Beyond Calibri: Finding Microsoft’s next default font

Erin and Wei: After years of Calibri — known for soft corners and narrow proportions — we were craving something very round, wide, and crisp, and the geometric genre felt like the right direction.

We both love the circular forms and sturdiness of Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir. But because customers read and write long paragraphs of text within applications like Microsoft Word, more generous character spacing is helpful. The Tenorite fonts aim to solve this problem.

The display styles of Tenorite, however, are much narrower and inspired by Trade Gothic. This tighter fitting allows for more words to fit on a line, which is great for use in PowerPoint presentations, and in all-caps settings when creating column headings in Excel spreadsheets, for example. The Tenorite Display weights are also a bit thinner and heavier than their Tenorite counterparts, giving the family more versatility. Tenorite’s punctuation was particularly fun to create, and we didn’t shy away from going large and circular! In many typefaces, the punctuation is too faint, tightly spaced, or easily confusable for on-screen rendering, where clarity is key.

Steve: Microsoft had requested a new typeface in the “grotesque sans serif” genre, a style defined by block-style letters without calligraphic flourish or contrast between thick and thin strokes. Helvetica, created by Switzerland’s Haas Type Foundry in 1957, is the most famed example.

Swiss typographers gravitated to grotesque designs like Helvetica because of their suitability for grid-based typography. In today’s world, I believe a grotesque typeface’s voice needs a bit of a human touch to be more approachable and less institutional. Bierstadt’s systematic design contains organic touches to help humanize digital environments and soften the regimented order of grid typography.

Microsoft already has Arial, which has many attributes from grotesque types preceding Helvetica, and my approach was to design a sans serif that would contrast with Arial by being far more mechanical and rationalized. The terminal endings are precisely sheared at 90° — a modern note contrasting the softer, angled endings in Arial — and a lack of somewhat fussy curves found in Arial’s “a,” “f,” “y,” and “r.”

As for the name, Bierstadt is named for one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. When I think of Swiss type, I think of the Alps, and since I’m based in Boulder, my Alps are the Rockies 😊

John: Skeena is a fresh take on sans serif, a genre that has been dominated in the past decade by neo-grotesques and geometrics. We wanted to create a humanist sans serif with generous proportions and a higher-than-usual stroke contrast (the variation in weight between thick and thin parts of the letter). Paul introduced diagonally sheared terminals to enhance Skeena’s distinctiveness, and I added the curving of entry and exit strokes in letters like “n” and “a.”

Because the design brief called for both text and display fonts, I decided we should use the latter to push the stroke contrast further, so that the display fonts used at larger sizes, while clearly related to the text fonts, have a more dramatic impact.

Paul: I find a typeface begins as either a mental picture which takes a visual form, or an abstract idea which is given life by constantly assessing its forms against the abstract idea. Skeena began in my mind as the latter, and fleshing it out required continual assessment to ensure my original idea was being reflected in the typeface’s forms.

Because the brief for a humanist sans was fairly open, I wanted to cherry pick from multiple typographic periods and force them to work together. I chose elements that I found challenging to appreciate aesthetically. For example, I like high contrast san serifs. These can be unsightly and too brittle to work effectively at small sizes in digital environments, which is why they tend to be associated with luxury branding and opulence.

I’m proud that Skeena respectfully nods toward type-forms of the 20th Century while adding a touch of unfamiliarity. It’s a contemporary typeface that gently subverts expectations without polarizing the wonderful humanist san serifs that came before it.

Tobias: At the start, there was just a broad description of a personality — comfortable, warm, inviting, animated — so we began by studying the overall movement of old-style serif faces. We hoped to create the same, familiar kind of warmth, but without the serifs.

We didn’t want to be too literal about these references, but many of their themes loosely guided our work, such as a preference for differentiation of shapes over repetition and symmetry. And since most of the running text is set in lowercase, the earliest drafts focused on the lowercase branches, bowls, and terminals, tracking how those elements would relate across the various styles.

Nina: To pinpoint the kind of familiarity and “comfort” the typeface should evoke, we also looked at pictures of old armchairs: in chair terms, we were going for a practical interpretation of a beautiful family heirloom; durable upholstery, nothing overtly plushy or nostalgic. And when it comes to italics, it turns out there are parallels between chair ergonomics and typography: rather than inflating it and making it softer, trust the rigid moments that are good for your back.

Using Bahnschrift — a prototype I developed in the mechanical style of DIN — as a starting point, I decided to keep the x-height large. This increases legibility and readability at smaller sizes on low-resolution devices, which matters because Grandview is intended for body text on any device. Then, I created a version about 20% wider than the original design and interpolated between them to find the exact right balance between Bahnschrift-ness and the horizontal aspect. Ultimately, I found increasing the width of the lowercase by 40 units (about 4–5%) was perfect. I increased the width of the uppercase by around 20 units (about 2%) to keep it in step with the lowercase.

The resulting design, Grandview, preserves the voice of the original and works exceptionally well for long-form text setting. I’m excited to see how the community engages with it, particularly because the mechanical style of DIN is popular across a wide range of design implementations, from data viz and gaming to document setting. Can’t wait!

What’s Next?

We’ll be evaluating these five directions over the next few months, but we won’t be doing that alone. All five font families are now available via the cloud across your favorite Microsoft 365 apps and experiences. You can play around with these new fonts starting today, and we welcome your ideas and opinions in the comments below!