That practice died out years ago with the rise of browser support for @font-face and the hosted webfont industry. Of course, you'll still encounter legacy sites that assume installed fonts, but no professional designer is going to specify type that way on a new project.
I think this is an ugly, clumsy typeface, designed primarily for legibility in a particular small application (the watch). Now it's now rumored to be destined as the system font in 10.11.
Going from graceful, readable Lucida to ok-only-in-Retina-but-even-then-hard-to-read-and-overused Helvetica to this new San Francisco is just plain frustrating. Maybe readability trumps taste, but in that case, just go back to Lucida.
Not really. That particular expression (and others like it such as "the elephant in the room" is more to get across the idea that there is an obvious truth staring people in the face and they don't see it / talk about it. I don't know that you can really say that San Francisco is objectively ugly - an opinion that I advance based on the fact that there are an awful lot of people out there that haven't even noticed what font is being used. If it was a truly ugly font, you would have every second post about the Apple Watch talking about how ugly the text is...
Yeah, this is just an attempt to imply some sort of consensus while shielding yourself from any disagreement, a way of enlarging your own opinion into something bigger than it really is.
I have a theory that every type family looks ugly when it replaces another one in a familiar context. We become so acclimated to a particular rhythm of strokes and counters that seeing them changed in situ inevitably looks wrong. In time, though, our brains adjust and the new typography comes to look right.
It is reminiscent of German industrial typeface DIN [1], which looks stylish in certain contexts (advertising), but arguably too stylish and cold for general use. An OS font will be used for everything from obituaries to love letters. Helvetica is a horrible screen font [2], but, unlike San Francisco, it doesn't impose a certain mood on text.
(On the other hand, SF's readability kicks Helvetica's ass, so at the end of the day, I do welcome this change. But Apple could do so much better.)
I always thought that XKCD was something of a Rorschach test: If you're already convinced that everything is subjective, you laugh at the idea of nerds becoming connoisseurs of something with no depth. If you believe everything can be judged objectively, you laugh at how true it is that even something with no apparent variance can hide subtle details that distinguish its better expressions.
Both of those seem silly to me. Aesthetics isn't a fact about the universe, but nor is it something people just make up. Aesthetics is an objective property of how an individual human's brain will react to a stimulus, summed across whatever group-size you want to talk about (humanity in general, some culture/subculture, etc.)
And those brains are pretty predictable; you can figure out what someone's "tastes" will be from their DNA and formative experience far in advance of actually exposing them to the stimuli in question.
Or, to put it another way, "human aesthetics are an arbitrary result; they 'could have' been anything. That doesn't mean you should ignore them—your arbitrary path-dependent values are literally all you are."
Try it at a bigger distance. I can notice a difference. Helvetica and Arial make it hard to distinguish the "l"s from the "i"s, while the other two have distinguishing features: a round dot and sloped stem for FF Meta, and the little overhang on FF Unit. That makes the two of them easier to distinguish at a glance.
You're right, Helvetica is and was a poor choice for Yosemite, even if you have a retina screen. It's not a screen font. Lucida Grande was a great screen font, but the boldness of it worked much better on 1x screens. With the added fidelity of retina screens, it just looks too strong. Apple probably should let you choose or choose for you depending on your pixel density, but that's not their style and they've always been willing to make compromises in choices for the sake of forward progress.
San Francisco as a system font in OS X on a retina screen is very good, even if the current hacked implementation has it's quirks. The thinner stroke intersections are somewhat reminiscent of ink traps. I'm not certain, but I'd be willing to bet it has to do with sub-pixel anti-aliasing and not making the stroke intersections look too heavy. To my eye, the taller but symmetrical bowls look really good and help keep an even cadence between all the vertical forms. The wide range of weights is also really useful. Maybe Apple will put that to use in 10.11 for retina and non-retina screens.
I'm with you, I think it's hideous. And it's not, as another commenter wrote, just the fact that we're seeing a new font replacing an old one in a particular context. I haven't seen this new font in the wild — just on the spec page — and I still thought "Surely no-one's putting their name to this…"
It's probably a personal aesthetic, but the variable stroke widths make it look cartoony. It's also got a tendency to big loops — the a, p, h, and g in the sample all have very large, arched, oval shapes (this is probably what they're referring to as the large x-height). That makes it look exaggerated to my eye, and doesn't help the cartoony appearance either.
But if it is a personal dislike and other people are fans, I can't object. It wouldn't be the first time I disliked an Apple initiative that turned out to be very successful.
The big loops seem necessary to me, at least when staring at the 8pt size on my retina screen. It's the same sort of contortions you go through to make a "pixel" font look good at 8x8 or 5x5, or an icon look good at 16x16—abstract overemphasis to survive reduction.
I think, if the font didn't literally have to be continuously zoomed in a lot of places, they would just lose the overemphasis at larger sizes.
You're unhappy with the readability of San Francisco? I've heard the opposite from most people who have seen it on the Watch.
I think it's quite a beautiful typeface, and I'm glad they're expanding its usage to their new keyboards and iOS/OS X. I think it will work out great for them.
It does look good on the Watch. But that doesn't automatically mean it would be a good choice for other uses. In my subjective opinion it looks pretty bad as OS X system font. Take a look: http://9to5mac.com/2014/11/19/how-to-use-the-apple-watch-fon...
We're operating off of rumors and a font hack that uses a font designed for hi-fidelity mockups of Apple Watch apps. I'm going to wait and see what Apple releases.
The statement that it's "like a Starship Enterprise" in that screenshot hit on exactly how the system-font-ization looks to me. It feels clinical somehow. It's definitely not a neutral statement—which is usually what people presume a system font should be.
Instead, it feels like something I'd expect to come with a redesign to the OS itself to make it all a bit more brutalist-feeling; maybe something that relies on Gestalt windows-menus-and-pointers less, and a narrative interface like Siri more. A HAL9000 chat-transcript.
Thanks for the link to that page, which contains a large image of a screenshot using San Francisco as the system font.
To me, it looks really great as a system font.
The reason is that it is legible. That legibility comes thru the junk on my glasses and the fact that my prescription is out of date so things are just slightly blurry. Yes, I need new glasses.
But that's a proxy for people who don't see as well. Apple's serving everybody. And not all of us can see so good.
There's an argument that this line of thinking will take Apple down the path of mediocrity-- lowest common denominator and all that. But hopefully it's only an option and they continue to use the "Best" font (of which I'm not the best judge) for the system.
And then make San Francisco an option as a system font in accessibility.
I don't know about San Francisco as I haven't really spent any time reading it. But there's something slightly odd about Roboto, I can't quite put my finger on it but it's like there is slightly too much bulge in some places. Does anyone else get this?
Is it common for type faces to be so almost completely similar? SF looks nearly identical to FF DIN to my untrained eye, but even with tiny adjustments, it's bit more than inspired by.
In so many industries we talk about here there would already have been a stream of C&D letters and injunctions would be filed in court.
That is the one part about typography that has always confused me - San Francisco is clearly a variation of FF DIN. Can you buy a 'licenses' to use and make your own variation of a typeface?
From a copyright standpoint in the US, you can copy the glyph outlines of fonts (usually some form of bezier curve or in some cases bitmap) without violating copyright. They are completely uncopyrightable.
Most fonts though (TrueType and OpenType) have a hinting language in them which is code and it is copyrightable since it is computer software. This means you can't just copy DIN font files themselves and distribute them freely without permission.
You can however take the outlines from the font, recreate the hints manually and then distribute it.
That said, there are such things as design patents and of course, trademarks. Design patents aren't used too much, but do protect the design itself. Trademarks of course allow you to protect the name.
Another font with very similar character is Malmö Sans (only regular weight though, bold has high stroke contrast) [1]. Typographic details differ (Malmö looks more dynamic than San Francisco due to slanted terminal strokes), but basic forms make it look almost identical to San Francisco at smaller grades.
Maybe I'm just not very observant and/or a philistine but I can't be the only one that can't tell the difference between these fonts without looking very hard. I doubt I would be able to tell at all if you swapped any of those fonts.
Typography is an extremely constrained design space with tons of little details and small differences. If you constrain yourself to readable type suitable for use on screen the space gets smaller, still. That’s why I love it. You don’t have to – but you should also then probably not offer up your opinion on fonts (which you didn’t, but many people do, in that same sneering and really annoying way some people talk about contemporary art, for example).
That’s a really boring opinion that is tremendously uninteresting and completely unsurprising. I do not know why anyone feels the need to express an opinion so utterly boring and predictable. It’s just cliche, zero substance.
I mean, if you think something is not interesting why add to that uninterestingness by saying something that itself is so utterly uninteresting.
I’m really a fan of amateur thinking and talking about art because I am also quite clueless about art (contemporary and all other art), so I think it’s great to talk about it even if you are clueless, but I do try to avoid clichés and if I don’t get something I assume that I either don’t know the context (context does tremendous things to elevate all human endeavors and can make something that seems superficially boring or worthless very interesting) or that there really is nothing to it – but I don’t really possess the ability to judge what’s what.
I think that’s a very reasonable assumption to make when looking at contemporary art and you are clueless about art – and you also avoid dealing in clichés as a result.
I'm postively surprised. I didn't expect this from Apple, but it actually does look good with the Windows font renderer here (Firefox, so I assume DirectWrite), down to at least 9px. The hinting could perhaps be better on a few letters but I expected none care taken whatsoever. Of course, this could be a lucky accident, not sure if Apple did this intentionally. The thin weights seem OK as well, something else that can not always be expected. Looks decent for general use unless Apple prevents that by licensing.
I never liked Helvetica Neue in user interfaces so I'm happy to soon (hopefully) see it gone from iOS.
Edit: OK, so it's only to be used by either Apple or Apple apps.
The Apple Watch Design Resources license where the font seems to have originated is pretty strict about using this font:
Limited License. Subject to the terms of this License, you may use the Apple Font solely for purposes of design and development of applications for the Apple Watch. The foregoing right includes the right to show the Apple Font in screen shots, images or mock-ups of an Apple Watch application.
Ask type professionals: what are good typefaces for spreadsheets (tabular numeric data), onscreen and in print?
Onscreen I've been switching Excel's default to Consolas, which is more compact yet more readable. Other programs have unchangeable defaults (but they rely more on fix-width, too).
If you choose a Opentype typeface with Tabular figures as an option, you could have a high quality typeface that prints out the numbers that are fixed width, but might be significantly more aesthetically considered than standard monospaced font.
Not from the perspective of a type professional, but Tahoma is still very readable down to 8 point, for when you want to see a lot of cells at the same time. I don't find that monospacing is any help in spreadsheets.
This is a ridiculously incomplete sample sheet. Most of the iOS, OS X, and Watch OS users will need to display characters outside the non-accented English alphabet.
Nerding out about minute-to-nonexistent differences from Helvetica is cute, but how will it actually look in real-life application?! Way to miss the point.
It probably doesn't support Japanese, Chinese or Arabic, so mulling over how the alphabet looks on this font seems to be the only reasonable thing to discuss in regards to this font.
There aren't that many fonts that supports 10's of thousands of glyphs and most of those just reuse from a standard set.
I like it. It just looks "right" somehow, and it's more optically dense, so it'll look good on all kinds of screens as well. Picking Helvetica Neue was a bit of a brain fart on Jony's part.
Can we do away with those s-t ligatures please? They're visually disturbing and serve no purpose. In a font for reproducing ancient text, okay. But not in any modern text please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface%...