Microsoft announced they finally picked a new default font for Office:
For 15 years, our beloved Calibri was Microsoft’s default font and crown keeper of office communications, but as you know, our relationship has come to a natural end. We changed. The technology we use every day has changed. And so, our search of the perfect font for higher resolution screens began. The font needed to have sharpness, uniformity, and be great for display type. It was exciting at times, but also intimidating. How do you replace Calibri? How do you find that one true font that can take its place as the rightful default?
As we shared before, Microsoft commissioned five new fonts: Bierstadt, Grandview, Seaford, Skeena, and Tenorite. It was our hope that one of them would be our next default font for Microsoft 365. All of them were added to the drop-down font picker. From there, as you got a chance to use them, we listened to your impassioned feedback and chose the one that resonated most which was Bierstadt. But as there was a change of guard so too the name. Bierstadt is now known as Aptos.
I had previously decided I liked Tenorite best. There are some odd things about this unveiling though, unfortunately I don’t have the answers. Why did it take them this long to make these fonts the default? It’s also odd that they chose Aptos (née Bierstadt) based on customer feedback. It’s also weird that there is a lack of examples of these typefaces at normal sizes in any of the marketing material which, in the context of Office documents, the real importance lies in their appearance at document text sizes, even though they’ve primarily been showcased at larger display sizes.
