Microsoft’s next big update to its Office apps: a new font

If you’ve got used Microsoft productiveness suites this millennium, you are in for a big change… visually, not less than. After 15 years, Microsoft is changing the default font in 365 and Office apps, Calibri, with one thing new: Aptos. It could seem like a easy sans-serif font (and it’s in default kind), however Microsoft is betting that you will prefer it thanks to its sheer flexibility.

Aptos works with many languages. There are 4 totally different font weights, and serif variants if you happen to want one thing much less hypermodern. Creator Steve Matteson (who made Windows’ first TrueType fonts) waxes poetic about Aptos together with a “little bit of humanity” and evoking the personalities of Carl Kasell and even Stephen Colbert, however the finish result’s a font that may theoretically be straightforward to learn and crowd pleasing whether or not you are writing a faculty essay or prepping a firm presentation.

Microsoft

The font has already been accessible as Bierstadt as a part of a suggestions gathering effort, however is rolling out because the default font in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word for a whole lot of thousands and thousands of individuals beginning as we speak. Everyone will see it inside the next few months. It’ll nonetheless be accessible beneath its outdated identify, as will the 4 fonts that did not make the lower (Grandview, Seaford, Skeena and Tenorite). Like Calibri, Aptos might be pinned to the highest of the font picker however will not be obligatory.

Yes, it is simply a font — like these redesigned Office icons from 2018, Aptos may have zero affect in your means to get issues achieved. As one of the noticeable parts of any app, although, the new default font will change the feel and appear of instruments you would possibly use day-after-day. And like Apple’s San Francisco font, it displays an evolving technological panorama the place a typeface has to be le on a wide selection of units and display sizes.