand identity” and commissioned some custom “fun, quirky but still authoritative and inclusive” font. That is just designers cirkcle-wanking.
Letterforms make a huge difference to how text is read, perceived, and remembered, and how much it affects us. Unless you’re a wild outlier in some way, you are affected by type treatments.
I don’t know if you can visualize it, but I clearly can: the word “Daisy” set in (a) an elaborate script font, (b) a blocky slab sans-serif, (c) child-like hand-drawn letters. Most people will assign different meanings to each, and many people will derive more meaning from the type than from the word.
Do you have a child? Would you recognize their hand writing? Same thing.