Say goodbye to Calibri! Well not quite as the Calibri font in Office isn’t going away, it’s just not going to be the default any longer as Microsoft is going to be refreshing the Office theme with a new default font, color palette, style, and line weights to help you make your documents more modern and accessible (Microsoft’s words, not ours). Here’s what’s changing:

Font: This all started a couple years ago when Microsoft released a handful of new fonts for Office (Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview) in an attempt to find a new default font. Apparently after a couple years of research, Bierstadt was the most popular. So they decided to use that font as the default, but with a new name: Aptos (named after a city in California). The nice thing about Aptos is that it will support a variety of weights and variants like narrow, serif and monospace:

Read more on Microsoft’s design blog and view screenshots of the new fonts (and comparisons to Calibri) being released over at Office Watch.

Color Palette: Microsoft researched popular color pallets and design trends, and created a new set of default colors:

Default Line Weights: Microsoft “increased the default outline weights, improved the consistency between shapes and lines, and added better contrast.” It’s subtle, but it is noticeable:

Default Styles: Microsoft did a refresh of the default style of Word documents and Outlook emails to make them easy to read, look more professional, and easy to navigate, using the new Aptos font.

This is a bunch of changes, but if you’re a traditionalist, don’t like change, you’re going to be fine: This will only apply to new documents, and you’ll be able to use the previous default Office theme (it’s been renamed (Office Theme 2013 – 2022).

Images courtesy of Microsoft.