"It's not unusual for a new president to implement a website redesign upon entering office. In 2009, Obama revamped the White House website with Hoefler Text, a font from Hoefler & Co., the same typeface he used on his campaign trail. Trump switched to Merriweather and Roboto in 2017, and in 2021, Biden adopted Decimal (also part of the Hoefler & Co. family) to embrace high-contrast designs that were accessible and easy to read. On January 20, Trump's new White House changed the website again, introducing a dark-blue interface with Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans."
""I was in a bunch of meetings on that particular day, but my phone was just kind of glowing in the corner of my eye," he told Jezebel. "I had two or three friends messaging me the whitehouse[dot]gov link with no caption, or captions that were cryptic, like 'Oh my God.'" He braced himself for what he assumed was "more bad news" about the U.S.-courtesy of Trump's new presidency-before realizing that everyone was alerting him that the new White House website was using fonts he helped create."
On January 20, the White House launched a dark-blue website interface using Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans. Jordan Egstad, a Portland-based graphic designer and web developer who co-created Instrument with Rodrigo Fuenzalida, was surprised to see the fonts deployed and received multiple notifications. He initially expected bad news about the new presidency before realizing the alert concerned his fonts. Egstad said the use of the fonts conflicted with his personal political views and prompted him to reconsider open-sourcing fonts in the future. Previous presidential website fonts included Hoefler Text (2009), Merriweather and Roboto (2017), and Decimal (2021).
Read at Jezebel
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