He designed the font with a slight humanist touch. From the piece (the quote is Matteson's): Advertisement

The post about Aptos' ascension, like the original post about the five typeface candidates, is full of the highfalutin language you sometimes get when you ask design people to talk about design things. The main flavor of Aptos is a sans-serif font- described by Matteson as 'Helvetica' but with 'a bit of a human touch' that makes it 'more approachable and less institutional.' But like Apple's San Fransisco typeface, Aptos comes in many different styles, including condensed, monospaced, and serifed versions. Given Matteson's history with Microsoft, choosing Aptos over the others feels like the safest possible choice. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the suite's default font in Office 2007, at a time before 'Retina' displays and when 1024×7×800 screens were still the norm-a ClearType font, Calibri itself was a response to the shift from CRT to LCD screens.Īptos was created by Steve Matteson, who is also responsible for Windows 3.1's original TrueType fonts (including Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New) as well as Segoe, which has been Windows' default system font since Vista and is also used for Microsoft's current logo. Microsoft has never laid out in so many words why it feels it needs to move away from Calibri, though today's announcement implies that Aptos was made with high-resolution, high-density displays in mind.

Further Reading 32 years in, Microsoft has decided to rebrand “Microsoft Office”

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