13 ms·

San Francisco system font replacement for Yosemite

107 points by siong1987 12y ago

gojomo 12y ago
For Apple aficionados of a certain vintage, San Francisco will always be the 'ransom font' of the original Mac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%28typeface%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%28typeface%29
- bsimpson 12y ago
  I expected this.
- yoctonaut 12y ago
  I have to say I was kind of hoping someone had replaced the Helvetica Neue with the old bitmap San Francisco face.
  - flomo 12y ago
    IIRC they made a TrueType version of San Francisco, for all your retina display needs. Perhaps the following would work. Otherwise it might be on some obscure printer disk. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/58243/can-i-get-the-original-mac-font-chicago-on-a-mountain-lion-mac https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/58243/can-i-get-th...
Jgrubb 12y ago
I don't hate it, but I'd love to just have Lucida back.
- wellsosaurus 12y ago
  I think you might be able to do that with this: https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite
  - m3andros 12y ago
    Thanks, mate! Made my day!
oliv__ 12y ago
This looks really good. Sleek and friendly at the same time. I just wish there was a way to bring the old dock back, then I might upgrade.
- cmelbye 12y ago
  https://www.google.com/#q=old+dock+yosemite https://www.google.com/#q=old+dock+yosemite
- TillE 12y ago
  Dark mode makes the dock non-ugly, at least. It's not the same as before, but it's inoffensive, especially with Reduce transparency / Increase contrast.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bherms 12y ago
Noticing a few issues like so: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cl4to142icjw2ay/Screenshot%202014-11-18%2017.20.20.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/cl4to142icjw2ay/Screenshot%202014-...
- wellsosaurus 12y ago
  Chrome, right? Not sure what to do about that. I think Chrome is doing some weird baseline alignment stuff that breaks with the custom font. The issue is open on Github: https://github.com/wellsriley/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont/issues/4 https://github.com/wellsriley/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont/issue...
DigitalSea 12y ago
I might not be in the majority, but I actually like the new system font Helvetica Neue. I am a huge fan of it and on a Retina Display it makes so much sense. Understandably those who do not have the luxury of a Retina Display, I can understand the frustration, but having said that, I think the whole system font change thing has been blown out of proportion. Even though I like Helvetica Neue, I really dig the new San Francisco font, it is a pretty nice alternative that seems to work pretty well for those who are using a non-Retina Display. If you want to bring back Lucida Grande, this Github repository has a handy script that will do that for you (some work colleagues of mine, designers mainly did it to bring back the old font): https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite
- doomlaser 12y ago
  The trend of using ultrathin fonts everywhere will be short-lived and date interfaces quickly. It's a trend inspired totally by the mere fact that high dpi displays can render them without pixelated artifacts, and not because they make sense for design or readability on a fundamental level. Thin weight type has uses in good design, but the way it's being applied ad nauseum today is a gimmick.
  - cmelbye 12y ago
    iOS hasn't used ultrathin Helvetica since its early betas, and I'm not aware of anywhere substantial in Yosemite that uses ultrathin. I believe mostly everything is regular Helvetica.
  - DiggityDug7 12y ago
    Modern fonts have been frequently thin before the invention of retina screens. The overuse of thin fonts might look dated in the future, but I don't agree that this trend is totally inspired by retina screens. If anything, I think Serif fonts have seen the greatest resurgence on web due to Retina screens. High DPI screens will impact our perception of all fonts, just as sans serif grew in popularity on lower dpi screens causing their perception to be more modern and technological. In general typography as a whole has become much more interesting on retina screens. So yes, fonts look better now than ever before so don't cheat by using superthin because its trendy.
_dps 12y ago
Does anyone know the licensing status of the TTFs?
- dshankar 12y ago
  Apple's TOS specifically states they should only be used for development of Watch apps. Distributing it on Github & using it for non-development purposes (i.e. as a system font) is probably against the TOS, but not sure Apple will care enough to do anything about it.
bbx 12y ago
Typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones' opinion about Helvetica in Yosemite: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont-work-on-your-desktop http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont... It echoes Erik Spiekermann's view as well: Helvetica wasn't designed for small sizes on screen. http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/ http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/
- gohrt 12y ago
  The FastCo blog article, the one what derides the uselessly thin font, is published in an unreadably thin set of fonts.
yincrash 12y ago
Isn't this against the license for the font? I thought that it was explicitly for the use of designing apple watch ui.
- billyhoffman 12y ago
  Uhhh yeah. This "project" is basically a binary blob of Apple's new San Francisco font and a script to hack it into OS X's font system. This is totally illegal in the United States.
hit8run 12y ago
I don't know what some designers today have with these ultra thin fonts. One can use thin font variants but only together with big font-sizes. Form follows function => Font Function = legibility => don't use too thin fonts in smaller sizes.
mfkp 12y ago
Looks like a straight up knockoff of Google's Roboto font: https://twitter.com/jm_denis/status/534802341770186752 https://twitter.com/jm_denis/status/534802341770186752 Only big difference I can see is the 'Q'.
- mortenjorck 12y ago
  Only if Backbone is a knockoff of Ember. A better comparison would be to say that they both fall into the same typographic category; they are both humanist sans families with a bit of geometric rigidity; both have been compared to the classic DIN type. That overlay isn't particularly useful; it only shows that the two families have comparable metrics and tend to follow the letterform patterns common to the category. A better visualization would be a closeup overlay of some characteristic letters, or a pangram set in each.
- bluthru 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451
- sammularczyk 12y ago
  At first glance, they look very similar. However, in use there's a big difference between the two. San Francisco is squarer which makes its x-height seem higher. The minor variations in lettering make a massive difference when used in application. 100% not a knockoff of Roboto. They're really, really different.
nwienert 12y ago
In chrome 38 it messes up tabs text (they are set too low)
mortenjorck 12y ago
Eventually, I think it's quite likely that Apple will adopt San Francisco across all its operating systems, but that will only happen after a lot more behind-the-scenes typographic tweaking. It may look good enough as a drop-in replacement right now, but everything from stroke widths and hinting for non-retina displays to kerning tables and metrics within the interface will get some attention before anything other than the watch ships with these fonts.
fabrika 12y ago
The font looks really fresh but it only has Latin glyphs, hopefully they will add Cyrillic and Asian range this winter.
LastZactionHero 12y ago
After looking over the Yosemite change logs, as a non-iPhone user, it looks like a new font was all I had to look forward to. Every other update seems to concern sharing content between the desktop and iOS devices. And now I'm finding out this new font- my only real reason for a 5GB update- is so unpopular that a hack to replace it is front page on HN.
- X-Istence 12y ago
  There is a lot more to Yosemite than just a font change. 1. Calendar/Contacts are cleaned up further from what they used to be. 2. The little green button no longer leaves you wondering what it does, it simply full screens now on a single monitor 3. There seems to be better consistency across many different applications when it comes to look and feel, and all of the partial see-through/blurriness actually feels pretty nice and gives interfaces a little more depth. 4. Improved Safari with a new JIT JavaScript engine that makes the web definitely feel faster 5. iCloud Drive integration, which is nice if you have multiple Macs 6. Spotlight has been massively improved, and is close to replacing Quicksilver for me. The Apple Watch SDK was released today, and people are falling in love with the new font that was released, this hack simply replaces Helvetica Neue with that new font, there is no requirement for you to do so, and I personally won't be replacing my existing font with the one linked here.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Issue 2 you mention is an issue for me. If I am in Safari or Xcode and click that green blob, I get a full screen window. Now, what if I want to use Calculator to calculate something related to the webpage or code I am viewing? I use cmd-space to open Spotlight and type "calculator" and press Enter. Now, I get a calculator but on an entirely different desktop because fullscreen apps and non-fullscreen apps cannot share the same desktop space. It's STUPID. I know you can hold down alt or whatever to make it behave like it used to, but I wish they'd put an option in to make it behave like it used to as the DEFAULT.
    - kalleboo 12y ago
fredsted 12y ago
I was actually saddened when I saw people starting with their patches forcing Lucida back in OS X 10.10. Helvetica was one of the things that made the iPhone so great. Helvetica is neutral, timeless and easy to read. It's the perfect user interface font, especially the UI-optimized version OS X 10.10 is using. As always, people just hate change. That said, San Fransisco is a cool font, it just looks horrible as a computer font: too much space, and it's almost like all the characters look the same. But for a small device like a watch it's perfect.
- 54mf 12y ago
  "Helvetica is neutral, timeless and easy to read." Not according to typographers. :) http://gizmodo.com/designers-explain-why-apples-new-os-x-typeface-is-a-str-1585123982 http://gizmodo.com/designers-explain-why-apples-new-os-x-typ...
- exogen 12y ago
  > it's almost like all the characters look the same. Interesting you say that, but prefer Helvetica. Quote from Erik Spiekermann in the film Helvetica: "Because all the letters...it's the whole Swiss ideology; the guy who designed it tried to make all the letters look the same."
h3xe 12y ago
So, Apple dedicate a cohort of designers to revitalize UI and what people do in return? They ruin all this by replacing system font with one from a goddamn 40mm watch. Disgraceful. As much as I don't like Yosemite (they really broke Spotlight), its UI is much better than that of previous versions.
72deluxe 12y ago
Does anyone here have a "low res" (like 1440x900) MacBook? I do - it's from 2012 and was the last to have a CD drive so that I could write CDs for bandmates, plus it has a dedicated Ethernet port instead of a mass of external adapters (useful for AVB testing). Anyway, since Yosemite the font for the menu bar has been a bit "bitty" and not smooth which contrasts sharply with the rest of the shininess seen everywhere - does this resolve this? I thought I'd ask before taking the plunge.
- sammularczyk 12y ago
  I just installed it on my Air, and it seems a lot smoother than Helvetica ever was. YMMV though
- lcmatt 12y ago
  2010 model (1280x800) here and the menu bar / general font looks fine for me. Here's the bar for me: http://i.imgur.com/oKnD674.png http://i.imgur.com/oKnD674.png
emillon 12y ago
> You must be a registered Apple Developer to use these fonts. Do not download if you don't have a paid Apple Developer Program account. I presume that this is against github's TOS.
tempodox 12y ago
Almost nice, but the digit glyphs are destroyed: they're not equally wide any more. Sorry, but can't use a font like that.
andy_ppp 12y ago
Good god, I've installed it and what a mistake! The weight of the font seems to be very variable and the spacing between letters i s m a s s i v e. Uninstall sadly :-(
nnq 12y ago
Am I the only one that thinks Segoe fonts from MS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe) would look much better than this for the original use (Apple Watch)?

107 points by siong1987 12y ago

For Apple aficionados of a certain vintage, San Francisco will always be the 'ransom font' of the original Mac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%28typeface%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%28typeface%29

bsimpson 12y ago
I expected this.
yoctonaut 12y ago
I have to say I was kind of hoping someone had replaced the Helvetica Neue with the old bitmap San Francisco face.
- flomo 12y ago
  IIRC they made a TrueType version of San Francisco, for all your retina display needs. Perhaps the following would work. Otherwise it might be on some obscure printer disk. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/58243/can-i-get-the-original-mac-font-chicago-on-a-mountain-lion-mac https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/58243/can-i-get-th...

Jgrubb 12y ago

I don't hate it, but I'd love to just have Lucida back.

wellsosaurus 12y ago
I think you might be able to do that with this: https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite
- m3andros 12y ago
  Thanks, mate! Made my day!

oliv__ 12y ago

This looks really good. Sleek and friendly at the same time. I just wish there was a way to bring the old dock back, then I might upgrade.

cmelbye 12y ago
https://www.google.com/#q=old+dock+yosemite https://www.google.com/#q=old+dock+yosemite
TillE 12y ago
Dark mode makes the dock non-ugly, at least. It's not the same as before, but it's inoffensive, especially with Reduce transparency / Increase contrast.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bherms 12y ago

Noticing a few issues like so: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cl4to142icjw2ay/Screenshot%202014-11-18%2017.20.20.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/cl4to142icjw2ay/Screenshot%202014-...

wellsosaurus 12y ago
Chrome, right? Not sure what to do about that. I think Chrome is doing some weird baseline alignment stuff that breaks with the custom font. The issue is open on Github: https://github.com/wellsriley/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont/issues/4 https://github.com/wellsriley/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont/issue...

DigitalSea 12y ago

I might not be in the majority, but I actually like the new system font Helvetica Neue. I am a huge fan of it and on a Retina Display it makes so much sense. Understandably those who do not have the luxury of a Retina Display, I can understand the frustration, but having said that, I think the whole system font change thing has been blown out of proportion. Even though I like Helvetica Neue, I really dig the new San Francisco font, it is a pretty nice alternative that seems to work pretty well for those who are using a non-Retina Display. If you want to bring back Lucida Grande, this Github repository has a handy script that will do that for you (some work colleagues of mine, designers mainly did it to bring back the old font): https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite

doomlaser 12y ago
The trend of using ultrathin fonts everywhere will be short-lived and date interfaces quickly. It's a trend inspired totally by the mere fact that high dpi displays can render them without pixelated artifacts, and not because they make sense for design or readability on a fundamental level. Thin weight type has uses in good design, but the way it's being applied ad nauseum today is a gimmick.
- cmelbye 12y ago
  iOS hasn't used ultrathin Helvetica since its early betas, and I'm not aware of anywhere substantial in Yosemite that uses ultrathin. I believe mostly everything is regular Helvetica.
- DiggityDug7 12y ago
  Modern fonts have been frequently thin before the invention of retina screens. The overuse of thin fonts might look dated in the future, but I don't agree that this trend is totally inspired by retina screens. If anything, I think Serif fonts have seen the greatest resurgence on web due to Retina screens. High DPI screens will impact our perception of all fonts, just as sans serif grew in popularity on lower dpi screens causing their perception to be more modern and technological. In general typography as a whole has become much more interesting on retina screens. So yes, fonts look better now than ever before so don't cheat by using superthin because its trendy.

_dps 12y ago

Does anyone know the licensing status of the TTFs?

dshankar 12y ago
Apple's TOS specifically states they should only be used for development of Watch apps. Distributing it on Github & using it for non-development purposes (i.e. as a system font) is probably against the TOS, but not sure Apple will care enough to do anything about it.

bbx 12y ago

Typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones' opinion about Helvetica in Yosemite: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont-work-on-your-desktop http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont... It echoes Erik Spiekermann's view as well: Helvetica wasn't designed for small sizes on screen. http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/ http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/

gohrt 12y ago
The FastCo blog article, the one what derides the uselessly thin font, is published in an unreadably thin set of fonts.

yincrash 12y ago

Isn't this against the license for the font? I thought that it was explicitly for the use of designing apple watch ui.

billyhoffman 12y ago
Uhhh yeah. This "project" is basically a binary blob of Apple's new San Francisco font and a script to hack it into OS X's font system. This is totally illegal in the United States.

hit8run 12y ago

I don't know what some designers today have with these ultra thin fonts. One can use thin font variants but only together with big font-sizes. Form follows function => Font Function = legibility => don't use too thin fonts in smaller sizes.

mfkp 12y ago

Looks like a straight up knockoff of Google's Roboto font: https://twitter.com/jm_denis/status/534802341770186752 https://twitter.com/jm_denis/status/534802341770186752 Only big difference I can see is the 'Q'.

mortenjorck 12y ago
Only if Backbone is a knockoff of Ember. A better comparison would be to say that they both fall into the same typographic category; they are both humanist sans families with a bit of geometric rigidity; both have been compared to the classic DIN type. That overlay isn't particularly useful; it only shows that the two families have comparable metrics and tend to follow the letterform patterns common to the category. A better visualization would be a closeup overlay of some characteristic letters, or a pangram set in each.
bluthru 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451
sammularczyk 12y ago
At first glance, they look very similar. However, in use there's a big difference between the two. San Francisco is squarer which makes its x-height seem higher. The minor variations in lettering make a massive difference when used in application. 100% not a knockoff of Roboto. They're really, really different.

nwienert 12y ago

In chrome 38 it messes up tabs text (they are set too low)

mortenjorck 12y ago

Eventually, I think it's quite likely that Apple will adopt San Francisco across all its operating systems, but that will only happen after a lot more behind-the-scenes typographic tweaking. It may look good enough as a drop-in replacement right now, but everything from stroke widths and hinting for non-retina displays to kerning tables and metrics within the interface will get some attention before anything other than the watch ships with these fonts.

fabrika 12y ago

The font looks really fresh but it only has Latin glyphs, hopefully they will add Cyrillic and Asian range this winter.

LastZactionHero 12y ago

After looking over the Yosemite change logs, as a non-iPhone user, it looks like a new font was all I had to look forward to. Every other update seems to concern sharing content between the desktop and iOS devices. And now I'm finding out this new font- my only real reason for a 5GB update- is so unpopular that a hack to replace it is front page on HN.

X-Istence 12y ago
There is a lot more to Yosemite than just a font change. 1. Calendar/Contacts are cleaned up further from what they used to be. 2. The little green button no longer leaves you wondering what it does, it simply full screens now on a single monitor 3. There seems to be better consistency across many different applications when it comes to look and feel, and all of the partial see-through/blurriness actually feels pretty nice and gives interfaces a little more depth. 4. Improved Safari with a new JIT JavaScript engine that makes the web definitely feel faster 5. iCloud Drive integration, which is nice if you have multiple Macs 6. Spotlight has been massively improved, and is close to replacing Quicksilver for me. The Apple Watch SDK was released today, and people are falling in love with the new font that was released, this hack simply replaces Helvetica Neue with that new font, there is no requirement for you to do so, and I personally won't be replacing my existing font with the one linked here.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Issue 2 you mention is an issue for me. If I am in Safari or Xcode and click that green blob, I get a full screen window. Now, what if I want to use Calculator to calculate something related to the webpage or code I am viewing? I use cmd-space to open Spotlight and type "calculator" and press Enter. Now, I get a calculator but on an entirely different desktop because fullscreen apps and non-fullscreen apps cannot share the same desktop space. It's STUPID. I know you can hold down alt or whatever to make it behave like it used to, but I wish they'd put an option in to make it behave like it used to as the DEFAULT.
  - kalleboo 12y ago

fredsted 12y ago

I was actually saddened when I saw people starting with their patches forcing Lucida back in OS X 10.10. Helvetica was one of the things that made the iPhone so great. Helvetica is neutral, timeless and easy to read. It's the perfect user interface font, especially the UI-optimized version OS X 10.10 is using. As always, people just hate change. That said, San Fransisco is a cool font, it just looks horrible as a computer font: too much space, and it's almost like all the characters look the same. But for a small device like a watch it's perfect.

54mf 12y ago
"Helvetica is neutral, timeless and easy to read." Not according to typographers. :) http://gizmodo.com/designers-explain-why-apples-new-os-x-typeface-is-a-str-1585123982 http://gizmodo.com/designers-explain-why-apples-new-os-x-typ...
exogen 12y ago
> it's almost like all the characters look the same. Interesting you say that, but prefer Helvetica. Quote from Erik Spiekermann in the film Helvetica: "Because all the letters...it's the whole Swiss ideology; the guy who designed it tried to make all the letters look the same."

h3xe 12y ago

So, Apple dedicate a cohort of designers to revitalize UI and what people do in return? They ruin all this by replacing system font with one from a goddamn 40mm watch. Disgraceful. As much as I don't like Yosemite (they really broke Spotlight), its UI is much better than that of previous versions.

72deluxe 12y ago

Does anyone here have a "low res" (like 1440x900) MacBook? I do - it's from 2012 and was the last to have a CD drive so that I could write CDs for bandmates, plus it has a dedicated Ethernet port instead of a mass of external adapters (useful for AVB testing). Anyway, since Yosemite the font for the menu bar has been a bit "bitty" and not smooth which contrasts sharply with the rest of the shininess seen everywhere - does this resolve this? I thought I'd ask before taking the plunge.

sammularczyk 12y ago
I just installed it on my Air, and it seems a lot smoother than Helvetica ever was. YMMV though
lcmatt 12y ago
2010 model (1280x800) here and the menu bar / general font looks fine for me. Here's the bar for me: http://i.imgur.com/oKnD674.png http://i.imgur.com/oKnD674.png

emillon 12y ago

> You must be a registered Apple Developer to use these fonts. Do not download if you don't have a paid Apple Developer Program account. I presume that this is against github's TOS.

tempodox 12y ago

Almost nice, but the digit glyphs are destroyed: they're not equally wide any more. Sorry, but can't use a font like that.

andy_ppp 12y ago

Good god, I've installed it and what a mistake! The weight of the font seems to be very variable and the spacing between letters i s m a s s i v e. Uninstall sadly :-(

nnq 12y ago

Am I the only one that thinks Segoe fonts from MS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe) would look much better than this for the original use (Apple Watch)?