After fifteen years, Microsoft sets a new default font for Microsoft 365.
After fifteen years of Calibri, it is time for something different, according to Microsoft. The new default font for Microsoft 365 is called Apt. Users worldwide will see those appear in the coming months.
End of an era
When a font becomes news, you know it’s about an icon somewhere. For fifteen years, every user of Microsoft 365 has been used to seeing Calibri as the basic choice. A font that is so easy that it was often simply not modified.
But with technical progress also come changes that you might not immediately think of at first. Higher resolution screens, for example, require a font that is sharper and clearly legible.
Two years ago, Microsoft launched five new fonts: Bierstadt, Grandview, Seaford, Skeena and Tenorite. They were added to the drop-down list and Microsoft collected user feedback for two years. It turned out that Bierstadt was preferred. To complete the change, that font will now also receive a new name with Aptos. Two years ago we described Bierstadt as ‘rational and precise’.
The design of Aptos comes from specialist Steve Matteson. He renamed Bierstadt Aptos after his favorite community in Santa Cruz, California.
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Calibri c’est fini, but not quite
Aptos will now appear as the default font in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel for several hundred million users and in the course of the coming months for everyone. It remains to be seen whether this also applies to the cheaper version of Microsoft 365 for Windows 11 in the near future, which Microsoft is said to be working on.
The new font is ‘sans serif’ which means that there are no horizontal transverse lines anywhere at the ends of the letters. Those who want to can of course continue to use Calibri, the font does not disappear from the selection list, just like newcomers Grandview, Seaford, Skeena and Tenorite. You can also always set a different font as default in Microsoft 365, if you want.
The choice of a font is ultimately something personal, according to Microsoft and that’s right. It is also an important part of a text design. Anyone who knows the online hate for Comic Sans knows what we’re talking about.
2023-07-14 06:55:50
#Notable #update #Microsoft
