The differences between Helvetica and San Francisco are subtle, even to the trained eye, but they’re there. Now, just two years later, Apple is updating its system font yet again.
Apple ultimately ditched Neue Light in favor of the meatier Helvetica Neue. The typeface was too light, too thin for small, lower-res mobile screens. The choice was almost universally panned by designers. Two years ago, with the launch of iOS 7, Apple announced it would be updating its system-wide font to Helvetica Neue Light. The company used Lucida Grande on OSX from 2000 to 2014. Apple has in more recent history relied upon off-the-shelf fonts for its user interfaces. "When it comes to design in general," Leming says, "Apple is in their own universe."Īpple does a history of championing type design, most notably commissioning typefaces from Susan Kare in the 1980s, but it’s just that-history. The company has moved the needle so far in so many areas, that it simply doesn't matter. He has quibbles, for instance, with some of San Francisco's numbers-the top of the "6," for instance, loops so far down that it can be mistaken for an "8." But, he says, such things can be overlooked.
San Francisco isn't perfect, says Tal Leming, a typographer and programmer at Type Supply. After all, Apple has been so dominant in other areas that anything less than stellar typography is going to draw critics. Google introduced its custom font, Roboto, in 2011, and Spiekermann developed Fira Sans for Mozilla a few years back. “Apple is really, really behind when it comes to typography,” says famed German typographer Erik Spiekermann.
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