Comment by okamiueru
3 years ago
I would hope someone who don't know the context or effect of a choice they are making, at the least consults with someone who does? This isn't rocket science to get right.
3 years ago
I would hope someone who don't know the context or effect of a choice they are making, at the least consults with someone who does? This isn't rocket science to get right.
Font licensing is an incredibly niche thing to be aware of. I'm highly confident the people involved in this decision simply saw that Calibri was the default font in Microsoft Office and didn't think twice about the availability of it. Perhaps someone farther down the chain of command raised a concern about licensing, but I doubt such a concern would make its way back up the chain. It seems like something only lower level employees, graphic artists, or even IT administrators would be aware of.
Anecdotally, the most pressing concern I made to management during my career only ever made its way up two levels in the corporate ladder, not including my manager. I have a feeling the State Department is even more rigid with communication flow.
It could also be that Microsoft are acknowledging the dominance of mobile devices and that they, as well as State, are optimising for reading on mobile rather than desktop or printed output.
This is amongst the few defensible rationales I can conceive of. The OCR argument offered in the Birdsite thread seems ... weak at best.
(As I've noted in another comment.)
This is such a weird HN-style take. I would bet money the start of this selection was "give me a list of the fonts on all our computers right now" and then they picked one. Probably Calibri after seeing it as the default in some other application.
Nobody at the State Department is diving into the intricacies of font licensure.
Calibri is the default font for new documents in Microsoft Office since Office 2007, when it first appeared. So they probably didn't even bother with browsing the choices, just documented what was the easiest for the users.
Can you describe what "HN-style take" means to you?
I'm saying that a decision should be made by weighing pros/cons by someone qualified to make them. If that's HN-y, then that sounds great.
It doesn't sound like how you described this process is anything short of incompetence or "phoning it in". Which, I'm sure is a valid explanation for how they ended up deciding it. But, I'm using the word "dumb" in not a literal sense. It covers both incompetence and laziness.
Also, if you are deciding on a font to be used widely. One of the key aspects is exactly the license. It describes the conditions for its use. If your job is to evaluate which fonts to use, and you don't consider the conditions for its use, then yes, you are incompetent in that decision. And its not "intricate", its the bare minimum expected.
Everyone at the State Department is using Word. Word includes Calibri. That's literally the only thing he's concerned about.