First: this is not a political post. Just to be clear. If you’re triggered, this is a safe space. We’re not going to solve any big political questions here. The impetus for this post was me jogging on a treadmill at the gym while NBC talked about the impeachment hearings (for those living under a rock or outside the US, the United States legislature has impeached and is now preparing to try the president. It likely won’t go anywhere but is excellent political theater). At one point, they put up a portion of the document that’s currently being debated about how to proceed to conduct the trial in the Senate. The fact that they even need to debate this is a giant eye roll, but that’s besides the point. What I noticed, because I’m a dork, is the font that the document used. It was, in a word, terrible. As a graphic designer, I would never use that font for broadcast TV. The lines were so thin in parts that the crappy LCD TV at the gym just lost them completely, and the old school serifs were thick and blocky. However, it did have this sort of historical gravitas about it. It felt out of place and out of time, as if it came from a different era - and that’s likely because it did!
So: what is this font? Where did it come from? When did we decide to use it, and why, and why do we still use it? I started Googling for answers.
My first pass at Googling revealed that there was no “one true font” for the US government. But that didn’t entirely match up with my experience. There’s a particular font that’s always seemingly used for official US Federal documents, such as those dealing with the Senate. The government actually has its own free font released as open source: Public Sans. It’s a nice font, but it’s clearly not the font we’re looking for; way too modern. There’s also the “font” used in “top secret” documents, sort of a modern typewriter looking thing (probably because originally many of them were typed), but that’s not it either.
I actually then went and googled the impeachment documents and found, to my surprise, that they are actually written in a fairly modern looking Serif font - possibly Times New Roman. Not what I was looking for, either.
It turns out that what I wanted was “Century Schoolbook”, and the reason I wanted it is because it’s used by the Supreme Court (though possibly not always). But it wasn’t easy to figure this out, and even once I did, it wasn’t easy to figure out why. It seems like it’s just a stylistic choice. It brings to mind solidity and tradition - and the reason it does so is because millions of people used it to learn to read. As the name implies, it was invented in order to help kids read schoolbooks. That’s why it’s a Serif font; it’s meant to be printed and read at medium-to-large font sizes, which I suppose makes sense for legal documents, but doesn’t work nearly as well on computer or TV screens (especially bad ones like I have at the gym). According to this page at Microsoft, it was invented around 1919 and perfected by 1924.
So there you have at. Century Schoolbook.
