The arrival of Aptos and the fuss about fonts

The poem was ready to be sent, but when writer and poet Priyanka Sacheti looked at the submission guidelines of the literary journal, she realised she had one last alteration to make: the font had to be changed from her usual Times New Roman to Arial. Steve Matteson, the American typographer who designed Aptos, says something similar in an email interview with Lounge: “A default font should not impact the tone of what the writer is going to communicate because it can’t predict the writer’s intent.… It simply needs to show the writer the words in a clear and neutral tone and not hinder their writing process.” Matteson adds that Times New Roman, which served as the default font on Microsoft apps from 1992, exhibited an “institutional formality”, while Calibri, which was adopted in 2007, has an “overt friendliness” about it—both of these could “skew the visual meaning before the message was even read”, he says. The other challenge that a default font has to rise up to, is the task of supporting “all kinds of documents—from essays to technical documents, from business letters to invoices and newsletters,” says Rathna Ramanathan, a children’s book author and graphic designer who researches intercultural communication design and typography. “Given how global the use of MS Office is, the default font needs to cater to different kinds of users with different technical fluencies,” she notes. They feel more modern and straightforward, kind of like the text you’d see on websites or signs.” While writer Daribha Lyndem describes her preferred fonts EB Garamond or Palatino—both serif types—as “fonts that look like something I would find in a novel”, translator Arunava Sinha finds that he prefers a sans-serif type, Gill Sans MT.