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Beyond Helvetica: The Real Story Behind Fonts in iOS 7
- MrDOS 13y agoI'm sorry, but who are these guys to judge any sort of font? Lower-case glyphs in their body font are as wide as they are tall and have really weird kerning. It's virtually unreadable.
- mitchty 13y agoI can't speak too much to this as its still technically NDA. But the whole font engine is rather changed. This almost looks like a leak of some NDA type material but dynamic type is actually quite cool. Additionally the "thinness" is largely not that big of a deal with the retina displays. Past that I'm not saying anything more. It is really nice to have some... designed text that you can hook into and use that the user can control. It scales really well readability wise, I'll just say screenshots don't quite do text in ios7 justice, and it is really easy to make it more readable if it isn't to your eyes. But I'm sure they'll always be neue helvetica haters in general so meh, whatever, use/hate what you want to.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Steko 13y ago"virtually unreadable" The tendency among typography enthusiasts to label all sorts of things unreadable or illegible has descended into farce.
- ctidd 13y agoLegibility and readability are technical terms in the field of typography. From what I've seen, the new iOS typography is adequately legible, but somewhat lacking in readability. To proclaim similar descriptions -- which might or might not be exaggerated -- fascicle is very condescending toward typographers and other design professionals. When people go further in their negative characterizations, the terms stop being used so technically. To call type completely unreadable or illegible is generally an intentional overstatement, and it's understood as such by members of the design community. It's like calling code shit. Is it literally shit? No -- but saying it is doesn't make a developer incompetent or even wrong. It's a clearly contextual statement, and it's rightly interpreted as such. Please give typographers some credit and don't assume we're somehow overreacting.
- smackfu 13y agoNDA? What NDA? I mean, I get that people are breaking it left and right, but using slides from Apple's WWDC decks as your illustrations is a bit much.
- coldtea 13y agoAnd we should care why? Is it our job to enforce Apple's NDA on a random blog?
- smackfu 13y agoWhen the random blog is getting upvoted on HN because they have exclusive information and the "real story", that is exclusive because they are breaking the NDA and using Apple's slides as illustrations, that's pretty shitty. I just see it as a less moral version of linkbait.
- jlgreco 13y ago"Pretty shitty" for who? Not for me... I mean, maybe if I were sitting on a blog post for now and just lost out on my precious internet points I'd be upset, but otherwise why would I be bothered?
- coldtea 13y agoPretty shitty why? Because it's marginally inconvenient for a large multinational to make it's developer information available freely? Oh, the humanity.
- uxp 13y agoIt's not _our_ job to enforce the NDA between Apple and other people, no, but we can certainly call out people for breaking their contract. The more people start ignoring their agreements, the closer Apple might get to canning their whole early-release developer program, which is a bad thing for all of us. Talk about it all you want, just don't fuck it up for everyone else.
- dirkgently 13y ago
- scrumper 13y agoI know this isn't what the article is about, but the new lightweight typeface looks like absolute shit on a non-retina iPad 2. I was very surprised indeed by that (and also by how stressed my iPad 2 seems running the basic OS - animations are labored, scrolling is jerky; it's like Symbian, or old-school Windows Phone). Early beta, fair enough, but the font problem is worrisome and I don't see it getting fixed. I'm curious how it looks on an iPad Mini.
- tvon 13y agoFor what it's worth, you could try enabling "Bold Fonts" in the Accessibility settings.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- scrumper 13y agoGood suggestion, I'll give that a try. Thanks.
- arrrg 13y agoApple already bumped the font weight up. Now it’s much closer to something you would see on iOS7 (but it obviously still uses the same system described in the article, so font weight scales with font size). It’s an easy enough fix once you have a system like this in place. Really, focusing all your attention on that is missing the forest for the trees.
- untog 13y agoI wouldn't worry about performance too much yet- it's still in beta after all.
- ricw 13y agoI would. But thats whats happens when you have old hardware and software is still progressing at an impressive pace. In fact, many of iOS7 features are only possible because of those advances (layered interfaces, the typography engine, for example). I wouldn't expect the ipad2 to last you much longer than a year (if that..).
- dirkgently 13y agoTL;DR: If you can't read Apple's new awesome fonts correctly, you need to get your eyes checked.
- melloclello 13y agoI have an extremely mild astigmatism and unless I put my glasses on the new Helvetica Super Skinny just disappears into a fuzzy mess. Even the characters on the keyboard. This was never a problem before.
- jvzr 13y agoSame here. The new beta fares much better, and the Bold option totally alleviates the issue.
- kunai 13y agoFor all its hate and overuse, Neue Haas is used for one reason and one reason only: simplicity. When you read a block of Garamond in a classic book from the early 19th century, you feel the serifs. They guide you from word to word, but they're there and you see them and feel them structuring the text into lines and establishing the x-height easily for readability. Easier to read, but you're still conscious of the typeface. The beauty of Neue Haas Grotesk compared to, say, Futura or Avenir is that it disappears. You cannot tell that you're reading a typeface, you're only seeing words. It's a highly readable font but with a very simplistic design. This is also evident with Lucida, but its letterforms are slightly more ornamental and wouldn't fit well on a mobile device. There's a reason Neue was chosen for iOS 7. It's simple and clean, just like its design leader likes it to be.
- arrrg 13y agoIt’s grey and boring and too self-similar to really be super readable. It’s ok enough, I guess, but if Apple wanted to they could actually improve on it. The church of Helvetica is annoying.
- melloclello 13y agoWho exactly are you trying to impress by calling Helvetica "Neue Haas"?
- radicaldreamer 13y agoI had to look up what 'Neue Haas' was. For all the extolling of simplicity and clarity in the original post, it wasn't very clear.
- achalv 13y agoFor all the extolling of simplicity and clarity in the original post, it wasn't very clear. You get +1 internet points for that.
- nsxwolf 13y agoI'm looking forward to hearing his thoughts on the upcoming NeXTSTEP 10.9.
- stock_toaster 13y agoSeems[1] that the font default may have changed in beta3? [1]: http://www.marco.org/2013/07/08/a-thicker-hope http://www.marco.org/2013/07/08/a-thicker-hope
- Steko 13y agoNaturally, as an NDA-bound developer, I cannot confirm this. Let’s assume it’s true for this post. ↩ Lulz
- stock_toaster 13y agoYeah. I got a kick out of that too and accidentally snorted some english breakfast into my nose. :P
- mmariani 13y agoI wear glasses and light fonts on light backgrounds suck hard. I noticed Mr. Ive doesn't wear glasses – at least in public. May be that's the problem. As for Helvetica, I have nothing against as it is a fine typeface. A little overused, maybe that's why some trendy folks despise it so intensely. All the typography theory apart, in the end typefaces are all about personal taste. Anyway, I don't know why they didn't go with something like Univers with configurable weight in the settings app. If they've chosen this path this problem simply wouldn't exist.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago>> "configurable weight in the settings app" They have configurable size in the settings. The reason I don't think they can do weight is that they use it to show different things in the UI (e.g. actionable text/buttons are heavier than content).
- fwr 13y agoMr. Ive is not the only employee of Apple
- gojomo 13y agoI'm beginning to wonder if tiny/slight fonts are a conscious plot to inoculate a product against too much use by uncool old people... sort of the reverse of places that use high-pitched whines to annoy youngsters away.
- jrochkind1 13y agoHuh, I hope we get that system on OSX too.
- mietek 13y agoThe real news is that optical scaling will soon be available on OS X, with a simple system call. This is pretty neat for anyone writing graphic design apps.