Marco Rubio's switch to Times New Roman a font faux pas for Calibri camp

Jon Contino, the Wantagh- and Seaford-raised designer, greeted with dismay the news this week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had directed the Department of State to use the Times New Roman 14-point font for official papers.

It seemed, Contino said in a phone interview Thursday, "like part of a vendetta against this DEI-woke thing."

Under some previous administrations, the nation’s diplomats used the nearly century-old Times New Roman, in which letters feature small lines, or serifs or strokes, at the end of larger letter strokes. They did not, notably, when Rubio’s predecessor Antony Blinken ran the department. Under Blinken’s watch, they used the sans serif Calibri, a style choice the department’s chief diversity officer told The New York Times in 2023 was intended to make the nation’s paperwork more easily readable, especially for people with visual disabilities — and therefore "more inclusive."

Rubio: Wasted resources

Rubio, in his order, said changing to Calibri had failed to achieve those goals.

"Although switching to Calibri was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of DEI it was nonetheless cosmetic," he wrote in a cable obtained by The Associated Press and first reported by The New York Times.

Contino, whose clients have included Nike and NFL and MLB teams, took issue with Rubio’s premise. Times New Roman, designed in the 1930s for the Times of London newspaper, partly to fit as much type as possible onto a newsprint page, is a print product "with more of a nostalgic value," said the designer. By contrast, Calibri, designed in the early 2000s, "made a lot of sense because it was designed for a screen." (From 2007 into the early 2020s, Calibri had a massive viewership as the default font on Microsoft Office products.)

If diplomats, like the rest of us, do much of their reading on screens, Contino reasoned, Rubio’s decision could be problematic.

Easier to read

"If you have any visual impairment, these extraneous marks like serifs add confusion to what your eye is interpreting. The reason you use a font like Calibri is because it sheds those extra marks. You’re left with the core structure of the character design — a K is very clearly a K, a Q is a Q," Contino said.

A State Department spokesperson said in an email Thursday that "consistent formatting strengthens credibility and supports a unified Department identity."

The spokesperson said that "Serif typefaces remain the standard in courts, legislatures, and across federal agencies where the permanence and authority of the written record are paramount. Aligning the Department’s practice with this standard ensures our communications reflect the same dignity, consistency, and formality expected in official government correspondence."

The spokesperson also said that "Times New Roman specifically, and serif fonts generally, are more formal and professional."

Whatever the aesthetic benefits Times New Roman may offer, the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that it and other serif typefaces are harder to actually read than simpler fonts like Calibri, said Aaron Johnson, a psychology professor at Concordia University in Montreal who studies reading and the impact of fonts on readers.

Less cluttered

Calibri is "less complex and easier for the eye and the brain to process. It doesn’t have as much clutter as Times New Roman. It also produces less strain. If you read Times New Roman on a computer, it’s more demanding. It takes more of what we’d call cognitive workload to process the text."

Research on fonts, which took off in the 1990s with the advent of tools like eye tracking and EEG brain scans, shows more profound impacts for people who have reading difficulties, like approximately one out of every six American adults, Johnson said. "We’ve done studies with dyslexia that have shown sans serif fonts are not just easier to read but also lead to increased comprehension. If you’re dealing with bills, legal documents or anything where the information is critical, you’d hope they would choose something that’s easier, rather than more difficult."

Calibri’s creator, the Dutch typeface designer Lucas de Groot, said in an emailed statement that he found the State Department’s switch "hilarious and sad."

Groot said his creation "performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman create more visual disturbance ... This decision takes the administration back to the past and back to bad."

In a phone interview, Groot said if the State Department was wedded to the serif, there many still fonts that would serve readers better than Times New Roman, including a number from the minion family of typefaces.

He said, "Of course, it’s not free. They would probably have to buy some licenses. I don’t know if they have to watch every single cent. Probably not."

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.