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Show HN: Typedetail.com – featuring Apple's new typeface San Francisco
- timothya 11y agoOn a related note, here's a comparison between Apple's San Francisco and Google's Roboto, along with FF DIN and Helvetica: http://www.fontshop.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/comparison.pdf http://www.fontshop.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/comparison...
- wodenokoto 11y agoThe lower-case a in the PDFs doesn't display the same as the lower case a in the linked website.
- willyt 11y agoI 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?
- herghost 11y agoyeah - the bottom left of the 'a' and the top left of the 'g' look to bulge a bit for me. I can't decide if it's a bit of an optical illusion though.
- themartorana 11y agoIs 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.
- madeofpalk 11y agoThat 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?
- joewalker 11y agoCopyright law with fonts is strange. 'Looking like' isn't a copyright vilation, but if you take copy a font and tweak it slightly then it probably is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Southern_Software,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems,_Inc._v._Souther.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... There's a similar situation with clothing, IIRC, which explains the prevalence of brand logos. IANAL, obviously.
- Aloisius 11y agoFrom 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.
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- currysausage 11y agoAnother 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. [1] http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/martin-lexelius-core/malmo-sans-pro/ http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/martin-lexelius-core/malmo-sans...
- sesutton 11y agoMaybe 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.
- arrrg 11y agoYou are not. 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).
- archagon 11y agoNot the OP, but as with contemporary art, I strongly feel that "this shouldn't be as big of a thing as it is" is a perfectly valid opinion to have.
- arrrg 11y agoThat’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.
- empressplay 11y agoThat's not the San Francisco font I remember... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface%...
- professionis 11y agovery funny! I did find this version when I did my font research, oh memories
- mortenjorck 11y agohttps://twitter.com/jimray/status/534880834025566208 https://twitter.com/jimray/status/534880834025566208
- azinman2 11y agoBefore and after sightglass.
- melted 11y agoI 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.
- namuol 11y ago> The typeface is licensed exclusively to registered third-party developers for the “design and development of applications for the Apple Watch”. [1] Cool. Another font for web designers to wrongfully assume I have installed on my system. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(2014_typeface) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(2014_typeface)
- madeofpalk 11y agoA designer who makes this kind of assumption and sticks with it is pretty poor and I doubt they would be making much of substance anyway.
- mortenjorck 11y agoThat 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.
- jug 11y agoI'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.
- nblavoie 11y agoThis font sucks.
- izzle49 11y agoagreed this font sucks
- nblavoie 11y agoThis font sucks.
- rdancer 11y agoThis 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.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoGiven that the majority of HN is an English-speaking audience, it's all that most folks need.
- cead_ite 11y ago…The majority speak English as one of their languages :)
- Aloisius 11y agoAccording to the font info, the ones from the Apple website have accented characters for: Afrikaans, Albanian, Asu, Basque, Bemba, Bena, Bosnian, Catalan, Chiga, Congo Swahili, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Gusii, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kabuverdianu, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luo, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Meru, Morisyen, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Sena, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Turkish, Turkmen, Vietnamese, Vunjo, Welsh, Yoruba and Zulu
- wodenokoto 11y agoIt 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.
- Quanttek 11y agoThe font rendering on the linked blog article is pretty atrocious on my PC: http://i.imgur.com/DL5pZKE.png http://i.imgur.com/DL5pZKE.png This is in Firefox Developer on Linux with the Infinality font rendering installed. I'm probably doing something wrong
- chinathrow 11y agoLicense confusion here. Isn't that font Apple only? How can that blog (http://www.nicholastodor.com/blog/use-apples-new-san-francisco-font-on-your-website http://www.nicholastodor.com/blog/use-apples-new-san-francis...) make it available for download?
- detaro 11y agoI expect it's going to be taken down soon (someone uploaded it to github with some config for OS X, and that got DMCA'd)
- gpvos 11y agoCan 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.
- jamesdelaneyie 11y agoThey are decorative ligatures so they do serve no purpose other than visually disturbing you ;)
- Aloisius 11y agoI don't see an st ligature. I forced ligatures on and off on the Apple supplied font and see none (not even for th or fi): http://i.imgur.com/O0jYcKF.png http://i.imgur.com/O0jYcKF.png
- gpvos 11y agoOops, sorry. It seems the font got blocked somehow, and one of my fallback fonts apparently has them. Sorry again, that was a useless comment of mine.
- thanatropism 11y agoAsk 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).
- jamesdelaneyie 11y agoIf 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. Here's some typefaces that are for the most part, only numbers, that I think might look rather nice for just tabbed numerical data: http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/claimcheck http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/claimcheck http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/greenback http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/greenback
- rz2k 11y agoNot 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.
- cpr 11y agoIs it OK to say the emperor has no clothes? 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.
- gonzo41 11y agoI'm going to go out an a limb here and just say it. That looks just like other fonts to me.... but good work anyway apple.
- cpr 11y agoI'm going to plead guilty to being in the publishing (and thus font) business for 35 years, so these things matter to me.
- Gracana 11y agoWhat's ugly about it? It doesn't even seem interesting or different enough from anything else to call it beautiful or ugly.
- currysausage 11y agoIt 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.) [1] FF DIN, an adaption for use in graphic design: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontfont/ff-din/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontfont/ff-din/ [2] See e.g. http://spiekermann.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/helveticasucks.jpg http://spiekermann.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/helveti...
- thisisblurry 11y agoMaybe I'm missing something obvious, but could someone explain why a handful of letters (G, J, K, M, etc.) have emphasis?
- hartator 11y agoTo install it now: https://github.com/supermarin/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont https://github.com/supermarin/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont
- Aloisius 11y agoThe 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. https://developer.apple.com/watchkit/ https://developer.apple.com/watchkit/ (after clicking on Apple Watch Design Resources)
- dimensionzirc 11y agohttp://www.hyperantivirus.com/?id=kgkk1AAdxAgdfEx http://www.hyperantivirus.com/?id=kgkk1AAdxAgdfEx
- derrasterpunkt 11y agoFor those of you with a Developer Account, the fonts can be downloaded here: https://developer.apple.com/watch/human-interface-guidelines/resources/ https://developer.apple.com/watch/human-interface-guidelines... The rounded version is missing in the package, though. The whole font is in the iOS-Simulator[1], but they don't seem to be usable. They have a ".San Fransico …" name. [1] https://twitter.com/chockenberry/status/534865299234127872 https://twitter.com/chockenberry/status/534865299234127872