“There’s no typeface for irony,” various editors over the years have told me reproachfully, as their red pencils scored out my attempts at humour. No question of leaving words’ real meaning to the reader’s intelligence, no question of encouraging that empathetic, unspoken moment of mutual understanding when reader and writer commune on another level without the awful, unforgivable line “this is a joke”.
Typefaces are no joke, no insignificant mere decoration, but imbued with as much meaning as the words they shape. They, like all aspects of culture, can signify everything from emotion to nationality, to social or technological change, to zaniness, to politics. And they can become battlegrounds in their own right, not least around “serifs”, small lines or projections at the extremities of many characters that many feel make letters more elegant and easier to distinguish from one another.
Last week, US secretary of state Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces with an edict halting the State Department’s official use of “sans serif” face Calibri in internal and external correspondence, in effect subtly rebranding US diplomacy for the age of Donald Trump and Maga.
A return to the use of Times New Roman, a serif typeface commissioned for use by The Times in 1931 and said to project classicism, formality and hierarchy, was an effort to “restore decorum and professionalism”, Rubio said, and to abolish what he called a “wasteful DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) programme”.
READ MORE
President Trump’s attack on DEIA in the military, education, the law, the arts and even science has been the major leitmotif of his presidential refashioning of America; typography is only the latest target.
Echoing Trump’s recent diktat requiring a return to the classical style in federal architecture, Rubio’s order also cited the origins of serif typefaces in Roman antiquity. So we are talking about promoting not just formality, but a hankering after empire and conquest.
The decision reverses a 2023 shift to the “informal” Calibri, which was adopted because it is easier to read for visually impaired users and works better on screen.
‘So what is Rubio playing at? Could it be that Times New Roman’s authority, professionalism and decorum make Trumpian lies more palatable than Calibri does? Surely not’
Trump’s relationship to typography in business and politics, as in much else, is inconsistent. But ironically, given his apparent hostility to sans type, his name was shouted out from election posters in Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended, one of the first widespread sans-serifs, that was designed in 1896, and a forerunner to the postwar, largely ubiquitous, Helvetica.
He also borrowed from Barack Obama’s much-commented-on and ground-breaking use of Gotham, a versatile typeface known for its geometric shapes and clean lines, praised by the Boston Globe for “the ever-present rising sun logo [that] has the feeling of a hot new internet company”.
The attempts by Rubio and Trump to turn back the clock typographically have strange historical resonances. In 1930s and ’40s Germany, typographical politics were a far more dangerous business.
With the rise to power of the Nazis and their violent opposition to “degenerate art”, typography became an expression of the culture war. The ’20s had seen a cultural blossoming in Germany, spearheaded by the Bauhaus art school of architect Walter Gropius. Its ideas had a profound effect on Paul Renner, whose new Futura typeface, a geometric sans-serif font, would attempt to distil the essence of the machine age, a type characterised by clean lines, a perfectly rounded “o”, uniform strokes and geometric forms.
Futura stood in stark contrast to the ornate embellishments of the Victorian era and the elaborate Blackletter or Gothic typefaces, supposedly rooted in Aryan heritage, which were to the Nazis the only true German way to print. Renner, who also antagonised them by insisting on a lower case “b” for Bauhaus, was arrested, dismissed from his professorship in Munich, and forced into exile in Switzerland.
After the war, Futura’s universal uniting appeal paved the way for Helvetica’s 1957 emergence, with its clean lines, no-nonsense shapes and simple efficiency, to become the dominant typeface. Calibri, a softer rounder digital font, born of the same family, and released to the general public in 2006, would replace Times New Roman as the default font in Word and Arial as the default font in PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook.
So what is Rubio playing at? Could it be that Times New Roman’s authority, professionalism and decorum make Trumpian lies more palatable than Calibri does? Surely not.
This column, written in Aptos, Microsoft’s default typeface following Calibri, is coming to you in Noto typeface if you’re reading it online, or Expresso in print. Any irony detected has been accidentally overlooked by the type police.
