This predates the Calibri-Times debacle by quite a few years.

No, this was a project by 18F and the U.S. Web Design group that debued several years back.

No, looks like it was started late in Obama's second term. As for the current guys, they would probably use Instrument Serif for body text if they could.

That's just the State Department. The federal government is a huge amalgamation of agencies, each with its own set of goals, responsibilities, and quirks. Even down at the local level, I've had a hard time getting the county and the city to agree on who owns the storm drain where the neighborhood connects to the highway.

Funnily enough, if you Google "Calibri", the page itself is in Calibri. I've never seen that happen for any other font.

To clarify, it is the default font for office documents, not the default UI font.

IBM Plex is very good. Recently, I have been enjoying https://rsms.me/inter/ for interfaces a bit more (with ss02 for body and ss02+tnum for tables activated).

Shoutout to Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, designed for the Braille Institut having excellent glyph differentiation ("Next" with variable weight)

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Next

My full list of ambiguous letters, from https://gajus.com/blog/avoiding-visually-ambiguous-character...

- O / 0 - I / l / 1 / 7 - 5 / S - 2 / Z - 8 / B - 6 / G - 9 / q / g

  $ cat passgen.sh                                                           
  #!/bin/sh
  export LC_ALL=C
  printf "%.16s\n" "$(/usr/bin/openssl rand -base64 32 | /usr/bin/tr -d 'lIOSBGZ')"

I really enjoyed reading through [1] as it gives a lot of insight into what goes into making a font. However I wonder what incentives does IBM have for putting this much work into making it public, accessible and widely used. Wouldn't the ubiquity of the font make it less strong for their brand identity?

Depending on your phone manufacturer, zFont 3 has been solid for me for setting system wide fonts.

I have Iosevka for everything I can set a custom font to.

Plex Monospace is great for coding as well.

Likewise the absence of a stroke through the zero. Without context, for example in a Wifi password, indistinguishable from uppercase letter O.

Marissa Mayer on why Google chose sans-serif fonts for search results:

When I had to make a decision about should the Google results pages be serif or sans-serif, I didn't have enough users to do the split A/B testing and mathematically figure that out, so I ended up reading a lot of research and ultimately finding out that serif fonts are more readable, and sans-serif fonts are more legible.

The serifs create a horizontal rule that guides the eye, so serif fonts are much better when you’re reading long pieces of text. Sans-serif fonts are more legible which means that... when the serifs are removed your eye can spot read a character much better and much more quickly, and as a result it is much better for spot reading. In an activity like search it turns out you want to facilitate spot reading to a much greater degree than reading long prose.

Here's the 2006 talk: https://stvp.stanford.edu/podcasts/nine-lessons-learned-abou...

I don’t think it’s that straightforward to answer that. They’re both body fonts. Public Sans is a bit wider (as it isn’t geometric) and roboto seems a bit thicker. Besides these bits which can be worked around, they’re functionally too similar. Maybe you’d prefer to use Public Sans because it’s less condensed which works well for readability of smaller fonts that would be in a body of text. But you can just adjust a number of things to get what you’re looking for here.

A more vague answer I can think of is that it’s preferential and doesn’t matter to most — with designers just being highly particular about preferences, in a way that isn’t really open to objective choice. One font may display slightly better but the other font pairs better with the title font. Or we’ll look for specific issues that I don’t really see in either fonts.

The Secretary of State recently decreed that sans serif fonts were woke and mandated all communications use Times New Roman.

The fonts are open and on github

Switzerland is strong and neutral. Pardon my little joke, as I have lots of Swiss friends. I hear ya.

Masculine, not-woke (asleep), but not like a sleepy Joe, like a toddler who takes a nap.

Looking forward to the National Design Studio getting it's arms around this

That's where most of their budget comes from I think.

This is like saying design is a solved problem.