2 minutes reading time
Does anyone love Times New Roman?
There’s no denying serifs read better in print. But Times New Roman didn’t win because it’s beautiful. It won because it shipped. Microsoft bundled it everywhere, and defaults are destiny. Once a default colonizes a platform, it colonizes taste. See also: how they shoved Internet Explorer down throats by abusing dominance.
Times New Roman was “good enough,” so academia fossilized around it. Then Microsoft flipped the switch to Calibri - not because sans‑serif is metaphysically superior on screens, but because someone in Redmond changed a config. Overnight, “professional” meant Calibri. Fonts don’t just decorate text; they launder authority. Ask Pakistan’s power elite how a default helped unravel a defence (Calibri‑gate).
In college, professors demanded Times New Roman. I wasn’t paying for Windows or proprietary font packs to appease their paperwork fetish. I used free, metric‑compatible substitutes (URW’s clones), and they couldn’t tell. When the herd switched to Calibri, I moved to Carlito, the free metric twin.
Now we’re collecting reports and the committee wants Calibri “because everyone has it.” Everyone doesn’t. And even if they did, that’s not an argument - that’s inertia cosplaying as policy. Use standards, not vendor lock‑in.
If you want sane defaults:
Defaults are politics with better kerning. Refuse to be formatted by monopolies.
Though this blog moved to an onion, this rant belongs here - where defaults still try to tell you who you are.