The despot King is dead. Times New Roman, the default font for billions of documents has been dethroned. Calibri is the new default font for Microsoft Office 2007. It's a good typeface - scalable, efficient, legible at small sizes but...it's a sans serif face. The writer in me cringes at the tide of sans serif paragraphs about to be unleashed by authors who fear exploring the font menu. Call me a Victorian Luddite (or worse), but I believe that serifs encourage readability in long offline texts, while sans serifs are better for online reading (which tends shorter). Very few designers and art directors truly embrace this - preferring the block cleanliness of a sans serif paragraph whenever and wherever. Yes, there are competing academic studies claiming legibility victory for the sans and serif camps, but no clear scientific consensus has arisen. Until it does, I'll toast the death of Times, and replace it not with Calibri, but with a well-kerned Caslon, Garamond or Hoefler.
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