Si Daniels, principal program manager for fonts and typography, Microsoft Office design (my god do people at Microsoft have long titles), in a much-noted post last week on Medium,¹ “A Change of Typeface: Microsoft’s New Default Font Has Arrived”:

Dear every human on earth that’s ever typed text,

I know this is just a lighthearted salutation, but it’s not the typing of text that exposes “everyone” to Office’s default font, it’s the reading of text. I have never regularly used any Office app other than Excel, and that was over 20 years ago. But it’s impossible not to encounter documents created with Office, whether you personally use it or not. Thus, Microsoft’s typographic choices affect us all. (I’ve never once set anything in Arial, for example, but it’s a near daily irritation thanks to its ubiquity.)

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. We changed. 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. It was exciting at times, but also intimidating. How do you replace Calibri? How do you find that one true font that can take its place as the rightful default?

As we shared before, Microsoft commissioned five new fonts: Bierstadt, Grandview, Seaford, Skeena, and Tenorite. It was our hope that one of them would be our next default font for Microsoft 365. All of them were added to the drop-down font picker. From there, as you got a chance to use them, we listened to your impassioned feedback and chose the one that resonated most which was Bierstadt. But as there was a change of guard so too the name. Bierstadt is now known as Aptos.

I don’t know if Microsoft actually chose Aptos (née Bierstadt) based on customer feedback, but it says a lot about the company either way. Companies that have taste do not conduct design via surveys. (My guess is they’re full of shit and probably knew all along they were going to go with Aptos/Bierstadt, the obvious choice, from the start. The “survey”, such that it was, seemingly consisted of just reading people’s replies on Twitter.)

What I find weird about the whole thing is that Microsoft still hasn’t really shown any of these new fonts. They’ve provided glimpses of them, but mostly at large display sizes, not text sizes, which is where they really matter in the context of Office documents. I’m not the only one to find this curious.

So I took matters into my own hands, and created rudimentary specimens for each of Microsoft’s five new typefaces (and Calibri to boot). A–Z in upper- and lowercase, 0–9, and the most common punctuation marks. Then a paragraph of sample text at 11 points. Dear reader, you really owe me for this one, because I had to use the web app version of Word, by way of Microsoft 365² to produce these PDFs. To describe this software as brutal and frustrating is an understatement. Herewith, the PDF specimens, and my brief comments:

• Aptos — Designed by Steve Matteson. I don’t know why Microsoft states as fact that Calibri somehow needed to be replaced as their default font just because it’s 15 years old. A good default font should stand the test of time for decades, if not a literal lifetime.³ But if Microsoft feels the need to chase fleeting fashion rather than timeless style, Aptos is the trendiest of the bunch: grotesque sans serifs are having a moment. Aptos is by no means a rip-off of Apple’s San Francisco, but it is, by far, the most San-Francisco-esque of any of these typefaces. Noteworthy characters: J (stunted and ugly), Q (small tail), R (inspired by Univers?), g (double-story, reminiscent of Franklin Gothic’s), and the numeral 1 (curved hat, a la, of all fonts, Arial). But the most distinctive character is the lowercase L, which has a curve to differentiate it from the uppercase i and numeral 1.

• Grandview — Designer Aaron Bell admits Grandview was largely inspired by DIN, and it certainly looks like it. Far too mechanical to serve as the default font. For chrissake look at those quotation marks and apostrophes.

• Seaford — Designed by Tobias Frere-Jones, Nina Stössinger, and Fred Shallcrass. Seaford strikes me as the only other font in the bunch that might conceivably have been chosen as the new default. If Microsoft had better (any?) taste, they would have chosen Seaford. Seaford strikes my eye as most similar to Martin Majoor’s rightfully renowned and beloved Scala Sans, with — maybe — a wee dose of influence from, of all typefaces, Frere-Jones’s ex-partner Jonathan Hoefler’s aptly-named Ideal Sans.⁴

• Skeena — Designed by John Hudson and Paul Hanslow. Looks like it came off a clip art CD circa 1995.

• Tenorite — Designed by Erin McLaughlin and Wei Huang. Admittedly inspired by Adrian Frutiger’s hall-of-fame typeface Avenir, and looks like it. Too friendly, bordering on childish (see the single-story lowercase “a”), to serve as the default for Office.

• Calibri — Designed by Lucas de Groot. It’s not my bag, personally,⁵ but Calibri is both a very good sans serif and a fine default for Office. There’s no reason Microsoft couldn’t have stuck with Calibri for decades to come.

Postscript

The kerning is rather awful in all of these PDF specimens, at times jarringly so. I suspect, or at least hope, the problem is with the web version of Word (which I presume has its own text rendering engine), not the fonts themselves. Look, for example, at the words milliner and Uncle (which looks like “Unde” in some of them) in the sample text. If these fonts were available for download, I’d have typeset the specimens using better software, but they’re not, so I can’t. I suppose I could fish out the web fonts used by Microsoft 365, but this whole endeavor has consumed enough of my time as it is.

It’s funny what gains traction for the long haul, and what turns out, in hindsight, to be a flash in the pan. I, for one, never would have predicted that WordPress would grow to become, by far, the most popular CMS in the world, and the foundation of a thriving company whose primary goal is making the web a better platform.

Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire on Ron DeSantis’s much-ballyhooed campaign launch on Twitter Spaces yesterday:

In the end, the event had all of the appeal of a glitchy conference call.

Politics aside, the event was humiliating for Elon Musk and Twitter. The space crashed on the server side several times, and it crashed the Twitter app on my iPhone at least 6 or 7 times. And even when it finally got going, the audio quality was terrible.

Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull, in an essay for The New York Times:

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.

Matt Levine, unsurprisingly, wrote a great column on Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. He predicts the FDIC will succeed in finding a bigger buyer to buy SVB and make all depositors whole — both because SVB should still be worth enough to buy at such a price, and because otherwise, the results could be catastrophic industry-wide:

I would also guess — not investing or banking advice! — that the answer will also turn out to be higher than $188 billion, which is the total amount of deposits plus FHLB advances. I say this not because I have done a detailed analysis of SVB’s assets but because it seems bad for the FDIC to wind up a big high-profile bank in a way that causes significant losses for depositors, including uninsured depositors. There was a run on SVB in part because there hasn’t been a big bank run in a while, and people — venture capitalists, startups — were naturally worried that they might lose their deposits if their bank failed. Then the bank failed.

If it turns out to be true that they lose their deposits, there could be more bank runs: Lots of businesses keep uninsured deposits at lots of banks, and if the moral of SVB is “your uninsured transaction-banking deposits can vanish overnight” then those businesses will do a lot more credit analysis, move their money out of weaker banks, and put it at, like, JPMorgan. This could be self-fulfillingly bad for a lot of weaker banks. My assumption is that the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the banks who are looking at buying SVB all really don’t want that. If you are a bank looking at buying SVB, and you do a detailed analysis of its assets and conclude that they are worth $180 billion, and you come to the FDIC and say “I will take over this bank and pay the uninsured depositors 95 cents on the dollar,” the FDIC is going to look at you and say “don’t you mean 100 cents on the dollar,” and you are going to say “oh right yes of course, silly me, 100 cents on the dollar.” 9

Maybe I’m wrong about that, but if I am it’ll be bad!

Omitted from my own roundup of pieces regarding Bing’s extraordinary new AI chatbot mode is this roundup by Simon Willison. Some bananas stuff:

I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever see a mainstream search engine say “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”!

I will again note that at this moment, this confrontational “Sydney” persona has not been fixed or tweaked, but rather is being suppressed.