Microsoft revealed on Thursday, that some of its most well-known apps would undergo a transition in the near future. It will choose a new default font for Word and Excel, among other Office applications. As a result, the font that has been the norm since 2007 — a sans-serif called Calibri — will no longer be used nearly as much. Another sign that this isn’t the same Microsoft as before is the transition. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, Microsoft has become easier to work with for partners, and has strategically welcomed third-party platforms rather than stubbornly rejecting them, and also has morphed into a formidable competitor in the ever-expanding cloud computing market.
It’s arguable that Microsoft software’s appearance needs to be updated. Lucas de Groot, the Dutch type designer behind Calibri, was taken aback. During a video interview from his home in Berlin, he said, “I had not expected it to be kind of replaced already.” Lucas said that he did not intend to be consulted on the decision and that he is pleased that Microsoft is investing in new fonts to improve the value of its apps. He reasoned that the move was motivated by a desire to keep up with current fashion trends rather than a desire to improve Calibri’s legibility.
Calibri was started in 2002 by De Groot. He’d been tasked with creating a monospace typeface proposal for an unidentified client by an intermediary. He had no idea that the client had solicited other ideas. In addition to the monospace work, he was also asked to design a sans serif font, so he sent some Calibri sketches. De Groot travelled to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, in 2003 to consult with designers, consultants, and members of the company’s typography team.
De Groot said he argued at the meeting, that Microsoft should have old-style figures — characters of different heights — to aid reading. The name was difficult to come up with. Microsoft requested names beginning with the letter C for both of his fonts. “I had suggested Clas, a Scandinavian first name synonymous with ‘class,’ but the Greek advisor said it meant ‘to fart’ in Greek,” de Groot explained in an email. Then I suggested Curva or Curvae, which I still like, but the Cyrillic advisor informed me that it meant “prostitute” in Russian, and that it is indeed used as a common curse word.” Microsoft’s legal team also reviewed to see whether any of the potential names had already been trademarked.
Calibri was the company’s motto, and de Groot thought it was strange at first. Colibri, a hummingbird species, looked a lot like it. However, Microsoft employees later explained that it was due to the rasterizer in the company’s ClearType font rendering system being calibrated. He had no idea what would happen to Calibri after he sent it over. He thought it would be part of a programming environment at first. He didn’t find out it would become the default in Office, which has 1.2 billion users, until a few years later. Calibri works with lining figures with standardised characters by default, but users can change this in Word.
Calibri replaced the staid twentieth-century serif font Times New Roman on millions of PCs with the release of Office 2007. It quickly spread throughout the city. For resumes, it quickly became a common choice. It’s been used to solve forgery cases, and it was included in a Pakistani corruption investigation that included then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2017. Former President Donald Trump’s uncle, Donald Trump Jr., used Calibri to leak an email exchange about a meeting with a Russian lawyer to collect information on Hillary Clinton, who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
De Groot has worked on Calibri extensively over the years. He added heavier weights and Hebrew support, and he said he submitted a prototype for a variable Calibri font three years ago, though Microsoft has yet to release it. As recently as two weeks ago, he was working on Calibri updates. And he began receiving news-related emails from journalists: On Thursday, Microsoft’s design team revealed five fonts that it had commissioned, one of which will eventually replace Calibri, in a blog post. They wrote that Calibri had “served us all well,” but that it was “time to evolve.”
De Groot couldn’t stop himself from inspecting the five fonts. He saved them to his computer and put them to the test. Tobias Frere-Jones, Nina Stössinger, and Fred Shallcrass of the New York studio Frere-Jones Type created the font Seaford, which he likes. “It has a very strong design,” he said, adding that he would like to see it become the new default. “It isn’t completely neutral, but it is a very nice design,” says the author.
