9 thoughts on “Apple web site adopts San Francisco font”

1. Years ago I explained the difference between Apple and Microsoft to a friend by pointing out that Microsoft just painted their operating system to look like their corporate website, while Apple had both a corporate look and also their OS had its own look that was designed for usability through an entirely separate design process — it wasn’t just painted in corporate colors. I remember I told him if Apple ever paints their website and OS the same, that will mean they forgot about user interface design and just thought fuck it paint it like the website.

   So this is the end of an era. For Apple, user interface is just a corporate graphic design project now. Paint it to look APPL-ish. Never mind what is functional or readable in low light or right for the hundreds of thousands of apps. Just paint everything to look like a giant faceless HP-type hardware developer corporation. You should want to spend your 10- hour workday looking at APPL corporate livery instead of a discretely-designed user interface. If Jony Ives’ Web designer has a brain fart, the entire user base should be greeted with a blurry gradient piece of shit all over their daily work. Why the fuck not? All the software quality is gone anyway. Why even care?

2. I realize these are depressing times, painted dark from the very top of government, but try to think positive anyway. Maybe go to work for Apple and point out their failings directly to Mr. Cook.

3. I’ve been a fan of Myriad’s many variants for a long enough time to learn how versatile and reader-friendly it is. San Francisco, like Android’s Roboto, is a corporate amalgam; a font that attempts to combine two categories of sans serif and succeeds at neither. It’s a solution to a problem that had already been solved by better type designers. Erik Spiekermann, for one.

   While it’s certainly more usable than Helvetica Neue, San Francisco seems to me more about IP than good taste.

   Update: As the article also points out, Apple’s page for the Mac Pro looks like it’s still set in Myriad and the ever-lovely Lucida Grande. Some other pages still have Myriad as well. Enjoy ’em while you can, folks.

4. Conflated gloom-and-doom notwithstanding, I agree to the extent that Macrumors commenter ErikGrim does:

   “You never saw a print ad set in Chicago or Charcoal. You never had UI elements set in Apple Garamond. Yes, those were specifically design[ed] and set for low vs high resolutions, but even with retina screens today typefaces made for user interfaces still look awkward and “cheap” when displayed at headline sizes.”

5. Yeah, I prefer the Myriad/Lucida Grande they had before. SF Pro Display is kinda like orthopedic shoes, safe and sound, but very inelegant.

6. This is what happens when you put someone from marketing in charge of UI design. Ive should have known better.

7. “orthopedic shoes”

   Stealing that.

8. Or vice-versa.

9. Yes but I’m not speaking hypothetically. Apple’s VP of UI Design is Alan Dye, who came from the marketing team.