Another Low for Liberal Design

There has been a lot of noise in the design world this week about a declaration from the United States Secretary of State to switch government correspondence from Calibri back to Times New Roman. Designers are upset. Twitter is doing its thing. Threads are being pulled about modernity, legibility, regression, usability, professionalism, and the symbolic anti-design of using a perfectly fine typeface originally commissioned by a British newspaper and shaped by Stanley Morison, a socialist designer working at Monotype. This is our fascism.

What makes the decision especially absurd is the logic being used to justify it. According to reporting, the move away from Calibri is being framed as part of a broader rollback of so-called DEIA culture. Calibri, a default Microsoft typeface designed for screen legibility and global standardisation, has been retroactively coded as ideological. Not because of anything in its letterforms, but because of when it entered bureaucratic life. It is now understood to signal inclusion, globalism, technocracy, and therefore something that must be purged. A font has become a proxy enemy in a culture war it never volunteered for.

To be clear, the decision is stupid. It is reactionary. It is culturally lazy. It is going to make some in-house graphic designer lose their mind. It is exactly what you would expect from people who think seriousness lives in nostalgia and authority lives in familiarity. But the volume of outrage from designers has been fascinating, not because it exists, but because it is so misplaced.

Designers love this kind of contrast. We are trained to. Time periods, intentions, technological shifts, aesthetic values. Typefaces as mirrors of their moment. And yes, type is meant to reflect the time it is made in. Which is precisely why this change feels so on the nose.

Calibri and Times New Roman are separated by nearly a century. Times was commissioned in the 1930s for a British newspaper trying to appear authoritative and efficient, a typeface designed to stabilise trust in print at the height of empire. Calibri is an excellent typeface designed by Lucas de Groot, released in the early 2000s as part of Microsoft’s ClearType push toward screen-first readability, friendly neutrality, and global standardisation. One emerged from a world of paper, hierarchy, and institutional gravity. The other from a world of software, interfaces, and managed inclusivity. Both became defaults not because they were radical, but because they disappeared. And it is precisely that disappearance that now allows Calibri to be recoded as ideological, as if the quiet logistics of legibility were ever a political position.

We are very obviously living through a period of reversion. Civil rights are being rolled back in real time. Environmental protections are being dismantled. Unjust wars are being normalised again as administrative facts. Migrants are still being dehumanised and deported. So yes, the return to Times New Roman does feel aligned with the broader cultural mood. The font and the reason for their decision fit the moment, because the moment is bad.

But here is the thing that should give designers pause: things were not somehow “good” when the U.S. administration used Calibri. The font was adopted by administrations that staged coups, expanded drone warfare, deepened surveillance, and continued the slow economic strangulation of the global south. It sat politely inside documents authorising violence, dispossession, and environmental collapse. It did its job beautifully. Clean, modern, legible, efficient. Not a curve out of place. So why are we acting like this is a moral break? Because we don’t like Donald Trump?

Why do we suddenly care so much about a font declaration, as if typography is where the line gets crossed? As if things were fine until the serifs came back. As if sans serif type has ever saved anyone from imperial power, or even mildly inconvenienced it.

Designers keep returning to aesthetics because aesthetics are where we feel competent. This is our terrain. We know how to talk about modernity and regression, usability and symbolism. We can get a few sharp soundbites off. We can mock a dumb decision made by classically dumb people, and feel briefly righteous while doing it.

What we do not want to do is interrogate the structures that allow our fonts to be used by anyone, for any purpose, without accountability. Because that part implicates us.

It is much easier to complain about Times New Roman than to ask why modern type designers have no visibility into how their work is deployed at scale. It is easier to dunk on reactionary aesthetics than to ask why our licensing systems are designed to maximise distribution, not responsibility. It is easier to argue about legibility than to ask why distributors cannot or will not tell us who is actually using our fonts, and for what. If this is a problem now, how do we prevent it from repeating itself?

We love to say that designers are powerless. That once the work is out there, it is out of our hands. That clients choose, not us. That neutrality is the price of participation. But this neutrality is selective. It collapses the moment someone makes an ugly choice, or at least one we disagree with after a very earnest final-year Typography 4 project. The United States administration did not suddenly turn bad because it changed a font. The system did not become authoritarian because it rediscovered serifs and decided they felt more serious. These structures have always been doing what they do. We just preferred how they looked before.

And maybe that is the real issue. Some things feel like progress because they look like progress. The sans serif has become one of Western society’s most reliable signals. Modern. Humane. Technocratic. Inclusive. Reasonable. It carries the visual language of care without requiring any redistribution of power. Which is why it is now being treated as ideological contamination rather than what it always was: infrastructure. Calibri did not encode values. It absorbed them. And now that those values are being publicly disavowed, the typeface is being punished for having once made them feel frictionless.

If this moment were taken seriously, it could be an opportunity to ask harder questions. Not about which font best represents democracy, but about what it means to supply cultural infrastructure to institutions that consistently produce harm. It could be a moment to ask why foundries have no ethical framework beyond compliance. Why licensing is built around plausible deniability. If type is an important cultural artifact that’s rich with meaning and purpose, why does our responsibility end at the invoice?

We cannot control which fonts clients choose. Fine. But we can interrogate the systems we have built that make total disconnection feel inevitable. We can demand better, more transparent reporting from distributors. We can talk openly about use, not just form. We can stop acting like aesthetics are where politics live, when they are usually just where politics get dressed.

Instead, we are doing what we always do: we are sounding smart. We are being cool. We are fighting over symbols while avoiding material change. It is disappointing, but it is not surprising. Design culture has trained itself to respond to power cosmetically, because we are part of its scaffolding. We critique how things look because critiquing how things work would require us to admit how deeply we are embedded. It would require us to acknowledge that our work often aligns with power not by accident, but because that is where the money, stability, and prestige are.

So yes, the font choice is bad. It is unserious and regressive and worthy of mockery. But, the technical limitations will change if Monotype gets commissioned to redraw a screen version. And Lucas is right: Minion would be better; so would Fern, or Merriweather, or most fonts. But if this is where the conversation stops, then we have learned nothing. Again. The problem is not Times New Roman. The problem is our continued belief that design choices are where political meaning begins and ends. That if the aesthetics were better, the system would be too. And hey, based on the reactions, they were better. But the system wasn’t.

I’d like to proffer that the real regression is not typographic. Maybe it is our refusal to grow past the idea that our relevance lives in commentary rather than consequence. That our power is expressive, not structural. That we are observers of history, not participants in its machinery.

If this moment teaches us anything, it should be this. Fonts do not signal values. Systems do. And if we are unwilling to interrogate the systems our work flows through, then we should stop pretending that a serif can cause a meaningful scandal. It cannot. And you know it.