While the name Aptos is explained in the article, I was more curious about the previous name Bierstadt (because the font is "inspired by Swiss typography", but the Swiss are not especially famous for their beer), and I found it in https://medium.com/microsoft-design/beyond-calibri-finding-t...:
> As for the name, Bierstadt is named for one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. When I think of Swiss type, I think of the Alps, and since I’m based in Boulder, my Alps are the Rockies
So it was more of a multi-step reasoning: Switzerland -> Alps -> Mountains -> Rockies -> peak in the Rockies with German-sounding name -> Bierstadt.
Digging deeper into the rabbit hole, according to Wikipedia Mount Bierstadt was named after Albert Bierstadt, an American landscape painter who made the first recorded summit of the mountain in 1863. Bierstadt was born in Solingen, which is pretty far away from Switzerland (and more known for its fine knives than for its typography or its beer)...
Changing the default fonts in Office acts as a generational marker for documents.
A lot of non-professionally designed content gets produced with these defaults: Excel sheets and memoirs and school essays and wills and corporate PowerPoints and the haphazard printed sign on the coffee shop’s door that announces a job vacancy.
All of that was in Calibri, but soon it will be in Aptos. And in a couple of years Calibri will start looking oddly nostalgic to people born around 2000.
These Office font generations are also useful for detecting forgeries. There was a court case involving an inheritance where documents supposedly printed in 2005 were set in Calibri, which wasn’t available yet.
> 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.
I couldn’t see in this article, or in the linked one, any rationale for what prompted the change, why the relationship with Calibri has come to a natural end, or why the new font is better than the old font.
Part of it is display technology. Calibri was chosen for an era where typography was increasingly digital but serif fonts rendered badly on the low-resolution screens of ~2009.
Aptos is still sans-serif but I think its shapes are too subtle for a low resolution monitor from that era. It looks much better on "Retina"-esque devices that are viewed in closeup.
The psychology of type is complicated. Some of it is fashion; some of it is innate; some of it is cultural which is neither completely arbitrary nor completely immutable.
In addition consumers begin to spot things that look out of place and attribute negatively to that. Calibri definitely looks "quaint" these days with its very rounded, extremely soft shapes.
Has to be. I stopped believe long ago in visual changes in software being anything else than marketing done in "we do improve things" fashion.
I mean, just look at this video of Office icons: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=VvOaGTtY6Y8 It's a new icons set and they're trying to portray it as a technological breakthrough.
Of course changes to the UI and UX are important and always interesting, don't get me wrong - I just despise the all that mindless fluff that always comes with it. Each time I'm having flashbacks of document by Arnell Group who introduced new Pepsi logo: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Calibri was never that great IMHO. Just like Apple with their San Francisco font, it’s worth a change to get a really great modern font and it looks like Microsoft went all out for Aptos. I like it
There is a rationale at the beginning of the article:
> 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.
To the degrees and manners typography matters, there are better and worse typefaces.
For example, in the past some typefaces were better for optical character recognition than others and a different set of typefaces were easier to read on a CRT.
This is in addition to cultural connotations like are associated with typefaces like Helvetica or Comic Sans where typefaces themselves can say something based on how they have been used over many years.
Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft 365 since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve.
--- end quote ---
It's literally designers keeping their jobs by running in an endless hamster wheel.
Edit: to those downvoting. Read the articles. This is the entirety of their rationale over two articles. The quote above is from the article they linked as "Calibri has come its natural end": https://medium.com/microsoft-design/beyond-calibri-finding-t...
It's been 15 years; from my point of view, understanding and application of fonts has changed or been improved radically. Smartphones and the mobile internet were only beginning around that time; the amount of people with internet has multiplied fivefold [0] since then, the quality and resolution of screens has gone up by leaps and bounds, and yes, fashion and design changed since then, like how before Calibri, Times New Roman was starting to look and feel old-fashioned.
Designers feel the need to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security. So once in a while they'll convince corporate they absolutely HAVE to change everything up for no reason, and they'll spew out pages of poetic nonsensical Gish gallop along with it, to hypnotise everyone into agreeing and let corporate convince themselves that they haven't wasted millions that could have been spent on anything else to benefit the company or, dare I say, humanity.
Ever notice how the more pointless or frivolous a change in design is, the more BS the designers include to back up their case? Think of any of the major design milestones of the last few decades - those striking, arresting works of design that revolutionised society. Did any of those come with a high school C-grade creative writing essay attached to it? Of course not. The design speaks for itself. When you have good design, you feel no need to back it up with a mental gymnastic exercise explaining why it actually is a better design and that everyone who disagrees obviously just doesn't have the intellect to appreciate the artistic vision that you have.
The job of designers is solely to make pretty things. The backup plan of designers is to make people feel good with dopamine-inducing verbiage. In the myriad cases where they fail at their job and produce something ugly and demonstrably worse than the previous version, they go into overdrive with the backup plan in the hopes that their mushy sugar-coated words will hide the bitter taste of their regrettable design choices that they've already spent millions of corporate (and, in some cases, taxpayers'!) budget 'executing'.
Notice also how they try to pass it off as just the natural passing of things, like these things happen, get used to it, as if gratuitous interface changes and jarring layout reshuffles are just a fact of life, like taxes, laundry or fruit flies. Like this idea that one's relationship with a font of all things can "come to a natural end." Again, it's a form of hypnosis. Because God forbid the higher-ups snap out of this trance before they sign off another multi-million-dollar contract for some tacky new coat of paint to be slapped all over the old just for the sake of it.
You see the same with cPanel: "It's time to switch to the Jupiter theme." Says who? Who dictates that "the time has come" in this way, as if it's a universal truth and not something they're coercing us into using? Look at any cPanel forum thread where someone asks why they're forcing this godawful new theme upon us and how exactly it's better. The cPanel staff can never give any meaningful answer to those questions, because there are no reasons. So they repeat the same designer nonsense, or better yet, give no reason at all. And so the design of things continues to get worse, the icons less and less readable, the screen space more and more wasted, the corners more rounded, the jobs of normal working people that little bit harder and more unpleasant as they have to squint for the less-readable icons and moved-around UI elements when the previous version worked perfectly fine and was loved by everyone, all for the sake of the ego of some designer somewhere, who I dare say is very pleased with themselves about making life that little bit worse for everyone else.
> I really hope that's not a sign of things to come in terms of popular design.
I think it is. I think design goes in cycles of clutter, minimalism, clutter, minimalism, repeat. We had our clutter in the 90s and 00s, then minimalism from the 10s on, now we could very well be headed back to clutter.
> Similar to mid-20th-century Swiss typography, Aptos is a sans serif.
Starting this paragraph immediately underneath an image of a serif version of the typeface made me briefly question everything I know about the subject.
It's kinda fitting that this type of content-free designer-fluff is published on Medium, but also weird to not be published under a microsoft.com domain. How do I know this isn't a random imposter?
Is there a link to the font displayed in a longer example? I found the inline images both incomplete examples and hard to read with poor contrast. And even the paragraph about the double stacked g was next to an image without a g.
It looks like it could be a really nice font but it isn’t displayed well to show off!
Interesting that they picked a name that tends to be mispronounced, at least according to those who live there; locals pronounce it like "app-toss" but non-locals tend to pronounce it "app-tose" (second syllable like "toast" without the trailing t). And the locals will correct you if you pronounce it wrong.
I don't understand why the changed the default font.
In the post it says:
> For 15 years ... Calibri was Microsoft’s default font ... but as you know, our relationship has come to a natural end [link here]. We changed. The technology we use every day has changed.
Do we know? I followed the link, and it says:
> Calibri ... has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve. To help us set a new direction
and this sounds like there's really no reason. In the fashion industry, they arbitrarily change things every year because this planned obsolescence means they sell more clothes, but it's not like MS will see its bottom line grow with artificial inflation of font license sales.
Going back to the first paragraph - what's actually changed? Font technology? Not fundamentally. I suppose there is the evolution of OpenType specification:
Microsoft is bad at picking names: if I search for Aptos I found a blockchain. When they launched their .NET technologies .net was a popular domain suffix making meaningless to add .net in a search query. For the COM [1] technology they started at the same time that Internet was being popular and but lost the battle for the .com keyword.
It's a person trying to explain their feelings about something in the context of font design; it's not actually real. Think of how people use various phrases to describe wine, e.g. the list here https://www.thebacklabel.com/10-most-ridiculous-wine-descrip...
I'm pretty sure Calibri is included with Windows since Vista (along with Segoe UI)- they wouldn't just simply stop bundling it. But if that would happen for whatever reasons then probably Office would ask user if missing font should be downloaded and installed on the system, to provide "best experience" in viewing and working with the document that uses it.
No particularly interested in MS Word or this font though I guess it's an improvement over the Calibri one, but it's kind of funny it's already 2023 and they seem to be more more worried about the default font than fixing once and for all the issues with unexpected layout breaks - unless the memes about it make for advertising
Segoe was introduced with Vista, you might be thinking of the refreshed version that came with Windows 10? I'm actually a big fan of the Windows 11 Segoe refresh, really makes what used to be a bland font (to my tastes) quite nice.
While I don't have Aptos on Outlook, I do have Bierstadt and so I was able to compare it with Calibri. All I know is that I'm glad they differentiated between uppercase 'I' and lowercase 'l' so I don't get that confused anymore. In Calibri, it's almost impossible to tell the difference unless you zoom in close.
[+] [-] rob74|2 years ago|reply
> As for the name, Bierstadt is named for one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. When I think of Swiss type, I think of the Alps, and since I’m based in Boulder, my Alps are the Rockies
So it was more of a multi-step reasoning: Switzerland -> Alps -> Mountains -> Rockies -> peak in the Rockies with German-sounding name -> Bierstadt.
Digging deeper into the rabbit hole, according to Wikipedia Mount Bierstadt was named after Albert Bierstadt, an American landscape painter who made the first recorded summit of the mountain in 1863. Bierstadt was born in Solingen, which is pretty far away from Switzerland (and more known for its fine knives than for its typography or its beer)...
[+] [-] pavlov|2 years ago|reply
A lot of non-professionally designed content gets produced with these defaults: Excel sheets and memoirs and school essays and wills and corporate PowerPoints and the haphazard printed sign on the coffee shop’s door that announces a job vacancy.
All of that was in Calibri, but soon it will be in Aptos. And in a couple of years Calibri will start looking oddly nostalgic to people born around 2000.
These Office font generations are also useful for detecting forgeries. There was a court case involving an inheritance where documents supposedly printed in 2005 were set in Calibri, which wasn’t available yet.
[+] [-] jl6|2 years ago|reply
I couldn’t see in this article, or in the linked one, any rationale for what prompted the change, why the relationship with Calibri has come to a natural end, or why the new font is better than the old font.
Is this just pure fashion churn?
[+] [-] jbreckmckye|2 years ago|reply
Part of it is display technology. Calibri was chosen for an era where typography was increasingly digital but serif fonts rendered badly on the low-resolution screens of ~2009.
Aptos is still sans-serif but I think its shapes are too subtle for a low resolution monitor from that era. It looks much better on "Retina"-esque devices that are viewed in closeup.
The psychology of type is complicated. Some of it is fashion; some of it is innate; some of it is cultural which is neither completely arbitrary nor completely immutable.
In addition consumers begin to spot things that look out of place and attribute negatively to that. Calibri definitely looks "quaint" these days with its very rounded, extremely soft shapes.
[+] [-] chronogram|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pndy|2 years ago|reply
Has to be. I stopped believe long ago in visual changes in software being anything else than marketing done in "we do improve things" fashion.
I mean, just look at this video of Office icons: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=VvOaGTtY6Y8 It's a new icons set and they're trying to portray it as a technological breakthrough.
Of course changes to the UI and UX are important and always interesting, don't get me wrong - I just despise the all that mindless fluff that always comes with it. Each time I'm having flashbacks of document by Arnell Group who introduced new Pepsi logo: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[+] [-] booi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whyever|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] brudgers|2 years ago|reply
To the degrees and manners typography matters, there are better and worse typefaces.
For example, in the past some typefaces were better for optical character recognition than others and a different set of typefaces were easier to read on a CRT.
This is in addition to cultural connotations like are associated with typefaces like Helvetica or Comic Sans where typefaces themselves can say something based on how they have been used over many years.
[+] [-] troupo|2 years ago|reply
--- start quote ---
Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft 365 since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve.
--- end quote ---
It's literally designers keeping their jobs by running in an endless hamster wheel.
Edit: to those downvoting. Read the articles. This is the entirety of their rationale over two articles. The quote above is from the article they linked as "Calibri has come its natural end": https://medium.com/microsoft-design/beyond-calibri-finding-t...
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm
[+] [-] Tepix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NackerHughes|2 years ago|reply
Designers feel the need to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security. So once in a while they'll convince corporate they absolutely HAVE to change everything up for no reason, and they'll spew out pages of poetic nonsensical Gish gallop along with it, to hypnotise everyone into agreeing and let corporate convince themselves that they haven't wasted millions that could have been spent on anything else to benefit the company or, dare I say, humanity.
Ever notice how the more pointless or frivolous a change in design is, the more BS the designers include to back up their case? Think of any of the major design milestones of the last few decades - those striking, arresting works of design that revolutionised society. Did any of those come with a high school C-grade creative writing essay attached to it? Of course not. The design speaks for itself. When you have good design, you feel no need to back it up with a mental gymnastic exercise explaining why it actually is a better design and that everyone who disagrees obviously just doesn't have the intellect to appreciate the artistic vision that you have.
The job of designers is solely to make pretty things. The backup plan of designers is to make people feel good with dopamine-inducing verbiage. In the myriad cases where they fail at their job and produce something ugly and demonstrably worse than the previous version, they go into overdrive with the backup plan in the hopes that their mushy sugar-coated words will hide the bitter taste of their regrettable design choices that they've already spent millions of corporate (and, in some cases, taxpayers'!) budget 'executing'.
Notice also how they try to pass it off as just the natural passing of things, like these things happen, get used to it, as if gratuitous interface changes and jarring layout reshuffles are just a fact of life, like taxes, laundry or fruit flies. Like this idea that one's relationship with a font of all things can "come to a natural end." Again, it's a form of hypnosis. Because God forbid the higher-ups snap out of this trance before they sign off another multi-million-dollar contract for some tacky new coat of paint to be slapped all over the old just for the sake of it.
You see the same with cPanel: "It's time to switch to the Jupiter theme." Says who? Who dictates that "the time has come" in this way, as if it's a universal truth and not something they're coercing us into using? Look at any cPanel forum thread where someone asks why they're forcing this godawful new theme upon us and how exactly it's better. The cPanel staff can never give any meaningful answer to those questions, because there are no reasons. So they repeat the same designer nonsense, or better yet, give no reason at all. And so the design of things continues to get worse, the icons less and less readable, the screen space more and more wasted, the corners more rounded, the jobs of normal working people that little bit harder and more unpleasant as they have to squint for the less-readable icons and moved-around UI elements when the previous version worked perfectly fine and was loved by everyone, all for the sake of the ego of some designer somewhere, who I dare say is very pleased with themselves about making life that little bit worse for everyone else.
[+] [-] CSMastermind|2 years ago|reply
Also am I the only one who finds the design of the images in that article ugly?
I don't mean the font itself, I mean the choice of colors, the busy/distracting visual clutter everywhere, and the brightness/intensity of everything.
I really hope that's not a sign of things to come in terms of popular design.
[+] [-] ragazzina|2 years ago|reply
I think it is. I think design goes in cycles of clutter, minimalism, clutter, minimalism, repeat. We had our clutter in the 90s and 00s, then minimalism from the 10s on, now we could very well be headed back to clutter.
[+] [-] adzm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danw1979|2 years ago|reply
Starting this paragraph immediately underneath an image of a serif version of the typeface made me briefly question everything I know about the subject.
[+] [-] flohofwoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azinman2|2 years ago|reply
It looks like it could be a really nice font but it isn’t displayed well to show off!
[+] [-] kalleboo|2 years ago|reply
edit: and vs some other fonts https://kalleboo.com/linked/aptos-roboto-sf-helvetica.png
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pid-1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stewx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GGO|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefrichter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradrn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] precompute|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UnixSchizoid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peepee1982|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasmer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staplung|2 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/wi1rw6/aptos_how_d...
[+] [-] einpoklum|2 years ago|reply
In the post it says:
> For 15 years ... Calibri was Microsoft’s default font ... but as you know, our relationship has come to a natural end [link here]. We changed. The technology we use every day has changed.
Do we know? I followed the link, and it says:
> Calibri ... has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve. To help us set a new direction
and this sounds like there's really no reason. In the fashion industry, they arbitrarily change things every year because this planned obsolescence means they sell more clothes, but it's not like MS will see its bottom line grow with artificial inflation of font license sales.
Going back to the first paragraph - what's actually changed? Font technology? Not fundamentally. I suppose there is the evolution of OpenType specification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenType
but why should that require a font redesign? Are there specific capabilities that Calibri didn't make use of, and could not be refined into using?
Finally, we read about how the designer
> ... wanted Aptos to have ... the astute tone of The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.
seriously?
[+] [-] wslh|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
[+] [-] hdesh|2 years ago|reply
What is this even supposed to mean? In the context of font design.
[+] [-] shrubble|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eimrine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pndy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gualdrapo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] innocenat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NackerHughes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|2 years ago|reply
Here's Aptos (MS) vs Roboto (Google) vs San Francisco (Apple) vs Helvetica
https://kalleboo.com/linked/aptos-roboto-sf-helvetica.png
[+] [-] srvmshr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bscphil|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sunspark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuff4ben|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mef|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_named|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmde|2 years ago|reply