{"id":42882,"date":"2024-04-18T22:18:19","date_gmt":"2024-04-19T02:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=42882"},"modified":"2024-04-18T22:18:19","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T02:18:19","slug":"legibility-and-san-francisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/18\/legibility-and-san-francisco\/","title":{"rendered":"Legibility and San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"

Niko Kitsakis<\/a> (tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Why is San Francisco not the best typeface for a user interface? After all, Apple has gone through quite some trouble designing it in-house. Do a search on the matter and you will find articles and videos for deve lo pers, where the people from Apple explain their thinking. They talk about optical sizes, different use-cases, space efficiency, expressiveness and so forth. It all sounds<\/em> very professional.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Apple’s San Francisco falls into the same category as the Japanese sword: It might, from a technical standpoint, be a very well designed typeface, but it’s the wrong kind of typeface to begin with.<\/em> Apple’s typeface lacks two things that any typeface (to a different extend) needs: Personality and purpose.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

If you compare San Francisco (or SF Pro as Apple also calls it) to FF Unit, you’ll see that the numeral “1” and the shapes of the first three letters of the word “Iliad” are much more distinct from one another in FF Unit than the same characters (or glyphs) are in in SF Pro. This was done on purpose, of course: Typefaces like FF Unit were de signed with legibility in mind, and one of the things a type designer does in that case, is ensuring that visually similar letters have shapes that make them more distinct from one another.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n