Calibri font was a DEI rent

The US Division of State is unwinding a 2023 decision to make use of san-serif Calibri font on all official communications and switching to Instances New Roman as a substitute, The New York Times reports. In a memo obtained by NYT titled “Return to Custom: Instances New Roman 14-Level Font Required for All Division Paper,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio frames the change as a method to return professionalism to the State Division.

“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing besides the degradation of the division’s official correspondence,” Rubio stated within the memo. That is as a result of the font is “casual” and clashes with the State Division’s letterhead, in response to Rubio, whereas serif fonts like Instances New Roman “connote custom, formality and ceremony.”

Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken initially switched the State Division to Calibri in 2023 to enhance the accessibility of official communications. The curvy, flourish-free strains of sans-serif fonts work higher with assistive applied sciences like display screen readers and text-to-speech instruments. Serif fonts, in the meantime, are usually utilized in issues like newspapers to make small, printed textual content legible.

Whereas Rubio notes that Calibri “was not among the many division’s most unlawful, immoral, radical or wasteful cases of D.E.I.A.,” it appears clear that Rubio lumps the font in with those self same variety, fairness, inclusion and accessibility initiatives. Eliminating it’s a simple (and weirdly petty) method to observe by way of on the second Trump administration’s anti-DEI stance in the direction of nearly all the pieces.