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Link to Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : New Fonts For Documents

Aldous Huxley wrote:

A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.
Typography for the Twentieth-Century Reader
Aldous Huxley

So we will see, at any rate.  The new versions of Microsoft Office now ship with new default fonts and type faces.  Added to the ubiquitous Arial, Verdana, Courier (New) and the loathsome Times New Roman are the new defaults of Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Candara, Constantia and Corbel.

I admit that I'm a closet typography geek.  I don't KNOW enough about typography and type design, but I really love it.  The creative use of type and glyphs to convey information in subtle ways just makes me warm and tingly like so much really good design does.  This is one reason I'm so much more in like with the Mac OSX and Apple design in general. 

(Interesing tangent:  The 1984 Macintosh was the first PC to truly support multiple typefaces.  Steve Jobs credits this to a calligraphy course he took in college which taught him the beauty of type.) 

Windows typography, on the other hand, has always seemed coarse and brutish by comparison.  Here's an example of sans-serif (without decoration) fonts:

(Note that the "Helvetica" is actually Coolvetica, a free version of Helvetica because I'm on a Windows PC and don't have the official font.  The goofy "t" is NOT in the normal Helvetica, it's much classier.)  Anyway, nothing WRONG with Arial per-se, it's just kind of plain.  It's clean and clear and has essentially been the default sans-serif font for most of the world for the past twenty or so years.  For variety, and because Arial is so plain we would occasionally try Arial Black (for bolding) or Arial Rounded, or get really crazy and use Verdana.  And then there was that whole phase in the mid to late nineties where every web page had to use Comic Sans MS… wow, I'm glad that passed.

The problem mainly comes (for me) when looking at the default serif fonts (with decorations):

The windows default, Times New Roman (TNR), is awful in my eyes (and I'm not alone).  It's scrawny and weak.  Serif-fonts are supposed to be strong and respectable.  I've never felt TNR did a good job of that.  Contrast it to the sample of Georgia below.  Look at how classy it seems.  The strokes are of varying  weights but they don't disappear.  Georgia is what's right with serif fonts and TNR is everything wrong.  In fact, I pretty much place the blame for my 15 year war against serif fonts squarely on the shoulders of the guy who invented Times New Roman. 

Now, with Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft is taking a step in the right direction.  They are releasing six new fonts, one mono spaced (Consolas) -which is actually a mono spaced sans-serif font-good for coding), two serif fonts (Cambria and Constantia) which are both less wimpy than Times New Roman but still not as classy as Georgia, and 3 sans fonts (Calibri, Candara and Corbel).  Each is designed for print and screen. 

An explanation of the six new fonts can be found here and the fonts can be downloaded for XP as .ttf fonts from here.

In addition, MS is releasing a new UI font for Office 12 (2007) and Vista is called Segoe UI.  Not as important to the type world as the elimination of TNR, but still moving Windows forward as a good UI.

It will take several years before we can depend on these fonts being ubiquitous, but at long last, it seems the end of Times New Roman may be at hand.