Courier New gets the boot from the State Department.

The U.S. Department of State issued a memo banishing the typeface Courier New from official written materials.

"In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: Times New Roman 14. TNR 14 takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look," The New York Times reported, quoting the memo, on Feb. 8, 2004.

In the early 1960s the Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger created Courier New for the I.B.M. Selectric typewriter.

Readers and design experts will be happy that the State Department stuck with a serif typeface. And taxpayers should be happy that the memos and other documents will take less paper to be printed on.

The Times, which noted that it itself is written in Times New Roman and which gave the news a quarter of a page, concluded, "Courier New is a living link to a vanished technology, and that sealed its doom. Oddly, though, the typeface that bumped it is even older. Times New Roman, designed by the Monotype Corporation, made its debut in The Times of London in 1932.

The Newsletter on Newsletters uses Amasis for body text (chosen for its nostalgic resemblance to the Courier New that most newsletters used for almost 30 years) and Arial for headlines.