United States of America eSeries: Microsoft's default font retires 📝

Microsoft's default font retires 📝

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Tonight we pay homage to Calibri, a typeface so basic you barely knew it existed, and size up the contenders to take its place as Microsoft's default font. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

💵 MONEY MOVES

With all eyes on President Biden's primetime address to Congress (more on that later), you might have missed the other big speech from Nightcap's favorite Fed chair, Jerome "the Silver Fox" Powell (aka J-Power, J-Money, Mix master J, Fed Savage).

Here are the highlights:

Steady as she goes: The biggest takeaway is that the Fed left its key interest rate unchanged at zero. This is the Fed giving the economy more time to heal from the pandemic.
Inflation inshmation: The Jay Man says inflation concerns are overblown. Sure, prices are rising — those stimulus checks are in the bank and holy crap we can go outside again. But Wall Street doesn't need to freak out (again) about inflation. This surge is a sugar rush, and not a sign of persistent price increases.
Meh: Wall Street follows every micro-movement of the Fed these days. Investors didn't throw a fit, but they didn't exactly celebrate. Stocks finished the day in the red.

CNN Business' Anneken Tappe has more on all things Fed.

🇺🇸 NUMBER OF THE DAY

$1.8 trillion

President Biden was expected to unveil an additional $1.8 trillion federal investment in education, child care and paid family leave during his first address to Congress on Wednesday night. The "American Families Plan" pairs with the $2 trillion infrastructure plan announced last month.

💻 WHAT'S YOUR TYPE?

Microsoft is changing its default font for the first time in nearly 15 years, and it wants your help selecting the new one. And no, you can't vote for the goofy options like Comic Sans, Windings or — heaven forbid — Papyrus.

The company has commissioned five new custom typefaces to replace Calibri, a workhorse of a font that has been the default for all your Word docs and Outlook emails since 2007. Calibri replaced Times New Roman (a noble type family but one with decidedly pre-internet aesthetic).

POUR ONE OUT FOR CALIBRI

Default fonts are designed to be unobtrusive and adaptable, and Calibri has served that role capably. It renders well on just about any screen, at any size, but it still has a bit of character. Its subtle curves make it a bit warmer than its blocky sans serif cousins Helvetica and Arial, two designer favorites that are famous — or infamous, in some circles — for their brutal simplicity and balanced stroke weight. (Sans serif means no curly bits at the ends)

Calibri's finest attribute, however, is that few people, apart from designers and typographers, even notice it. It's the tofu of the type world. But after 13 years, Calibri is starting to look a little dated, and Microsoft wants to give your emails and documents a fresh coat of paint.

THE CONTENDERS

Bierstadt: Inspired by mid-century Swiss typography, this font is versatile and clear-cut.
Grandview: The mechanical but sophisticated vibe here can be traced to the font's roots in old German road and railway signage, which was designed to be legible at a distance.
Seaford: This "gently organic and asymmetric" font is like a warm hug, or a cozy reading nook, or a cup of tea. Something just makes you want to live in it.
Skeena: This one may be the quirkiest of the bunch, but it's nicely compact and readable as body text or display type (think Power Point titles).
Tenorite: Another workhorse sans serif, but friendlier. Notable for its large dots, accents, and punctuation that make it comfortable to read at small sizes.

Choose carefully — this could affect every Power Point presentation you have to sit through for the next decade or more. You can tweet your favorite to Microsoft here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

What I will say is we have 8 million creators, and hundreds of millions of pieces of content. We have a content policy and we do remove pieces that violate it.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek gave a downright Zuckerbergian response when asked about the vaccine misinformation that came from the audio platform's biggest podcast star, Joe Rogan.

On a recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," the host said — against all credible medical advice — that healthy young people should not get the Covid-19 vaccine. Ek is standing by Rogan, apparently playing the "neutral platform" card used by tech companies such as Facebook to abdicate responsibility for the content they publish.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

📲 Tech earnings: Apple reported almost $90 billion in revenue and $24 billion in profit for the first quarter, handily blowing past analyst forecasts. Its shares surged more than 3% in after-hours trading on the news. Facebook also beat expectations, and lifted the veil a bit on how it's monetizing Whatsapp.

💼Ginormous SUV: Toyota is planning to offer a new, very large SUV with three rows of seats, and will add 1,400 jobs to an Indiana plant in order to build it.

🚗Uber rent-a-car: Uber launched car rentals in its app nationwide Wednesday, and will launch a valet service next month in DC to drive them to customers.

🌮Taco Moon: On May 4, the moon will closely resemble a taco during its waning crescent phase, so naturally Taco Bell is handing out a ton of free tacos.

💰Crypto watch: Tesla bought $1.5 billion in bitcoin early this year. By the end of March, it was worth $2.5 billion.