Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts
A less romantic truth is that aesthetic standards rarely travel alone; power tends to follow in their wake. An episode at the U.S. State Department this month makes exactly this point.
On December 9, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a memo titled “Return to Tradition” that required all State Department documents to switch back to 14-point Times New Roman, overturning a Biden-era directive from 2023 that had turned to 15-point Calibri.
State Department correspondence in Calibri and Times New Roman (Credit: The New York Times)
Frankly, most people likely view both of these simply as “standard typefaces” without distinguishing much difference between them. So why would an institution of the State Department’s scale bother, twice in three years, to take a stance on something as seemingly trivial as a default typeface?
John Gruber, an Apple-sphere blogger with a well-known appetite for political commentary, obtained the full text of Rubio’s memo and published it. (It is worth reading first.) Rubio’s rationale, in simplified form, has three parts. First, serif typefaces are said to better communicate professionalism, formality, and authority in official documents (¶¶ 6–8). Second, using a serif typeface is aligning with the White House, the courts, and the State Department’s own historical practice (¶ 9). Third, the 2023 decision was a “cosmetic” gesture associated with diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) politics, and the reversion a correction to that (¶ 10).
Commentary on American partisan politics is beyond the scope of this article. Still, in neutral terms, Trump’s second term has been marked by an unusually rapid and sweeping effort to repeal or reverse the prior administration’s policies, with DEIA among the earliest targets. The memo itself cites Executive Order 14151, signed on the first day of the term, that instructed federal agencies to terminate all DEIA-related activities, offices, positions, policies, programs, and contracts.
That makes the political element of this typography decision fairly plain: it coheres with, and signals loyalty to, a broader anti-DEIA agenda. The remaining question is whether it is only politics. Put differently, how persuasive are Rubio’s first two, ostensibly nonpolitical claims about design and conventions? Or are they merely pretexts?
To recap, a serif typeface is one with extra decorative strokes, or “serifs,” at the ends of main strokes. A popular narrative links serifs to stone inscriptions: Roman craftsmen would sketch letter outlines on stone and carve along them; at stroke endings and corners, the chisel work flared outward, leaving the small protrusions we now call serifs. That lineage likely underwrites the memo’s association of serifs with “tradition,” “formality,” and “ceremony.”
A Roman stone inscription (Credit: Wikipedia)
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