
Introducing the San Francisco system font - davidbarker
https://developer.apple.com/fonts/
======
yawaramin
Some wag on Twitter pointed out that it should have been called Francisco
Sans.

------
cschmidt
I wonder how many HN readers are too young to remember the original San
Francisco font on the original Mac. It was the "ransom note" font.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface%29)

~~~
r0naa
Damn, this font is glorious.

I often wonder if what appears to me to be a very clear cut in aesthetic
standards between the 1980s and the 2010s is the result of my own bias (I was
born in the late 1990s) or actually a thing. In fact, I do not find the
difference between common fonts used in the 1960s -> 1990s as shocking.

What's your take on this? Do you think there has been a bigger and more
drastic change in what people consider "aesthetically pleasant" between now
and the 1980s compared to other time-periods.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
archive.org has a selection of Byte computer magazine issues from the 1980s. I
don't think the design is particularly distinguished. It's functional and good
enough, but it's not as polished as a generic Bootstrap site.

You have to remember that before the Mac arrived, if you wanted graphic design
you had to pay someone. Or if you were ambitious, you'd maybe buy some stick-
on letter decals and try to make them line up to make a headline or a logo.
(It hardly ever looked good.)

Most people had no idea what fonts were, and if they were aware of graphic
design at all it was because of vinyl album covers.

On computers, the previous generation of 8-bit micros couldn't handle fonts.
So you had a choice between the system font, which usually looked ugly but
might have some weird icons you could draw shapes with, and the kind of
overwrought hand-drawn (pixeled?) lettering you'd find in many 8-bit games.

A lot of people underestimate how influential the Mac was. It turned graphic
design into something everyone could work with - which is why you now have
fast food joints with sandblasted Helvetica on their windows, and regular
passing font fads, like Ray Larabie's Neuropol, which was everywhere ten years
ago.

1990s/2000s web design was not a little crass, with Flash loading pages
everywhere, lots of cyan and orange, fonts that said "Look at me! I'm a
font!", and strange linear graphics with 45 degree kinks in them. Business
sites were often messy and used a lot of Verdana and Tahoma - like Amazon's
product pages, which haven't changed much in ten years.

The recent Bootstrap/etc fad has converged on a style that isn't distracting
and works well when you want a clean but pleasing look. It's kind of
homogenised, and not very creative, especially when it's paired with a hipster
logo. But it does the job, and original creative graphic design is not easy.

Having lived through the 1990s and the early 2000s, I prefer the contemporary
Bootstrap/Medium look by a long way.

~~~
DonHopkins
The Apple ][ had a lot of fonts for the third party hires character generators
(and dot matrix printers of course), but they were usually fixed width and
what we would now consider very lowres. But I used to love listing out my
Basic program in the fancy script font.

[https://books.google.nl/books?id=pD0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7...](https://books.google.nl/books?id=pD0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7&dq=apple+%5D%5B+hires+character+generator&source=bl&ots=2kQfleGur5&sig=d40GoJv48XXhPtWzjfikS58yBCc&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=apple%20%5D%5B%20hires%20character%20generator&f=false)

In fact Bob Bishop's early "Apple Vision" demo used his own machine language
HRCG with the same font as in text mode so it could draw text on the screen
(which was an amazing feat at the time).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiWE-aO-
cyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiWE-aO-cyU)

The zero page COUT character output routine vector set so you could just PRINT
characters and they would appear in hires. But when you ^C'ed the program it
would print out "BREAK" and the basic prompt on the hires screen, then call
the CIN character input routine, which went through DOS and was not revectored
to the HRCG, so that DOS would reset the COUT vector to normal text mode
output, so none of the subsequent text would go to the hires screen. It was
maddenly frustrating that it could write any text onto the hires screen while
the program was running, up until you broke the program, and then no more.
Later general purpose HRCG's solved that problem and added more fonts, so you
could use the computer with hires text in any font. It was slow (especially
scrolling) but luxurious and worth it!

[http://apple2history.org/spotlight/bobbishop/](http://apple2history.org/spotlight/bobbishop/)

I can't remember the name of the HRCG I used, but it might have been Beagle
Brothers or something like that. They even had variable width text with
FlexType!

[http://beagle.applearchives.com/Posters/Poster%204.pdf](http://beagle.applearchives.com/Posters/Poster%204.pdf)

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/graphics/flextype.txt

And then there was Mike Koss's "The Terminal" with its 3x5 font that could fit
32 lines by 70 characters on the screen! I fucking loved that program, and
used it a lot, with my face pressed up against the screen.

[http://mckoss.com/jscript/tinyalice.htm](http://mckoss.com/jscript/tinyalice.htm)

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/apple2/the.terminal.doc.t...](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/apple2/the.terminal.doc.txt)

------
JonathonW
I find it mildly amusing how the linked page appears to be set in Myriad,
_not_ San Francisco.

Also, how in the world do you actually get to that page from the root of the
Apple Developer site? It's not linked from the Resources page [1] (its parent
in its URL), and it's also not to be found on the UI design resources page
[2]. I'm wondering because I saw this font download (the new version of San
Fransisco, not the Watch variant, which has been up for a while) referenced a
couple times earlier this week, but never could find it myself until just now
when it was linked.

[1]
[https://developer.apple.com/resources/](https://developer.apple.com/resources/)
[2] [https://developer.apple.com/design/](https://developer.apple.com/design/)

~~~
calinet6
I was struck by this also. Why would you release a brand new font that you
plan to spread widely and use in all your products, and set the announcement
_in a different typeface?_

Makes no sense.

~~~
mortenjorck
This is just the age-old tension between _marketing_ design standards and
_product_ design standards. Apple's marketing materials have all used Myriad
Pro since the early 2000s (though Apple only recently got around to using a
webfont on apple.com), and thus the announcement is produced according to
those standards.

San Francisco is a UI type family for use in products. Just as Apple has never
preferred Lucida Grande or Helvetica for marketing (only using either on the
web in the pre-webfont era), this announcement doesn't get set in San
Francisco. If Apple has a webfont version of it at all, the only place it
would get used is on icloud.com, which is an actual web-based product UI.

All that said, this announcement could do with a bit more of the typeface on
display than the paltry two letters seen here.

~~~
geofft
Yeah, historic Apple advertisements for the Macintosh were in the tall, thin
serif Apple Garamond font [1], but the system font for the Macintosh was
Chicago, a less-tall-proportioned, heavier sans serif.

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/mac-
ad-1...](http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/mac-
ad-1984-crop.jpg)

I would have appreciated a type sample or maybe some mostly-vapid sketches of
a few letterforms, but I didn't really expect the entirety of the text itself
to be set in the system font.

(I miss Chicago. I kind of want to see a hacked up OS X using Chicago or at
least Charcoal as the system font....)

~~~
abrowne
Have you seen
[https://github.com/dtinth/YosemiteSystemFontPatcher](https://github.com/dtinth/YosemiteSystemFontPatcher)
?

------
aaronbrethorst
I've been using El Cap and iOS 9 (and watchOS 2.0) since Monday, and I'm
really liking San Francisco. I feel like the keming could use a little
tweaking in places, but—for the most part—it's a big improvement over
Helvetica Neue for legibility. And it's also nice to feel like I'm no longer
staring at Gap logos all day, every day.

~~~
derefr
Haha, keming. [That's an M, whoever downvoted.]

Turns out it's a subreddit!
[https://www.reddit.com/r/keming](https://www.reddit.com/r/keming)

An on-topic example of keming, from said subreddit:
[http://i.imgur.com/jOZ58Vm.png](http://i.imgur.com/jOZ58Vm.png)

Also, in searching for this, I just found a Google easter egg:
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=kerning](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=kerning) (look at the
search result body text.)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I'm glad someone caught the joke :)

------
Leszek
So... what does it look like? The font on that page is Myriad, and I can't see
link to a preview of the font itself.

~~~
dmix
From wikipedia:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/San_Fran...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/San_Francisco_Display_SP.svg)

I like it personally. But I much prefer Google's new version of Roboto:

[https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3e191ddf621d46efd1fbfa919...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3e191ddf621d46efd1fbfa919bc6a8175165f309/687474703a2f2f312e62702e626c6f6773706f742e636f6d2f2d694a31684e73585f4f5a412f553861724a6a50756235492f41414141414141414f67512f7443376573434a4b4c486b2f73313630302f7468655f6e65775f726f626f746f312e706e67)

~~~
jacobolus
Note that that’s the version from the watch, which has substantially different
shapes (most notably is less rounded) and metrics than the version for phones
/ computers, and is not appropriate for the size of type shown in the
Wikipedia diagram.

------
andmarios
I would like to see more companies follow Google's lead and release their high
quality fonts under a free or open source license.

I understand a type foundry not making their product available for free, but
software behemoths like apple, google and microsoft can and should help make
quality fonts available for everyone.

------
hyperbovine
I find this font weirdly difficult to read. I'm on a rMBP.

~~~
intsunny
I too am on a rMBP (13"). I also agree that the font is weirdly difficult.

It seems to be on the thinner side, and in turn off-putting.

~~~
to3m
It looks to me too thin for an unhinted font. Its lines look like they're
trying to be one pixel wide, and failing. Fonts can go much thinner when they
match up with the pixel grid; as an example, here's 14pt Andale Mono on
Windows 8 with antialiasing off:
[http://www.quadruple-a.com/tmp/AndaleMono.png](http://www.quadruple-a.com/tmp/AndaleMono.png)

------
kapowaz
Interestingly they've built two different versions of the typeface: Compact
(for watchOS) and UI (for OS X/iOS). Compact is far closer to DIN or Roboto
(with flattened vertical strokes on glyphs like the uppercase C, D and G),
whereas UI is far more rounded, and looks a lot like Helvetica for some
glyphs.

I was concerned based on what I'd seen of the typography of the Apple Watch
that it'd be too cold and characterless (I really dislike Roboto on Android)
to use across OS X and iOS, but by creating this separate UI variant they're
able to make it feel like a gradual transition from Helvetica Neue. It's so
similar, in fact, that I'd not be surprised if we end up seeing more font
quizzes asking: ‘Arial or Helvetica …or San Francisco?’

------
fit2rule
This is a really good font.

Is there an analog of this font for Android, anyone know?

Because, if there is a font that is similar enough to this, on Android, then
I'll be happy to use San Francisco on iOS, and the alternative on Android.
But, if there isn't, I will avoid this font and try to find one which is
platform-friendly.

There is no way I'm keen on designing, at the Type level, exclusively for
Apple platforms.

That's a play in this 'freebie' that is extraordinarily offensive.

------
keyle
For an introduction, it's a bare one.

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davidbarker
There's also a video of the WWDC session, "Introducing the New System Fonts"
[https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=804](https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=804)

------
prewett
What was wrong with Helvetica-Neue? Or what is better about San Francisco? I
was hoping the page would give some reasoning I could get behind.

~~~
obstinate
Fashion and taste evolves, and not always for reasons that are easy to
articulate, especially to the laity.

------
inguinalhernia
has someone patched it for Yosemite yet?

[https://github.com/dtinth/YosemiteSystemFontPatcher](https://github.com/dtinth/YosemiteSystemFontPatcher)

~~~
tonyspiff
long time ago.
[https://github.com/supermarin/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont](https://github.com/supermarin/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont)

~~~
cmelbye
That's not the same font. It's San Francisco Compact, the Apple Watch font. El
Capitan's font is different (and available for download on the linked page).

------
dmritard96
It kinda stresses my head out to read. Its too tall perhaps?

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brentis
Slow news day...

