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Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp last month

The #BrokenTimes elevates & normalizes the trivial stupidity of the woke font fight--as ever, without bringing the history of font fights past, under another authoritarian leader, Hitler.
Is Times New Roman Better Than Calibri for the State Department? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/13/us/calibri-font-times-new-roman-state-department.html?smid=tw-share

https://www.nytimes.com

Is Times New Roman Better Than Calibri for the State Department?

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Federation Bot
Federation Bot
@Federation_Bot replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis Pain is the goal. Calibri is a better font for people that have difficulty reading. Times New Roman is a font for print that can cram the most text in a cramped space. So lets efff around with the vision impaired and make their life even more miserable that it already is.

A font that works good for papers is not necessarily a good font for screen. Or correspondence that has a lot more horizontal space. Or even a book.

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Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

From my upcoming book, Hot Type:
The great Beatrice Warde, expert in typography, called those who would use sans serif faces as body type "aesthetic nudists." T.M. Cleland called sans serif “simplification for simpletons, and those are block letters for blockheads.” Indeed.
Preorder: https://jeffjarvis.com

Warde is best known for her 1930 dinner-speech-cum-essay, “The Crystal Goblet,” the
epitome of her inviting and accessible prose promoting typography’s mission. “Printing,” she
said, “should be invisible.” Like the finest crystal, the finest typography “is calculated to reveal
rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.... Type well used is
invisible as type.... But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that
crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.”44 Morison wrote
similarly: “Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally
aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader’s chief aim. Therefore, any disposition of printing material which, whatever the intention, has the effect of coming between
author and reader is wrong.”. . .
 In his cranky
1940 speech “Harsh Words,” for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, book designer T. M.
Cleland evoked this paradox. On typography, he echoed Warde and Benton: “If it is an art at all,
it is an art to serve another art.... It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and
when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionist antics of its own, it is just a bad
servant.” Like Warde, he mourned the loss of serifs as “simplification for simpletons, and those
are block letters for blockheads.”
Warde is best known for her 1930 dinner-speech-cum-essay, “The Crystal Goblet,” the epitome of her inviting and accessible prose promoting typography’s mission. “Printing,” she said, “should be invisible.” Like the finest crystal, the finest typography “is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.... Type well used is invisible as type.... But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.”44 Morison wrote similarly: “Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader’s chief aim. Therefore, any disposition of printing material which, whatever the intention, has the effect of coming between author and reader is wrong.”. . . In his cranky 1940 speech “Harsh Words,” for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, book designer T. M. Cleland evoked this paradox. On typography, he echoed Warde and Benton: “If it is an art at all, it is an art to serve another art.... It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionist antics of its own, it is just a bad servant.” Like Warde, he mourned the loss of serifs as “simplification for simpletons, and those are block letters for blockheads.”
Warde is best known for her 1930 dinner-speech-cum-essay, “The Crystal Goblet,” the epitome of her inviting and accessible prose promoting typography’s mission. “Printing,” she said, “should be invisible.” Like the finest crystal, the finest typography “is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.... Type well used is invisible as type.... But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.”44 Morison wrote similarly: “Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader’s chief aim. Therefore, any disposition of printing material which, whatever the intention, has the effect of coming between author and reader is wrong.”. . . In his cranky 1940 speech “Harsh Words,” for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, book designer T. M. Cleland evoked this paradox. On typography, he echoed Warde and Benton: “If it is an art at all, it is an art to serve another art.... It is not the business of type and printing to show off, and when, as it now so frequently does, it engages in exhibitionist antics of its own, it is just a bad servant.” Like Warde, he mourned the loss of serifs as “simplification for simpletons, and those are block letters for blockheads.”
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ruurd@mastodon.social
ruurd@mastodon.social
@ruurd@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis I don't care if typography is an art form. This kind of attitude shows the hubris of font designers. If it is easier to read in the nude do me a sans font any day.

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Jonathan Hendry
Jonathan Hendry
@jonhendry@iosdev.space replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis

They weren't designing for screens.

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⏚ Antoine Chambert-Loir
⏚ Antoine Chambert-Loir
@antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis By the way, my personal feeling is that the font used in your Gutenberg book (the book I'm reading now) is especially difficult to read.

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Andreas K
Andreas K
@yacc143@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis Well, yes, but actually, this time the fascists are going backwards.

Hitler actually moved German typography more in line with other European languages that did the switch to Antiqua centuries earlier.

In that way, it's not an analogy. On the scale of things the Nazis did, this is probably mostly benign and fine (and it btw still applies today, while I had to learn to read Fraktur in school, I don't think many of my generation had to, and today not many know it).

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One more try
One more try
@LastTry@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis I do not care, look at the little bird. https://chatgpt.com/share/693ecd14-494c-8013-b4b8-48778fa44249

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Tony 🌮 Bark
Tony 🌮 Bark
@tonytins@furry.engineer replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis Normally, I’m willing to hand wave this stuff but this decision - like everything from this administration- is just stupid.

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Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

History. https://mastodon.social/deck/@jeffjarvis/115695810766176123

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Absinthe
Absinthe
@absinthe@mammut.sch.moe replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis

There's always a link between hitler & trump... 🙁

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jz.tusk
jz.tusk
@jztusk@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis

Incriminating collages!

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🔏 Matthias Wiesmann
🔏 Matthias Wiesmann
@thias@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last month

@jeffjarvis This is one of the main reasons why Swiss Design is a thing…

https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/archives/41902

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