Microsoft wants you to choose its next default font

You can learn a lot about a person by the fonts they use. Whether they are a disciplined or creative person by the boldness of their font choices, or more likely, how lazy a person is because they just keep working with whatever default font Microsoft Word throws at them for a document. And it those latter people that Microsoft is speaking to in announcing plans to change the default font found in Office from Calibri, to whatever else the world decides to choose.

While there are over 700 different font options in Word, along with thousands more that can be downloaded, the majority of people prefer to stick with the tried and trusted default of Calibri that the company has been using for the past 15 years. Which itself was considered a big improvement over the previous default of Times New Roman.

To decide on what the next default font should be for their Office suite, Microsoft has decided to release five new fonts with the intention of leaving it up to their users to decide on the preferred font moving forward. The five new fonts were all designed by different designs and don’t look drastically different from other popular fonts, offering subtle variations across the different letter shapes. It’s not clear exactly how Microsoft will gather this feedback, though polls and probably direct feedback on different channels will probably be the preferred approach.

And while it appears that the choice of a new font is going to be down to these newly released five fonts, it’s not clear if Microsoft will allow people to vote for other choices as their preferred favourite option.  So, time to start a campaign to get the Wingdings font voted as top and really annoy everyone.

Microsoft says that the new default font will then appear in their varus apps in 2022. For those that do still prefer Calibri, they can still select this font as they can still select Times New Roman for that 90s nostalgia look.

Last Updated: April 30, 2021