A designer explains why Apple has chosen the font type »San Francisco«

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When Apple finally launched its Apple Watch, it also did so with a type of font that until now had not been seen in any of their operating systems, we are obviously referring to the "San Francisco" font type. This typeface was specifically designed to combine the best of readability with a clean design that perfectly fits the small clock face.

We previously talked about how Apple would not limit this tfont to clock display but also quite possibly adopt it for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Many media believe that San Francisco will be the perfect replacement for Helvetica Neue and that it will become part of the iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 systems. This is how designer Wenting Zhang talks about this type of font where he declares that "there are beautiful details in the typeface that we often overlook" ...

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The web-based Type Detail project is directed mainly to fans of typographySo there will be no explanations of the technical terms used in visual analysis, but some of the details that make San Francisco an easy-to-read typeface are revealed even at very small sizes.

One of the keys to improving readability is what is described as the large height of the x, the lowercase letters are about 75% of the height uppercase, so lowercase letters are larger than in a typical font. The website also shows the typeface and what it would look like in a diverse range of sizes, weights and styles similar to Open Sans and Arial.

On the other hand aside from the font, let's not wait see many new features in iOS 9 or OS X 10.11, multiple websites already confirm that the changes will focus more on the security and stability of the system than on adding extra features. If you don't want to wait to see how the font looks in OS X 10.11, before it was possible to download a modified version of the font and install it as your original system source in YosemiteHowever, due to rights, the link on GitHub has been removed, hopefully they will upload it again.


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