The Typeface of Authority

Why the State Department's font mandate reveals misplaced priorities in digital governance

Among the many weighty decisions confronting America's top diplomat—nuclear proliferation, trade negotiations, consular services for citizens detained abroad—Secretary of State Marco Rubio has identified his priority: fonts. Specifically, a mandate requiring all State Department documents and contractor work to abandon Calibri for Times New Roman. One imagines career foreign service officers, mid-briefing on Middle Eastern peace initiatives, receiving an urgent memo about serif selection. "Hold that thought on regional stability—we need to discuss descenders."

The absurdity would be complete if not for the price tag. A 2019 study in PLOS One calculated that manuscript reformatting devours 23.8 million hours globally each year, costing US research institutions alone $202 million annually making text look different without changing what it says. The State Department, whose entire business model involves people staring at screens and typing, has just volunteered its workforce for this particular circle of bureaucratic hell. Every employee now manually overrides Microsoft's defaults multiple times daily, accumulating what economists politely call "friction costs" and everyone else calls "death by a thousand paper cuts."

Microsoft ditched Times New Roman as its default in 2007 for reasons that seem almost quaint in their logic: most people read documents on screens now. Times New Roman was designed for 1930s metal type—optimized for ink squishing onto newsprint, not pixels glowing on LCD displays. Calibri's humanist letterforms actually work for the medium where State Department officers spend their days: hunched over laptops in windowless rooms, not lounging in leather armchairs with printed dispatches and a pipe. But such ergonomic trifles apparently pale beside the font's deeper mission: projecting gravitas.

And here lies the tell. Times New Roman signals Serious Business—the typeface of term papers solemnly submitted to professors, of Important Documents emerging from Institutions of Weight. It evokes a misty-eyed nostalgia for an era when America wore fedoras and meant business, even if that era exists primarily in imagination. For an administration ostensibly barreling toward the future, this is a curious backward glance. Then again, consistency has never been branding's strong suit. Branding changes with the, ahem, times. Alas, the economics of employee workflows have no such latitude. 

Design Director Scott Kellum notes that Microsoft's font shifts have tracked genuine technological inflection points. Moving to Calibri made sense when LCD screens proliferated. The recent switch to Aptos in 2023 chases geometric trends while maintaining screen optimization. But reverting to Times New Roman is like mandating that smartphones use rotary dials—technically functional, spiritually bewildering. The paper memo some executive might read represents perhaps 5% of a document's existence; screen-based drafting consumes the rest. Optimizing for the former while penalizing the latter suggests either profound misunderstanding or profound indifference to how work actually happens.

Technologies exist to solve these problems. Kellum's Typetura system creates responsive typography that adapts across devices without requiring designers to rebuild everything for each screen size—the digital equivalent of pants that magically fit whether you're sitting or standing. The W3C recently codified the approach into web standards, meaning browsers now support it natively. But such forward-thinking solutions require acknowledging that the future might differ from 1932.

The State Department's font mandate ultimately succeeds at one thing: clearly signaling priorities. Form has trumped function. Aesthetics have conquered efficiency. And somewhere, a foreign service officer is manually changing fonts instead of, say, doing diplomacy. At least the memo looked authoritative.

Referred study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0223976

Additional reference (ed’s note: this article is not a perfect match for the topic of the CX Pod, but it has interesting tangential topic areas): https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy

Host: Aaron Meyers
Guests: Ana Monroe, Scott Kellum
Text: Abigail Adams
Artwork:Laocoön c. 1610/1614 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). Via the National Gallery of Art. 

Why this artwork? The serpents twining around the bodies of Laocoon and his sons seems appropriate, given the strictures of this typographic change from the US State Department.