Times change, but the Trump administration doesn’t and its longstanding “war on woke” has a new victim. Not happy with recent budget changes to “eliminate funding for cultural Marxism” or dismantling USAid in early 2025, they’ve now come for the wokest symbol of them all: a font.
Yes, that’s right. The thing that is holding America back from being great again is a typeface. If only that were true. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has set about reinstating Times New Roman as the department’s default font “to restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program”.
I’ll tell you what’s wasteful: switching fonts across a large national department. I’ve worked on several newspaper redesigns where we’ve changed fonts, mostly due to changes in technology and reader habits. What worked well in print back in the day doesn’t work so well for a mobile phone screen. What was once majestic and authoritative on a broadsheet newspaper became uneconomical space-wise when British newspapers became compact (tabloid, to you and me).
I know from experience that switching a font on a systems scale isn’t as simple as waking up in the morning and deciding which one takes your fancy in the drop down menu. I’d liken it more to recarpeting a house: all the furniture has to come out, skirting boards are ripped from walls and then everything has to be made good afterwards. Wasteful, in other words, if your objective is just to have another blow on the dog whistle.
I don’t love Calibri, the sans-serif typeface designed by Lucas de Groot in 2004 that the Biden administration installed, but I can see why it was a practical choice for a state department. It’s legible on screens, where most people now read. It’s also neutral and dispassionate for conveying dense information.
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Switching to Times New Roman, designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent in 1931 for the Times of London newspaper, is the highest pitched dogwhistle of them all. How many typographers are out there stroking their beards right now connecting the dots? “Ah yes, Times New Roman, the anti-woke font of choice. Heralding from the good old interwar days. When the US was cursed by the deepening Great Depression, marked by severe unemployment, food riots, and bank failures. Nothing woke about those days.” None, I’d wager.
Marco, on your mission to Maga you overlooked one key thing: neither of these typefaces was designed by an American. Sad. And while I’m at it, you might want to have a word with your neighbours in the US Customs and Border Protection department. They’re using a font called Joanna, designed by a Brit called Eric Gill. Wait till the populists find out about his story…
Photograph by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images