The arrival of Aptos and the fuss about fonts

Microsoft’s Aptos has stirred debates about font preferences. Why does the look of lettering matter so much?

An earlier version of Aptos, designed by Steve Matteson, called Bierstadt. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The poem was ready to be sent, but when writer and poet Priyanka Sacheti looked at the submission guidelines of the literary journal, she realised she had one last alteration to make: the font had to be changed from her usual Times New Roman to Arial. 

“It was difficult to put a finger on why, but the poems sat differently on the page in Arial than in Times New Roman,” she recalls of the incident from a few weeks ago. 

Sacheti’s feelings resemble what many users of Microsoft Office Suite experienced recently. On Reddit, X and Instagram, users began saying they felt unsettled while using Word, Excel or Outlook email; that their work looked and felt different. When they realised this was due to Aptos, MS Office’s new default font, the rollout of which started earlier this year, many passionately objected to or advocated for Calibri’s typographic successor. 

In her book Why Fonts Matter, UK-based typographer Sarah Hyndman suggests that experiences in the physical world can influence how we interpret a font. “Type can be seen as mirroring the emotions we display...through our facial expressions and gestures,” she writes. Hydman goes on to say that typography reflects how handwriting can show our mood: “When writing quickly, your mood is italicised and when angry it becomes bold and deliberate.” 

For those who still write extensively by hand, transitioning from page to screen becomes easier with fonts that look like their own handwriting. 

K.C. Janardhan, calligraphist and founder of Bengaluru-based J’s La Quill, a museum of handwriting and lettering, says that he only uses ITC Galliard Italic while typing “because it’s close to the way I write”. On his website, he uses Optima for the comfort of clarity that it offers others.

This is the same reasoning that software developers and companies follow when planning default fonts for applications that are used by a diverse, global audience.

THE DUTY OF A DEFAULT 

“A default font must be clean, legible and neutral, devoid of a strong character...,” says Satya Rajpurohit, co-founder of the Indian Type Foundry, which has designed Indian and Latin fonts for Apple, Google and Amazon. 

The visual elements of the alphabet’s design, “can significantly impact our interaction with text”, adds Rajpurohit, also the founder of Fontstore, a subscription font service for designers. These elements not only influence readability but also perception of the tone of the content.

Steve Matteson, the American typographer who designed Aptos, says something similar in an email interview with Lounge: “A default font should not impact the tone of what the writer is going to communicate because it can’t predict the writer’s intent.… It simply needs to show the writer the words in a clear and neutral tone and not hinder their writing process.”

Calibri dethroned Times New Roman around the time that Apple launched its first iPhone. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Matteson adds that Times New Roman, which served as the default font on Microsoft apps from 1992, exhibited an “institutional formality”, while Calibri, which was adopted in 2007, has an “overt friendliness” about it—both of these could “skew the visual meaning before the message was even read”, he says. 

To him, “Aptos is an attempt to temper that effect and draw the reader in to read first without any presupposed sense of the message”.

The other challenge that a default font has to rise up to, is the task of supporting “all kinds of documents—from essays to technical documents, from business letters to invoices and newsletters,” says Rathna Ramanathan, a children’s book author and graphic designer who researches intercultural communication design and typography. 

“Given how global the use of MS Office is, the default font needs to cater to different kinds of users with different technical fluencies,” she notes. For her, the perfect default font is “functional, not fussy, and easy to use”.

A font also needs to adapt well to the technology that displays it. So far, decisions concerning a font change on the MS Office Suite have coincided with milestones in technological advancement. Calibri dethroned Times New Roman around the time that Apple launched its first iPhone, which was an industry disruptor. Now, more than 15 years later, the demand is for a font that holds its own on UltraHD and 4K screens. Microsoft specifically mentions as much in a post on Medium that announced the roll-out of Aptos. 

“We very rarely print documents anymore—we are instead viewing them on our phones, tablets or on our computers,” notes Ramanathan. To her, Aptos “is born for reading on a screen”. 

Personal Preferences

When dealing with chunks of text on a daily basis, however, typographic preferences go beyond defaults.

“Obsessed with fonts”, India-born, US-based writer Nishanth Injam, writes with a different font each time he starts a new story. “At least for the first draft, as I fine-tune the voice, I run through different fonts, matchmaking till I find something that clicks,” he says. The idea is that with every new font, he can make a “clean break” from work he’s done before, to make way for “something new to emerge”. 

For some others, changing a font—even midway through a draft —is an instinctive act as they work through mental blocks. Editor Gayatri Goswami reformats files to Times New Roman before she works on them. “When dealing with so much text on a daily basis, tidy fonts that ensure an ease of reading are critical,” she says. 

This leads back to Rajpurohit’s observation on the design of each alphabet of a font. He explains that factors like the width of letters, the height of the lowercase letters compared to capital letters and the spacing between each letter can lead to users nurturing specific, personal font preferences. 

Even a change from a serif font to a sans serif font makes for a huge shift in mindset. He lays out the difference: “Serif fonts are the ones with little feet or lines attached to the ends of their letters (like Times New Roman). They often give off a classic, formal feeling, like what you’d see in a book or newspaper. Sans serif fonts (like Arial, Calibri and Aptos) don’t have those extra bits; their letters are plain and simple. They feel more modern and straightforward, kind of like the text you’d see on websites or signs.”

While writer Daribha Lyndem describes her preferred fonts EB Garamond or Palatino—both serif types—as “fonts that look like something I would find in a novel”, translator Arunava Sinha finds that he prefers a sans-serif type, Gill Sans MT. He explains that “flaws in my text jump out at me when I read in Gill Sans MT. The problem with (a serif font) is that things seem to flow into each other so beautifully, I gloss over any errors,” he says. 

That fonts are essentially designed to support creation and consumption of content without drawing much attention to themselves, marks the act of designing them with a certain altruism. “Fonts are akin to air; vital yet often unnoticed,” says Rajpurohit. “The best font is one you have read without even realising it was there.”

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 5 April 2024

Why wordless books for children are getting better, popular

Wordless books, a specialised segment within picture books for children, are being seen as aids to visual literacy, not held back by language barriers

A page from Dugga by Rajiv Eipe (Pratham Books)

For many of us, large-leafed picture books have been the first steps to reading. As words grow into sentences and paragraphs, illustrations are edged out. But there’s a lot happening in the space of picture books, particularly in the wordless books that bypass the traditional writer-illustrator collaboration and tell stories only through illustrations.

In just the last few months, children’s book publisher Pratham Books has published two standout wordless books. Pankaj Saikia’s The Theatre Of Ghosts is set in Majuli, Assam, and follows young Jhunali and Rimjhim as they head for a traditional Bhaona drama. The other is Rajiv Eipe’s Dugga, which follows the (un)remarkable life of a stray dog that meets with an accident and is nurtured back to health.

“Overall, we are seeing many more (wordless books) since 2017,” says Bijal Vachharajani, commissioning editor at Pratham Books. She is currently working with animator Aithihya Ashok Kumar and multi-media artist Labonie Roy on a few such books. Other children’s publishers, like Tulika and Ektara, too are focusing on this niche segment.

A defining moment came in 2017, when Ammachi’s Glasses by illustrator Priya Kuriyan, published by Tulika, was shortlisted for the Children’s Book of the Year award announced by Publishing Next. The shortlist for the story about a pudgy grandmother who wakes up in the morning and is unable to find her glasses was a feat: A book from a niche segment surpassed titles that adhered to a more mainstream understanding of what children’s books ought to be.

“The world over, (people still wonder) why (these types of picture books) have no text, and what children will get out of this,” says Canato Jimo, an illustrator and art director at Pratham Books. “But it’s now becoming a popular, visual and artistic form of storytelling.”

For starters, wordless books are finding favour in a world marked by geographical mobility and multilingual families. Now the same book can be “read” to a child by grandparents who speak different languages, or by a nanny who may be literate only in an entirely different tongue. With such books, “bhasha ka koi bandhan nahi hai; words se mukti hai (language is no longer a barrier),” says Sushil Shukla, Hindi poet, editor, and publisher of the Bhopal-based Ektara that publishes illustration-led picture books for children.

Each page of Ammachi’s Glasses, for example, is filled with detail and visual humour, drama and suspense: What will Ammachi do next as she stumbles along without her glasses? While the title might refer to Ammachi, the heroine could as well be Nani, Baa, Paati or Bamma.

Kuriyan notes that “the interaction between parent and child while ‘reading’ a wordless book (is) very different” from that of a text-led one. In the latter, the parent is just reading the author’s words. In the former, the parent is asking the child what they see, and the child narrates the story.

A page from Pankaj Saikia's Theatre of Ghosts. (Pratham Books)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the National Book Trust had published a few memorable wordless books— Debashish Deb’s The Story Of A Mango and Pulak Biswas’ Busy Ants, for example, are now into their 10th editions. Kuriyan recalls Manjula Padmanabhan’s A Visit To The City Market. “This one stands out because (it was about) lived reality. (Others were) just animal and folk stories,” says the Lounge contributor who is known for works like The Poop Book and Around the World With A Chilli. Each page in Padmanabhan’s 15-pager is filled with details that depict the India of a specific few decades.

“The same story…is looked at from different angles, aiding cognitive development,” says Aarti Bakshi, a developmental psychologist and SEL (social, emotional learning) consultant at SAAR Education, a Mumbai-headquartered consortium that offers educational resources for children in the 3-14 age group. This introduces the child to differing world views, building empathy. Also, “the expectation of art and literature is that they open themselves up for various interpretations and wordless (spaces) are nice ways to bring back the emphasis on that,” adds Shukla.

Bakshi notes that illustrators currently place an emphasis on “factual detail (in their work)…developing (children’s) ability to correlate”. They “may play around with colours but (they don’t compromise) on the exactness,” she adds.

Eipe does just this with Dugga—colour drives emotion and plot as sepia-toned, dusty streets give way to grey, grim hospital scenes, with brighter shades seeping back in only when Dugga the dog starts healing. The panels in Dugga have a rich, graphic novel sensibility. Eipe encourages visual literacy in his audience, ensuring wordless books can cater to larger demographic bands and become early introductions to art appreciation.

“At Pratham, there is a focus on visual literacy,” says Jimo. “(Sometimes) we have done away with (text) since it felt…redundant,” he adds. This happens when an illustrator has a “very strong visual and narrative sense”.

“For many years, illustrations were only looked at as decorative elements,” says Shukla. With wordless books, however, illustrators are no longer playing second fiddle to writers. They are finally being recognised as specialised storytellers in their own right.

This was first published in Mint/Mint Lounge on 26 September, 2022.