> For 15 years, our beloved Calibri was Microsoft’s default font and crown keeper of office communications, but as you know, our relationship has come to a natural end.
I couldn’t see in this article, or in the linked one, any rationale for what prompted the change, why the relationship with Calibri has come to a natural end, or why the new font is better than the old font.
Part of it is display technology. Calibri was chosen for an era where typography was increasingly digital but serif fonts rendered badly on the low-resolution screens of ~2009.
Aptos is still sans-serif but I think its shapes are too subtle for a low resolution monitor from that era. It looks much better on "Retina"-esque devices that are viewed in closeup.
The psychology of type is complicated. Some of it is fashion; some of it is innate; some of it is cultural which is neither completely arbitrary nor completely immutable.
In addition consumers begin to spot things that look out of place and attribute negatively to that. Calibri definitely looks "quaint" these days with its very rounded, extremely soft shapes.
I still use fonts with good hinting that pre-date Calibri (e.g. Verdana) because they were hinted for displays that didn't always have anti-aliasing available. On this display I intentionally turn AA off and override browser choices because I like crisp fonts not blurry smeared fonts.
I don't have a 4K display and I would suggest to OS makers to smarten up and turn AA off today because you don't need AA on higher ppi displays.
Fonts, like layout and design goes through fads and I dislike the current trend of "let's make everything spindly and hard to see in a sea of endless whitespace". For me, my perspective on typography is that the most important part of it is the user experience, i.e. readability!
I don't care how uniquely sculpted an individual single character in isolation is. What's important is readability. Can the reader view the text with flow in comfort? If yes, then it is successful. If not, then it's just faddish presentation that needs overriding with more sane choices. Part of that is also the weight of the type, there needs to be balance with the page background also so the letters don't shimmer, etc.
> I dislike the current trend of "let's make everything spindly and hard to see in a sea of endless whitespace".
Actually, the peak of that phase is gone for several years now. We’re already back at proper contrast, borders, and shadows. Take a look at more recent redesign, or just the front page of Dribbble, to notice that.
If HN had a "pin" feature for comments, this would take the cake.
It feels far too coincidental for this not to be relevant. Fashion/busybodies of font stylists and marketing and display variance may play a part, but the timing cannot be unrelated.
Has to be. I stopped believe long ago in visual changes in software being anything else than marketing done in "we do improve things" fashion.
I mean, just look at this video of Office icons: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=VvOaGTtY6Y8 It's a new icons set and they're trying to portray it as a technological breakthrough.
Of course changes to the UI and UX are important and always interesting, don't get me wrong - I just despise the all that mindless fluff that always comes with it. Each time I'm having flashbacks of document by Arnell Group who introduced new Pepsi logo: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Oh my… the amount of BS that was written in that document was something truly enlightening. To think that BS cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars…
What do you think sells pepsi cans? Why are there only two brands in the United States that have meaningful market share in the dark syrup + water industry? Do you think it's because of something done by engineers in a basement with papers stacked up to the ceiling, or do you think it is possible that these two companies are global experts in capturing the attention and imagination of billions of people and have done so better than anyone else in human history using the shape of a can, a logo, and a font. If you don't buy the rationale provided in that document, fine, but rationality doesn't sell trillions of cans of syrup water, Vitruvian Man, Golden Ratio, Feng Shui, earth Geodynamo 'woowoo' does.
I think this comment helps me to finally understand the concept of memetic evolution - you are seeing intelligent design, but it's possible that this document just organically was chosen through its version of "natural selection" to be one that has propagated.
Fashion churn is probably part of it, but high-DPI screens are commonplace now and were more-or-less nonexistent when Calibri (which was designed to look good on screens of its era) was introduced. That alone seems like reason enough to have a different default.
The failure is mostly because there's no one left at Microsoft (or anywhere) to do the same research: gather and evaluate data over decades, make informed decisions, iterate on designs etc.
Calibri was never that great IMHO. Just like Apple with their San Francisco font, it’s worth a change to get a really great modern font and it looks like Microsoft went all out for Aptos. I like it
Calibri was a big deal when introduced because, along with the other fonts in that cohort[0] (like Consolas), it was optimized for subpixel rendering (known on Windows as ClearType), which was a new thing too, and made huge difference in quality and comfort of reading text on flat panel displays. It was a good, practical reason to create new set of default fonts.
There is a rationale at the beginning of the article:
> The technology we use every day has changed. And so, our search of the perfect font for higher resolution screens began. The font needed to have sharpness, uniformity, and be great for display type.
To the degrees and manners typography matters, there are better and worse typefaces.
For example, in the past some typefaces were better for optical character recognition than others and a different set of typefaces were easier to read on a CRT.
This is in addition to cultural connotations like are associated with typefaces like Helvetica or Comic Sans where typefaces themselves can say something based on how they have been used over many years.
Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft 365 since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve.
--- end quote ---
It's literally designers keeping their jobs by running in an endless hamster wheel.
Edit: to those downvoting. Read the articles. This is the entirety of their rationale over two articles. The quote above is from the article they linked as "Calibri has come its natural end": https://medium.com/microsoft-design/beyond-calibri-finding-t...
This is really sad, and it's distasteful for them to mention Calibri in their "rationale". The change made 15 years ago wasn't a fashion churn - it was improving legibility and ergonomics by taking advantage of capabilities of new display technologies.
The switch to Calibri & friends was a real, tangible quality improvement, as those fonts were optimized for - then also new - subpixel rendering, known on Windows as ClearType. Anyone who remembers using Windows at that time, and experienced switching from CRTs to flat panel displays, can surely attest for how big jump in comfort it was to enable ClearType and ditch Arial & Courier & Times New Roman for Calibri, Consolas and Cambria.
(I've lost count of how many programs, on how many machines of various people, I've reconfigured to use Calibri and/or Consolas as default, going as far as extracting and copying over the whole font set to Windows XP machines, and by force of habit, also Windows 2000 and Win 2003 machines - which IIRC didn't have proper ClearType, but the new fonts still looked better than defaults.)
Well, I agree with you in general, but Calibri actually seems to have some / cause some trouble. I recently filed a bug against LibreOffice regarding the rendering of ligatures in documents with Calibri, where you see things like:
... and it turns out that this is due to the use of hard-coded bitmaps for ligature hinting provided for some glyphs but not others, which confuses rendering engines.
It's been 15 years; from my point of view, understanding and application of fonts has changed or been improved radically. Smartphones and the mobile internet were only beginning around that time; the amount of people with internet has multiplied fivefold [0] since then, the quality and resolution of screens has gone up by leaps and bounds, and yes, fashion and design changed since then, like how before Calibri, Times New Roman was starting to look and feel old-fashioned.
Do you know if that counts "retina"/"2x"/"HiDPI" resolutions as their real or displayed resolution?
(i.e. would a "retina" 4k display be counted as 1920x1080, or as 3840x2160? I suspect the former, and I believe this font is designed to show well at those doubled resolutions.)
I don't have a high-DPI display, but the display size shown on about:support (which I suspect is also what is being transmitted via telemetry) seems to properly handle Window's display scaling – I've experimentally changed it to a value > 100 % and the display size reported by Firefox remains unaffected, only the scaling changes accordingly.
Plus if you hover over the diagram, you can eventually discover some screen resolutions > 1920x1080, although all of them in the low single-digit percents. (And some might be lumped together underneath the "Other" category.)
Designers feel the need to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security. So once in a while they'll convince corporate they absolutely HAVE to change everything up for no reason, and they'll spew out pages of poetic nonsensical Gish gallop along with it, to hypnotise everyone into agreeing and let corporate convince themselves that they haven't wasted millions that could have been spent on anything else to benefit the company or, dare I say, humanity.
Ever notice how the more pointless or frivolous a change in design is, the more BS the designers include to back up their case? Think of any of the major design milestones of the last few decades - those striking, arresting works of design that revolutionised society. Did any of those come with a high school C-grade creative writing essay attached to it? Of course not. The design speaks for itself. When you have good design, you feel no need to back it up with a mental gymnastic exercise explaining why it actually is a better design and that everyone who disagrees obviously just doesn't have the intellect to appreciate the artistic vision that you have.
The job of designers is solely to make pretty things. The backup plan of designers is to make people feel good with dopamine-inducing verbiage. In the myriad cases where they fail at their job and produce something ugly and demonstrably worse than the previous version, they go into overdrive with the backup plan in the hopes that their mushy sugar-coated words will hide the bitter taste of their regrettable design choices that they've already spent millions of corporate (and, in some cases, taxpayers'!) budget 'executing'.
Notice also how they try to pass it off as just the natural passing of things, like these things happen, get used to it, as if gratuitous interface changes and jarring layout reshuffles are just a fact of life, like taxes, laundry or fruit flies. Like this idea that one's relationship with a font of all things can "come to a natural end." Again, it's a form of hypnosis. Because God forbid the higher-ups snap out of this trance before they sign off another multi-million-dollar contract for some tacky new coat of paint to be slapped all over the old just for the sake of it.
You see the same with cPanel: "It's time to switch to the Jupiter theme." Says who? Who dictates that "the time has come" in this way, as if it's a universal truth and not something they're coercing us into using? Look at any cPanel forum thread where someone asks why they're forcing this godawful new theme upon us and how exactly it's better. The cPanel staff can never give any meaningful answer to those questions, because there are no reasons. So they repeat the same designer nonsense, or better yet, give no reason at all. And so the design of things continues to get worse, the icons less and less readable, the screen space more and more wasted, the corners more rounded, the jobs of normal working people that little bit harder and more unpleasant as they have to squint for the less-readable icons and moved-around UI elements when the previous version worked perfectly fine and was loved by everyone, all for the sake of the ego of some designer somewhere, who I dare say is very pleased with themselves about making life that little bit worse for everyone else.
That's such a cynic and may I say arrogant take on things and on the important work designers do. One could equally argue engineers refactor code just "to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security". Or Product Managers rejig priority lists only "to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security" etc etc etc
There's a difference between designing because they are designing to please a middle-manager that has directed them to "innovate" in that corporate sphere and design that is meant to be used and enjoyed by an end-user in comfort, i.e. human ergonomics.
A design language fad I hated from day one is MS's Metro design language which Apple also adopted in iOS 7, the format of which is that there must be as much glaring white space as possible, the user must be kept guessing which part of the screen is a button or switch and stab randomly at it until they find it, fonts must be spindly and thin, etc.
I couldn’t see in this article, or in the linked one, any rationale for what prompted the change, why the relationship with Calibri has come to a natural end, or why the new font is better than the old font.
Is this just pure fashion churn?