Corporate & Securities Law

Typography: Revisiting My Choice of Calibri

By Ken Adams

In December 2007 I underwent a Damascene conversion and switched typefaces?for purposes of contracts and pretty much everything else?to Calibri, one of a new suite of Microsoft typefaces. Calibri has been designated the default typeface for body text in Office 2007, and the Word 2007 default font for body text is 11-point Calibri. (Click here for a pdf sample of Calibri.) For more on this change, see chapter 15 of MSCD and this blog post (and its 31 comments).

Flash forward to now, or rather yesterday. I had occasion to revisit Typography for Lawyers, a handsome site maintained by Matthew Butterick, a solo litigator based in Los Angeles. (I’ve corresponded briefly with Matthew.) On this page of the site, I read the following:

Avoid using the core operating system fonts in printed documents.

On Windows, that includes Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Comic Sans, Constantia, Courier, Georgia, Helvetica, any flavor of Lucida, Palatino, Trebuchet, and Verdana. On the Mac, that includes Arial, Courier, Helvetica, Palatino, Skia, and Verdana. Subject to a few exceptions, you should also avoid Times New Roman.

Operating system typefaces have three problems:

1. They?re overexposed. The fact that they?re included with the operating system for free means that people who are lazy and cheap tend to use them. You don?t want to be lumped in with those people.
2. They?re not very good. This is less a problem on the Mac. But certain typefaces included with Windows are among the most god-awful on the planet. I don?t want to name names, but my least favorite rhymes with Barial.
3. They?re optimized for screen display, not printing. The Mac and Windows system fonts have been meticulously engineered to look good on screen (for instance, website text). But often, that means that subtle design details have been sanded off, and the typeface looks clunky on the printed page (e.g. Georgia).

Here’s my take on these matters:

• I don’t care that Calibri is overexposed. In fact, that’s an asset. When I send someone a draft, I don’t want them to be unnecessarily distracted by the typeface. And I certainly don’t want my contract to be displayed on their system in a fallback typeface because their system didn’t recognize my exotic typeface.
• I’m not going to claim that Calibri is king among typefaces. All that matters to me is that I find it a big improvement over Times New Roman and Arial, the typefaces almost invariably used for contracts before Calibri came on the scene. And more to the point, my informal research and discussions suggest that typography professionals broadly agree with me.
• I do an inordinate amount of my reading on screen, and I suspect the same applies to transactional lawyers generally. So it makes sense for me to use, for my benefit and for the benefit of anyone else who’ll be reading my document on screen, a typeface designed to read well on screen. Calibri is one such typeface. And it would be inconceivable to use one typeface for reading a document on screen and another when you print it out.

More generally, Matthew’s typeface needs differ from mine because he’s a litigator and I’m a transactional lawyer. His writing seeks to persuade; mine regulates conduct and is akin to software code. And he submits finished documents to courts or to opposing counsel; transactional lawyers send drafts to lawyers on the other side of the deal, and they want to be able to make changes or mark comments and send them back.

The net effect of those differences is that any if any transactional lawyer were to use for a given contract Sabon, Goudy Old Style, or any other typeface recommended by Matthew, others working on the transaction would, I suspect, be baffled.

So I’m sticking with Calibri.

A reminder: When it comes to matters of typography, people like what they’re used to. So your reaction to a given typeface is perhaps less relevant than your reaction after having considered the opinions of typography professionals. For example, studies have cast doubt on the assumption that serif typefaces are eeasier to read than sans-serif typefaces, so I have no qualms about recommending Calibri.

Full post as published by AdamsDrafting on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).