The Quiet Politics of the Default Font

A nurse named Trần Thị Hảo once showed me her employee badge, on which her own name appeared in two typefaces.

The badge system used a default called Corvane, a tidy, confident sans that you have seen ten thousand times without seeing it. Corvane knows a couple hundred Latin characters and some punctuation. It has no idea what an ầ is, or an ị, or an ả, and in Vietnamese those marks aren’t decoration, because they change the word. So when the printer reached those letters it went rummaging for a fallback, found something heavier and a touch taller, and stamped it in. The result looked like a ransom note from someone who had almost finished their homework. She had worked at that hospital for eleven years. “It’s fine,” she told me, in the voice people use for things that stopped being worth mentioning around year two.

I was there because her department had hired me to make patient forms easier to read, and she showed me the badge because I had made the mistake of telling her what I do for a living. People show me things. It’s like being a dentist at a party.

I have been drawing letters for twenty years, and this is the one opinion I would defend in court. A default is a decision made by someone who will not be there when it goes wrong.

Nobody experiences it as a decision, which is where its power comes from. Pick a font for a poster and you’ll argue about it over dinner. The font on your bank statement or your discharge instructions got there because of what came preinstalled, what the vendor’s template used, or what looked all right in a conference room to a deputy director who was handed three options on a Thursday.

Defaults tend to serve people whose languages were finished first. Font menus show their sample text in English, and character sets grew outward from there, so Vietnamese and Yoruba, with its dots beneath and its tone marks, get patched in later if they get in at all. When a font and a name disagree you get the ransom note, or the little empty rectangles type people call tofu, which is a cute word for your name failing to exist.

They serve people with young eyes and good screens. The fashionable setting of recent years has been small, light, and pale gray, approved by people sitting at large, expensive monitors in well-lit rooms. I once watched a man in his late sixties tilt a cheap phone toward a pharmacy window, trying to read a refill notice set that way. He got it on the fourth angle.

They serve people who never have to tell an I from an l. In Corvane the capital I, the lowercase l and, at small sizes, the numeral 1 are three nearly identical sticks. The word “Ill” is a fence. That’s charming until it’s a one-time code or a license plate, and you’re reading it over the phone to the county.

In fairness, defaults also serve some people very well, and I say this as someone who sells the alternative. A handsome custom web font can weigh a few hundred kilobytes. The font already on the device costs nothing and shows up instantly, and if you’re on a prepaid plan with one bar of signal, that is the kind choice and my lovely typeface is a tax. Nor will I tell you there’s a magic font for dyslexic readers, because the studies I’ve read don’t support one. Looser spacing seems to do more than any particular letterform.

So somebody has to set the starting point, and most people will never change it and shouldn’t have to. The question is whether anyone checked.

Changes are where you catch a default in the act. A county clerk in Ardmoor told me about the year an office software update swapped in a new default that ran slightly wider. Her department’s benefits renewal form, which had fit on one page for nine years, quietly became two, with the signature line landing on the back. People filled out the front and mailed it. She estimated 1,100 rejected renewals that first quarter before anyone traced the problem to the type. Nobody had voted on anything, and there were no minutes to go read. Some households lost a month of benefits to a character width.

If you’re the person choosing, the checks take less time than the meeting did:

• Type the names of your last 50 customers or patients into the font, in place of the sample sentence.

• Print it at its real size on the worst printer in the building.

• Set Il1 O0 and read it aloud to a colleague over the phone.

• Hand the screen to someone over 65, outdoors.

I put the badge problem in my report. Adding Vietnamese to Corvane is not a heroic project, and I offered to draw the missing vowels myself in a couple of weeks. The vendor wrote back that the font lived in the printer’s firmware and the printers were on a seven-year contract.

The next spring I came back to check on the forms and ran into Hảo in the elevator. She had a new badge. The hospital had solved the problem by removing the marks: TRAN THI HAO, in perfectly even Corvane capitals. Everyone in the department agreed it looked much cleaner.