The designers took inspiration from old armchairs to find a practical way to bring a classic, valued font back to life without the serifs.

Seaford by Tobias Frere-Jones, Nina Stössinger, and Fred Shallcrass, feels the most immediately familiar out of the bunch, invoking the classic old-style serif text typefaces. Mattison named the font after a rocky mountain in Colorado that reminds him of the Swiss Alps. Helvetica is the most famous example of this type of “grotesque san serif” font, and Matteson has attempted to contrast Microsoft’s Arial font here, too. The stroke endings are very clearly cut off, but there’s some subtle softening to avoid the rigid grid-based typography you typically find with a font like this. Image: Microsoftīierstadt by Steve Matteson is inspired by mid-20th-century Swiss typography. It has big variations in the thick and thin parts of its letters, along with very distinct curves on letters like S, A, and J.

Skeena, created by John Hudson and Paul Hanslow, feels inspired by various periods of font design. It almost looks like a more modern version of the default Times New Roman font from decades ago, with wide characters, accents, and clear punctuation. Tenorite, created by Erin McLaughlin and Wei Huang, is the more traditional style out of the five. Microsoft is starting to gather feedback on these five new fonts today, and it plans to set one as the new Office default font in 2022. The five new sans-serif fonts feature a variety of styles, including traditional, modern, and even one inspired by German road and railway signs. While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years. Microsoft is changing its default Office font next year and wants everyone to help pick the new default.

How to set default font in word