Trump’s Lake America font underscores the new name’s silliness

To announce his executive order renaming Lake Ontario last week, President Donald Trump brought props that wrote out his new name for the lake using his administration’s official font. A typeface chosen to convey seriousness ended up looking like a joke.

During an Oval Office signing ceremony Thursday, Trump signed an order making the Interior Department’s Board on Geographic Names rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid an escalating trade war between the U.S. and Canada. His visuals for the event included two posters on easels, with text on each written in Instrument Serif, a condensed serif designed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida with direction from Jordan Egstad and released in 2023. It gives the second Trump term the look of an A.I. tech company.

One of Trump’s posters showed a map of the Great Lakes region with “Making the Great Lakes Even Greater” written across the top in Instrument Serif and “Lake America” written in a different font inside a big red box like this is a Daily Mail story. The image on the other poster was a close-up map of the lakes, which the White House also shared on social media. While Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie are all written in this map in a blue, nondescript, sans-serif font that looks like standard map typography, “Lake America” is written in red and on a curve in Instrument Serif.

It looks kind of goofy. About as silly as the phrase “making the Great Lakes even greater” when all Trump’s proposing here is a stunt name change, his second in two years. The circus is boring and the bread is moldy.

The right typography can go a long way in conveying a sense of authority and trust. One 2012 experiment, for example, found the serif Baskerville is the most believable font. When it comes to government communications, type choice is all about credibility. You won’t see a jury summons or voter registration materials written in Comic Sans or Impact. Instead, fonts are chosen to convey formality and carry the weight of the state.

Modern presidential administrations use serious serif fonts. In his first term, Trump’s White House used Merriweather, while then-President Joe Biden’s administration used Mercury. For term two, Trump’s administration chose a typeface that’s on trend for the branding of Big Tech’s A.I. boom.

Young A.I. startups looking to brand for visual credibility often use serif typography to suggest a sense of humanity and the retro style of fonts like vintage Apple Garamond, Apple’s classic serif font of the 1970s and ‘80s. The Trump administration uses Instrument Serif on its website, social media posts, event signage, and executive orders, and when it comes to the written word, it’s as much of a part of Trump’s second-term visual identity as the gaudy gold White House redesign is to the executive mansion and awful A.I.-generated MAGAslop social media content is to the realDonaldTrump account.