Jon Contino, the Wantagh- and Seaford-raised designer, greeted with dismay the news this week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had directed the Department of State to use the Times New Roman 14-point font for official papers.

It seemed, Contino said in a phone interview Thursday, "like part of a vendetta against this DEI."

Under some previous administrations, the nation’s diplomats used the nearly century-old Times New Roman, in which letters feature small lines, or serifs or strokes, at the end of larger letter strokes. They did not, notably, when Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, ran the department. Under Blinken’s watch, they used the sans serif Calibri , a style choice the department’s chief diversity officer told The New York Times in 2023 was intended to make the nation

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