D E S I G N /// ck

Microsoft has finally entered the 20th century and adopted a sans serif font as the Office 07 default: Calibri. The old Times New Roman font, the font I saw so many papers written with in college, has been dethroned.
Why is this important, you ask? Granted, most people won't notice the change or care about it. But that's exactly the point- New Times Roman was the font of people who don't care, the people who just start typing with the default and don't even know there is a font list on Word. These people litter the world with notices, posters, emails, resumes, and bad birthday cards. They drive those of us who do care crazy.
Fonts are becoming a obsession of mine. It's subtle art, full of implication. I love sans serif fonts, particularly the "Swiss Style" which gave us Helvetica and Arial. There is a great article on Wikipedia that gives a good overview. I hadn't known that there were four subgroups of sans serif. The more you read about fonts, the more you realize how you've responded to various fonts in the past, particularly in advertising. Many of these fonts have been around for fifty years or longer. They were controversial at first- they were too "modern." Sound familiar?
In 2007, it seems we've finally and completely embraced sans serif fonts.