Fonts to change in Office 12
The new font for Office 12.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any respectable office productivity suite equipped with a new user interface, must be in want of a new font.
And that, dear reader, is what Office 12 is to have. Not, alas, a Mr Darcy font or an Elizabeth Bennet, but at least it’s not called Wickham.
What then is it to be named? Segoe UI.
Hmmm … that’s what I thought too. What would Jane Austen have made of Segoe UI?
At least it’s based on ClearType and is said to be more humanistic and less computer-like than its predecessor, Tahoma. Humanistic : a font?
Segoe has apparently taken two years to develop, building on a decade of research by Microsoft’s Typography Unit. Office 12 will mainly use the 8pt size, while Windows will use 9pt. The whole purpose of the exercise is to make type easier to read and scan on screen.
Microsoft User Experience team member Jensen Harris says, “It’s amazing to me how much work goes into making a great font ~ sometimes we send back feedback just about a certain glyph (’g’ looks weird in this specific situation) and they tweak the hinting just a bit to improve it.”
One commenter on Harris’s blog wasn’t too impressed : “Segoe UI looks exactly like Frutiger (with the addition of round dots, as in another Frutiger ripoff called Myriad). This is going to be just another repeat of the Arial and Book Antiqua incidents. Can’t your designers try to come up with something original?”
Pride and prejudice all round then?
