Times New Rubio
This week, The New York Times ran a story, under a shared byline of Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, which reported on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s memo to State Department personnel saying the agency’s official typeface would go back to 14-point Times New Roman from Calibri. The Times didn’t include Rubio’s full statement, but John Gruber obtained a copy from a source and helpfully posted a plain text version.
“Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department’s official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a ‘wasteful’ sop to diversity,” Crowley and Aleaziz wrote on Wednesday. “While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed ‘radical’ diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.”
The reason I’m covering ostensibly arcane typographical choices is right there in the NYT’s copy: accessibility. The Biden administration’s choice to use Calibri, decreed in 2023 under then-Secretary Antony Blinken, was driven in part to be more accessible—Calibri was said to be more readable than Times New Roman. In his piece, Gruber calls bullshit on that notion, saying the motivation was “bogus” and nothing more than a performative, “empty gesture.” He goes on to address Secretary Blinken’s claim, according to a The Washington Post report, that the Calibri-to-Times New Roman shift was made because serif fonts like Times New Roman “can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers [and] can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities.” Gruber rightly rails against the OCR and screen-reader rationale as more bullshit while also questioning the visual recognition part.
I’m here to tell you the visual recognition part is true, insofar as certain fonts can render text inaccessible to people with certain visual (and cognitive) disabilities. This is because the design of letters, numerals, symbols, et al, can look “weird” and not “normal” to certain people and how one’s brain processes visual information. Why this is important is because bad typography can, for a person with low vision like yours truly, adversely affect the reading experience—both in comprehension and physically. Depending on your needs and tolerances, slogging through a weird font can actually lead to physical discomfort like eye strain and headaches. It’s why, to name just one example, the short-lived ultra-thin variant of Helvetica Neue was so derided in the first few iOS 7 betas back in 2013. It was too thin to be useful in terms of legibility, prioritizing aesthetics over functionality. (A cogent argument could be made the tweaks Apple has made to Liquid Glass, including adding appearance toggles, are giant, flashing neon signs of correction from similarly prioritizing aesthetics over function at the outset.)
As somewhat of a font nerd myself—I agonized over what to use at Curb Cuts when designing the site before settling on Big Shoulders and Coda—I personally find Times New Roman ugly as all hell and not all that legible, but I can see the argument that it’s more buttoned-up than Calibri for official correspondence within the State Department. Typographical nerdery notwithstanding, however, what I take away from Rubio’s directive is simple: he cares not one iota for people with disabilities, just like his boss.
