Hacker News Reader

Comment by ronbenton | Hacker News Reader

anything on digital.gov is at best on life support given 18F was disbanded and much of the government digital service efforts have been neglected

View on HN

The fonts are open and on github

The Secretary of State recently decreed that sans serif fonts were woke and mandated all communications use Times New Roman.

I doubt they got the memo.

God, I was so hopeful that you were joking but I guess I should know better by now.

I thought it was a joke, then I checked.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/trump-times-...

The quote is milder and the "woke" bit was added by others, but the context is essentially correct.

In an interview, the font's creator took it as a compliment and was a good sport about it.

I'd say “wasteful” diversity move == woke in this context, not sure if that's milder. Just another distraction thrown at us to keep us at each other's throats. (+ keeping better alignment with the carrot man's branding)

Psychoanalysing politicians aside, serif fonts used to be considered more legible, but that doesn't hold any more that much (e.g. much of research shows that people tend to underestimate familiarity when assessing legibility).

Times New Roman is the worst serif font they could have picked.

To be fair, it's replacing Calibri, so it's still an improvement. We should just use Garamond or Caslon for everything, but that'll never happen. :(

I'd go with Baskerville personally.

I like Crimson Pro

The other frontpage article on the same topic[1] makes a fairly good case that both Times and Calibri suck in this role (not least because they are default fonts and receive the social connotations of that) and notes in passing that the US Supreme Court uses Century Schoolbook, IMO a solid choice (helped also by their competent formatting) and perhaps a less artsy look than Garamond &co.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432862

History of the Schwabacher Judenletter repeats

Interesting! I knew that the Nazis repudiated Fraktur fonts in 1941 but I never knew the story behind it.

I actually agree with this but TNR is so tired for a serif font.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com