@grimalkina I am starting a new job and had to read a bunch of starting paperwork, all of which used the Calibri font face. Which has a ton of subtext, regardless of what the paperwork actually says, about the company culture.

Like, say, imagine that same paperwork in Computer Modern, from LaTeX, and the very different signals that would send about the company.

Obviously, we love to make fun of Comic Sans or Papyrus, but even the very boring default font faces do send signals.

@ricko Rick you have to tell us what those signals are saying to you because some people* don't know!!

*me, although maybe if I tested myself on implicit associations I would, just don't know fonts that well of the top of my head

@grimalkina Hahahaha. Totally fair.

Okay, so Calibri has been the default "business" font in MS Office for almost 20 years now, designed to replace Arial for new high-density displays and better kerning.

To overgeneralize, many businesses will use Calibri because it is bland and inoffensive, and the opposite of eye-catching: it just sort of fades into the background. [1] Thus, it's great (sarcasm) to use for all kinds of corporate proclamations which come "down from above" without any human names attached.

Computer Modern is the font you see on most research papers, because it's the default for LaTeX, which is like Word but for people who need lots of equations everywhere. If used for corp docs, it might signal comfortable familiarity to other researchers, but would probably put everyone else on alert.