Are you an Arial?

[I know this post is weird :)]

My name is Sriram Krishnan and I'm a font addict. I can't stop tweaking and playing with fonts.

Microsoft lives inside Outlook. You could take away our food, water but we would survive. If Outlook and Exchange stop working for a day, the whole company would come to a standstill. One side-effect of such an Outlook obsessed culture is the quirky and distinctive email styles people develop.
I can tell a Eric Lippert mail a mile away – it screams at me in purple Lucida. He explains the back-story here.
Michael Kaplan makes quite the style statement with his Comic Sans in teal. In case you're curious, the latest email I have from BillG is in Tahoma. And Ray Ozzie still uses Arial (old skool!) but puts a rusty spin on it.

I'm convinced that the font and the color you use says something about you. Or maybe the fact that I think so says something about me :).

For around 3 years in college, I was in love with Verdana. I used it everywhere – on my websites, on my blog and in each and every one of my emails. Verdana has an interesting history, underlining Microsoft's obsession with typography. Microsoft commissioned Matthew Carter to create a font which would look great on screen. Verdana was the result of the effort. Verdana has a lot of characteristics which make it great for on-screen reading. It performs great in small sizes and cramped spaces due to the loose spacing between characters, helping with readability even at bad resolutions. Of course, there are a ton of other readable fonts out there but Verdana has an asset which very few fonts have – it is on every Windows desktop (and on Macs too). This makes it a very tempting choice for most web developers, leading to a Verdana overdose IMHO.

When I joined Microsoft, lots of things change. I bade a tearful farewell to Verdana (though I did have a fling with her for this site sometime back). For the early part of my career here, I was a Trebuchet MS person. I 'stole' Trebuchet from Paramesh – every single mail of his has been in Trebuchet. This font served me well for quite a while until I started getting that familiar feeling again. I knew it was time for a font change.

After a few months, I started noticing something interesting. Microsoft has thousands of mailing lists internally and some real hardcore gurus hang out here. Folks like Raymond Chen and Barry Bond and tons of others like them. I noticed that most of these guys didn't use any fancy colors. Or fancy serif fonts. They used something very boring, very plain – they used the Arial that ships out of the box as the default configuration in Outlook. That combined with the default navy blue color for replies and you'll see a sea of blue in long email threads. In a vain hope that some of Raymond's coolness would rub off on me by sharing his font, I switched to the default Arial. This was a tough switch to make – I've never been a 'default color/skin' person. To pose a Carrie-like question – was I trying to be different by being 'default'?

Ugh.

Life was merry for some time. Until the Office guys came and switched the defaults again in Office 2007 to the drop-dead gorgeous, award winning Calibri (one of the several new fonts Microsoft did). At Microsoft, 'dogfooding' and 'self-hosting' very, very raw and early bits is a badge of honour. Think of it as the MSFT equivalent of saying "I compiled Slackware from the original floppy disks!". All of us early testers of Office 2007 proudly flaunted our Calibri. We would walk around to folks who didn't have Calibri and sneer at them, laughing at their screens showing Times New Roman.

Soon, the Office team did the inevitable. They shipped. And soon, every single mail was in Calibri. I opened my inbox today and was struck by how my emails looked just like the emails from everyone else. I had to do something. Stamp my individuality. Show off a new font preference.

It was time.

As of this morning, Tahoma 9pt is my new weapon of choice. Bring on the font wars, baby!

P.S Posted using Word 2007. Inspired by Jon Udell.