As for Calibri, even Microsoft has moved on. They designed a successor font family for even better readability, and that happened before the State Department changed to Calibri. It also has serif variants.
Word works very well without surprises if you have learned how to use templating and proper headers - the semantics. Big if!
I will claim most people still just do selections and change font/weight.
So what is good design? Something which enforces our geeky ideas of a base font? Or something which let people easily do what they want to do and get work done?
Who should get the least amount of surprise?
Design is taste. Taste leads to principles. Principles makes things easy. Design is also compromise. Compromise is hard. Design is hard.
In fact best way to use Word is to write LaTeX in it and then save as .txt and run pdflatex. It is truly an amazing editor capable of great typesetting.
While it is possible to use "semantic" styling and page layouts and templates in Word, I would argue that Word owes its popularity to the fact that no user is surprised when they select text, change the font, it does not change it anywhere else.
It is one of the tools that popularised "WYSIWYG" as an approach, and as we know from many other tools, you lose something when you adopt a tool like that.
Now, I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system (but despite my huge respect for DEK, not Computer Modern family of fonts, even for mathematics), but many struggle with non-visual document entry: it is no surprise scientific community is the only one which standardized on it since inputting mathematics visually is a PITA.
The Warren Commission report was set in Century Schoolbook, the Supreme Court's typeface of choice. The appendices are photo reproductions of originals produced on typewriters, so they are in something monospaced.
You can see for yourself. They certainly would not have used Times New Roman.
But I suppose interoffice memoranda are meant to be skimmed, not read, so TNR or Calibri are both fine.
I didn’t mean to suggest that they would’ve. I just named a government document with significant gravity behind it to affect a point similar to the author’s:
> There’s nothing inherently wrong with this style, but one would hardly want an official document or legal contract to appear “warm and soft.”
Consider the response I gave to the other child comment on this thread referring to a different document as a revision if that suits you. [1]
I’m sorry. I don’t know of nor do I have the wherewithal to find any correspondence from the State Department to bolster my argument that “humanist fonts” are not always suited to the tenor of all government correspondence. Oddly, none of the press releases on state.gov are available in PDF as far as I can tell.
Wait.
At least imagine this!
> The State Department is taking decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies. As such, I have determined that their entry, presence, or activities in the United States have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.
It’s already in “Open Sans”, which looks thinner and may have a taller X-height. What do you think of it? Not quite “warm”; certainly “soft”, I think. Should I feel concerned about this news? Or just alright?
Anodyne. That’s the way the words start to look after some time when set like this. How far away is that feeling from “banal”?
If the US wants a truly "traditional" typeface, the choice would be Caslon.
Caslon was used to print the first 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence. Old Caslon was used for Thomas Paine's Common Sense. It was also a favorite of printers throughout the US including Benjamin Franklin.
> After the earthquake Google's researchers changed the algorithm, and simulated the first earthquake again.
> This time, the system generated 10 million Take Action alerts to those at most risk – and a further 67 million Be Aware alerts to those living further away from the epicentre.
So, basically, Google learned from the data, improved the algorithm, and they are blamed for not having done that before the earthquake.
The headline makes it sound like Google had the good model before, and something went wrong in the notification system so nobody got the alert.
