But for type lovers, WatchKit contained a nice little surprise: a folder containing 23 different variations of the Apple Watch system font, the first one Apple has designed in-house in almost 20 years. Even better, that typeface finally has a name: San Francisco.
I really like the typeface.
Meh. It’s slightly better than Helvetica, at least. I’m assuming it’ll be more legible on a small screen, so that’s good.
I think they could have done better by asking Erik Spiekermann himself to work something up for the purpose.
Actually it is almost exactly the same as Walbaum Grotesk.
You’re right. Apple “city” fonts or system fonts were named after the towns that inspired them. Since they were bitmaps of specific sizes, we often caught our designers trying to sneak them into designs. Postscript caught them every time.
Before I saw this I wondered if this was some weird retro throwback to the ransom-note font days. This isn’t the first font Apple’s called ‘San Francisco’…
Walbaum actually has more personality than SF, more of DIN’s good features, and also bears some resemblance to Adrian Frutiger’s Univers.
Frutiger’s another designer whose work might have yielded better results than this. It’s barely much better than Roboto, probably for most of the same reasons.
Agreed. I thought so when I re-reviewed the font again. This being the only sans serif font that Walbuam created, it does have more character than the SF font. Which, unfortunately, isn’t difficult.
I’m trying to think of a more hideous looking font… but I can’t come up with anything off hand. Verdana?
Love it! Wish OSX uses this.