Microsoft are know to mess with their internal blogging platforms every 3-4 years, breaking everyone's links, the formatting of the posts, embedded images, and killing all the comments (see: The Old New Thing). Maybe their staff have had enough?

Well if they base them on Sharepoint it’s understandable that the staff would avoid them

I read most of the article thinking it was satire and that was partly because the domain was medium.com not microsoft.com

> Si Daniels

> Principal Program Manager for fonts and Typography, Microsoft Office Design. Formerly Senior Lead PM for fonts and icons, Microsoft Operating Systems Group.

Well that settles it: if they claim to not be an imposter, clearly they can't be an imposter!

It does seem totally bizarre to me to make a big product announcement on a third party's website.

Peak "Shadow IT"? Maybe it took too much effort to post it on the company blog.

(Maybe they maxed out their user account quota on Jira and couldn't post a ticket to get someone to publish their article. Not that anything this silly could happen in a multinational corporation. I'm surely imagining experiencing that.)

Maybe it's their new approach to marketing. To reach people on popular sites in "look, we're using this site too - we're cool and so modern and no different than you ordinary human" way

In case you haven’t figured this out:

Go to https://www.microsoft.com/design

Scroll to the bottom.

Look for the set of social media links; the first one is an “M”.

Assuming you’re sincere :) The same text in different fonts, or different type setting with the same font, absolutely does convey different meaning. Most simply, UPPERCASE IS SHOUTING.

Letterforms make a huge difference to how text is read, perceived, and remembered, and how much it affects us. Unless you’re a wild outlier in some way, you are affected by type treatments.

I don’t know if you can visualize it, but I clearly can: the word “Daisy” set in (a) an elaborate script font, (b) a blocky slab sans-serif, (c) child-like hand-drawn letters. Most people will assign different meanings to each, and many people will derive more meaning from the type than from the word.

Do you have a child? Would you recognize their hand writing? Same thing.

I am sincere. You've picked some pretty obvious differences. I'm talking about the vast majority of fonts which are to all intents and purposes identical. I don't know if you have a kindle but to restate my original question - if you read the same book using each of the 8 or so built-in fonts, do you seriously believe you are reading 8 different books? I'm sorry, it's just a nonsense. Sure, you can have a favourite font or dislike how..i dunno..descending letters look, but I simply don't believe normal human beings look at a (normal, not comic-sans etc) font and a) give a shit about it, and 2) feel that one is more "professional" or "zippy" or some other adjective, like a designer has reached into their soul.

In this particular instance I disagree. The default Office font is the font that many people will read/write a very significant portion of the text they consume/produce in. So it’s nice if it’s a decent font.

I totally agree though when it comes to longreads of some over funded startup that redesigned their “brand identity” and commissioned some custom “fun, quirky but still authoritative and inclusive” font. That is just designers cirkcle-wanking.