Changing with the Times - new fonts in O12

The new font, Calibri, in Office 12 is one of the 6 new fonts you will find in Office 12. In 12 it will be Calibri rather than Times New Roman that you find yourself using on a fresh document by default. Office 12 is the first application to use them and will enable documents to be more readable on screen as well as making Office 12 documents look more contempory.
Very good session (long but good - one to watch on increased play speed!) on Channel 9 by Bill Hill which covers the very interesting world of typography and how the ClearType technology works. ClearType actually uses colour to assist with the clarity of characters. Some of the interesting performance statistics derived from running ClearType I picked up were:

  • Word recognition accuracy 17% more accurate with ClearType over black and white.
  • Sentence comprehension 5% faster and 2% more accurate with ClearType
  • Non traditional reading tasks (like scanning a spreadsheet) 7% faster with ClearType

It's well worth turning on ClearType and tuning it with the tuning tool you find here.
So one for all of my font-head journo friends out there - you know who you are :-)