Can a typeface be too woke?
In these charged times, apparently even the appearance of letters is a political statement. It sure seems that way to the U.S. State Department, which just ordered a move from Calibri to Times New Roman in official correspondence. That reverses a 2023 department shift to Calibri.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in an internal directive, suggested the previous change was a failed diversity effort.
For almost 20 years, Times New Roman had been the State Department’s official typeface. But in 2023, under the previous administration, the department’s DEI office recommended going with Calibri for accessibility reasons.
Calibri was considered easier to read for people with low vision or dyslexia, or who use assistive technologies like screen readers. You see, Times New Roman is an example of a serif typeface, meaning it has small decorative strokes at the ends of letters. Calibri is sans-serif, without those strokes, so the letters appear cleaner, simpler and more modern.
Rubio, however, said that using Calibri degraded the department’s paperwork, and that serif typefaces “connote tradition, formality and ceremony”.
Make fonts great again, I suppose.
While Rubio admitted that going with Calibri wasn’t among the State Department’s “most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances” of DEI, it was nevertheless deemed bad enough to overturn. So, accessibility was out. All for the sake of a typeface that, to some, smacks of importance.
Seeing this news sent me down a rabbit hole.
Times New Roman came to be in 1931, when the British daily paper, The Times, was looking for a new typeface. Roman, in this case, refers to one of the three main styles of Latin script typography (along with blackletter and italic).
The typeface became ubiquitous across publishing. But in 2007, Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Microsoft Word, and also replaced Arial as the default typeface in PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. In 2024, Calibri was in turn replaced in Microsoft Office by Aptos, Microsoft’s new custom typeface (also sans-serif).
Deeper down the hole, I started to read up on a branch of academic research that has examined how typefaces are perceived to have political attributes.
For instance, at Virginia Tech a pair of communications professors had subjects read a neutral phrase or a name in each of two typefaces – one serif and one sans-serif. The subjects rated the typeface as liberal or conservative, and also answered a series of questions related to their own political leanings.
The results, published in 2019 in the journal Communication Studies, found that the serif typeface was viewed as more conservative than the sans-serif group. And they preferred whichever style they felt “aligned” with their politics.
The researchers surmised that this stemmed from the visual cues: serifs signal tradition (conservatism), while sans‑serifs project a more modern aesthetic (liberalism). People absorb these qualities and subconsciously map them onto a political ideology.
Helpful to know if you’re designing campaign posters or working in the propaganda business. Still, you’d think the U.S. Secretary of State has better things to do than police typefaces. Guess there’s a new sheriff in town – or should that be new serif?
Of course typography conveys meaning, just like colour palettes, spacing, scale, composition, etc. All of it communicates. That’s design 101. What’s off‑putting is watching Rubio treat typefaces like a battlefield in the culture war.
Lucas de Groot, the Dutch designer who created Calibri, told the BBC that the State Department change was “sad and hilarious”.
It’s also absurd. But given the government’s war on DEI and obsession with symbols, this is all according to type.
Stuart Foxman is a Toronto-based freelance writer, who helps clients’ products, services, ideas and organizations to come alive. Connect with me here on LinkedIn, or check me out at foxmancommunications.com where I share these blogs too. More original posts coming regularly about communications, information, motivation, writing, branding, creativity, media, marketing, persuasion, messages, learning, etc.
December 10, 2025