Not too young here; San Francisco was one of the original bitmapped 'city' fonts which shipped with the original Macintosh operating system, alongside Monaco, Chicago, Geneva, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Athens, Venice, London, and Cairo.
I often wonder if what appears to me to be a very clear cut in aesthetic standards between the 1980s and the 2010s is the result of my own bias (I was born in the late 1990s) or actually a thing. In fact, I do not find the difference between common fonts used in the 1960s -> 1990s as shocking.
What's your take on this? Do you think there has been a bigger and more drastic change in what people consider "aesthetically pleasant" between now and the 1980s compared to other time-periods.
archive.org has a selection of Byte computer magazine issues from the 1980s. I don't think the design is particularly distinguished. It's functional and good enough, but it's not as polished as a generic Bootstrap site.
You have to remember that before the Mac arrived, if you wanted graphic design you had to pay someone. Or if you were ambitious, you'd maybe buy some stick-on letter decals and try to make them line up to make a headline or a logo. (It hardly ever looked good.)
Most people had no idea what fonts were, and if they were aware of graphic design at all it was because of vinyl album covers.
On computers, the previous generation of 8-bit micros couldn't handle fonts. So you had a choice between the system font, which usually looked ugly but might have some weird icons you could draw shapes with, and the kind of overwrought hand-drawn (pixeled?) lettering you'd find in many 8-bit games.
A lot of people underestimate how influential the Mac was. It turned graphic design into something everyone could work with - which is why you now have fast food joints with sandblasted Helvetica on their windows, and regular passing font fads, like Ray Larabie's Neuropol, which was everywhere ten years ago.
1990s/2000s web design was not a little crass, with Flash loading pages everywhere, lots of cyan and orange, fonts that said "Look at me! I'm a font!", and strange linear graphics with 45 degree kinks in them. Business sites were often messy and used a lot of Verdana and Tahoma - like Amazon's product pages, which haven't changed much in ten years.
The recent Bootstrap/etc fad has converged on a style that isn't distracting and works well when you want a clean but pleasing look. It's kind of homogenised, and not very creative, especially when it's paired with a hipster logo. But it does the job, and original creative graphic design is not easy.
Having lived through the 1990s and the early 2000s, I prefer the contemporary Bootstrap/Medium look by a long way.
The Apple ][ had a lot of fonts for the third party hires character generators (and dot matrix printers of course), but they were usually fixed width and what we would now consider very lowres. But I used to love listing out my Basic program in the fancy script font.
In fact Bob Bishop's early "Apple Vision" demo used his own machine language HRCG with the same font as in text mode so it could draw text on the screen (which was an amazing feat at the time).
The zero page COUT character output routine vector set so you could just PRINT characters and they would appear in hires. But when you ^C'ed the program it would print out "BREAK" and the basic prompt on the hires screen, then call the CIN character input routine, which went through DOS and was not revectored to the HRCG, so that DOS would reset the COUT vector to normal text mode output, so none of the subsequent text would go to the hires screen. It was maddenly frustrating that it could write any text onto the hires screen while the program was running, up until you broke the program, and then no more. Later general purpose HRCG's solved that problem and added more fonts, so you could use the computer with hires text in any font. It was slow (especially scrolling) but luxurious and worth it!
I can't remember the name of the HRCG I used, but it might have been Beagle Brothers or something like that. They even had variable width text with FlexType!
And then there was Mike Koss's "The Terminal" with its 3x5 font that could fit 32 lines by 70 characters on the screen! I fucking loved that program, and used it a lot, with my face pressed up against the screen.
There was a brief era when the Mac came out in 1984 when bitmap fonts were the thing. I had a lovely ImageWriter printer that could print them all out.
Emigre was one of the early people to push design in that area. They still have a section on their "low res" fonts:
Actually, while on nostalgia lane, does anyone else remember the font called Boston II? It was a shareware font that was the best ImageWriter bitmap font ever. It was a thing of beauty. I've looked for it occasionally, but I haven't found any web references for it.
The OverbiteFF extension (http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/) will let you use the gopher protocol as well. I actually installed it just so I could browse the floodgap gopher server.
It doesn't feel, to me at least, as much that aesthetic standards have changed in general as much as that they've changed on computers. I'm not certain why, but I'd guess it has to do with various things ranging from screen resolution to font availability to marketing.
On the other hand, the "fun" of fonts like San Francisco ('84) might have partially worn off as computers became more integrated into our lives.
Many currently popular web typefaces have been around for decades. Helvetica, Avenir, Franklin Gothic, Futura, etc.
I recently converted all of the old font suitcase (FFIL) files that I salvaged from Mac OS 1-7 (other than the elusive Taliesin which I have the FFIl for but remains unreadable in FontForge) to working OS X bitmap datafork fonts (.dfont). [0] Missing a few random ones such as Fancy (1993), the Apple Newton font, Espy Sans (1993, Apple eWorld, Apple Newton and iPod Mini font, known as System on the Apple Newton platform), eWorld Tight (1993, Apple eWorld font based on Helvetica Compressed), Simple (1993), Apple Newton font, based on Geneva), and toronto. It seems Grant Hutchinson (splorp) seems to have some old converted Apple fonts from his Newton projects [1] and from Mark Simonson [2], which could be promising of finishing the collection of what I've been referring to as the "Lost Fonts" project. I will be e-mailing them when I get the chance...
This prompted me to dig out my old Macintosh disks (then spend half an hour downloading software that could read them only to find out most of it doesn't work on 64-bit Windows)
I found fewer bitmap fonts than I had thought I had saved. I came across a specimen printout with Espy Sans and Espy Serif (also BeBox) so I had it at one point. But I only found a file for "Espi Sans" that I think was an imitation. I also have the TTF conversion Epsy Sans.
If you would like some help cracking Taliesin I spent most of high school reverse engineering resource forks. Some of what I learned must still be lodged in my brain somewhere.
And yes, the first thing I thought of when I saw this article title was the old funky letter font.
I should be able to help you locate some of the lost fonts, and I’d be interested in learning your conversion technique. Please do get in touch. My contact information is in my profile.
Your parent likely knows what it means; the message is no longer clear but the post it was in reply to originally said "random note". Your parent was simply a suggested correction, which didn't hold up after the correction was made.
Does anyone know the name of the most common small font from Windows XP? For example, when you right click and a context menu appears, or the names of files in explorer.
The Wikipedia article seems to imply that the previous San Francisco font hasn't shipped since System 7, which came out in 1991. I think it has been long enough that there shouldn't be any confusion.
Now even Microsoft feels more playful than Apple, at least that's my impression. Designing beautiful products doesn't have to mean that you're stuck up and can't embrace experimentation every once in a while. I miss the times when Apple used to come up with goofy stuff.
The exception being the Apple Watch, which has lots of playful elements, from the drawing feature, to the heartbeat, to the activity achievement awards and the animated emoji.
Drawing and emoji are just normal expectations of an interactive device with a screen, heartbeat stuff is just proximity of the device to biology, and whatever the fuck activity achievement awards are, if something named that is now considered play, then Huxley scores yet another point.
Indeed. If this were the old Apple the devs would have snuck in an easter egg which changes the watch face to a mouse-like cartoon character that totally isn't a copyright violation, honest.
Not sure if you're serious, but I don't think the fact that Apple is influential enough to be able to get the mouse as a legitimate face makes it not as playful.
Also, if the parent hasn't seen it, Apple Watch's particular brand of animated emoji is rather unusual - I think it's somewhat garish, unusually for Apple, but it's certainly an attempt at... something. Drawing is certainly not a normal expectation for such a tiny screen; measuring heartbeats is one thing, but sharing them is another, and... yeah, I shouldn't bother responding to trollish comments.
Off topic, but do people truly feel Googles current culture is playful? The last couple of years have seen Google aim far more for professional and corporate than play, in my opinion.
I find it mildly amusing how the linked page appears to be set in Myriad, not San Francisco.
Also, how in the world do you actually get to that page from the root of the Apple Developer site? It's not linked from the Resources page [1] (its parent in its URL), and it's also not to be found on the UI design resources page [2]. I'm wondering because I saw this font download (the new version of San Fransisco, not the Watch variant, which has been up for a while) referenced a couple times earlier this week, but never could find it myself until just now when it was linked.
I was struck by this also. Why would you release a brand new font that you plan to spread widely and use in all your products, and set the announcement in a different typeface?
This is just the age-old tension between marketing design standards and product design standards. Apple's marketing materials have all used Myriad Pro since the early 2000s (though Apple only recently got around to using a webfont on apple.com), and thus the announcement is produced according to those standards.
San Francisco is a UI type family for use in products. Just as Apple has never preferred Lucida Grande or Helvetica for marketing (only using either on the web in the pre-webfont era), this announcement doesn't get set in San Francisco. If Apple has a webfont version of it at all, the only place it would get used is on icloud.com, which is an actual web-based product UI.
All that said, this announcement could do with a bit more of the typeface on display than the paltry two letters seen here.
Yeah, historic Apple advertisements for the Macintosh were in the tall, thin serif Apple Garamond font [1], but the system font for the Macintosh was Chicago, a less-tall-proportioned, heavier sans serif.
I would have appreciated a type sample or maybe some mostly-vapid sketches of a few letterforms, but I didn't really expect the entirety of the text itself to be set in the system font.
(I miss Chicago. I kind of want to see a hacked up OS X using Chicago or at least Charcoal as the system font....)
Apple’s marketing materials use Myriad. It would make no sense to set their marketing materials in San Francisco. That would be totally inconsistent and weird. (Also, this is just a download page for people wanting to work with the font … not a place to show it off. I mean, if this were a place to show it off then setting that in San Francisco would still be wrong, wrong, double triple wrong. You would set the text in Myriad and give examples of San Francisco.)
I've been using El Cap and iOS 9 (and watchOS 2.0) since Monday, and I'm really liking San Francisco. I feel like the keming could use a little tweaking in places, but—for the most part—it's a big improvement over Helvetica Neue for legibility. And it's also nice to feel like I'm no longer staring at Gap logos all day, every day.
Note that that’s the version from the watch, which has substantially different shapes (most notably is less rounded) and metrics than the version for phones / computers, and is not appropriate for the size of type shown in the Wikipedia diagram.
I would like to see more companies follow Google's lead and release their high quality fonts under a free or open source license.
I understand a type foundry not making their product available for free, but software behemoths like apple, google and microsoft can and should help make quality fonts available for everyone.
Standard font:
A. Limited License. Subject to the terms of this License, you may use the Apple Font solely for designing or developing applications for Apple-branded products running on Apple’s iOS or OS X operating systems, as applicable.
Compact font:
A. 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 Apple Watch.
They also include additional clauses requiring Developer Program membership and Apple-branded hardware.
It looks to me too thin for an unhinted font. Its lines look like they're trying to be one pixel wide, and failing. Fonts can go much thinner when they match up with the pixel grid; as an example, here's 14pt Andale Mono on Windows 8 with antialiasing off: http://www.quadruple-a.com/tmp/AndaleMono.png
Interestingly they've built two different versions of the typeface: Compact (for watchOS) and UI (for OS X/iOS). Compact is far closer to DIN or Roboto (with flattened vertical strokes on glyphs like the uppercase C, D and G), whereas UI is far more rounded, and looks a lot like Helvetica for some glyphs.
I was concerned based on what I'd seen of the typography of the Apple Watch that it'd be too cold and characterless (I really dislike Roboto on Android) to use across OS X and iOS, but by creating this separate UI variant they're able to make it feel like a gradual transition from Helvetica Neue. It's so similar, in fact, that I'd not be surprised if we end up seeing more font quizzes asking: ‘Arial or Helvetica …or San Francisco?’
Is there an analog of this font for Android, anyone know?
Because, if there is a font that is similar enough to this, on Android, then I'll be happy to use San Francisco on iOS, and the alternative on Android. But, if there isn't, I will avoid this font and try to find one which is platform-friendly.
There is no way I'm keen on designing, at the Type level, exclusively for Apple platforms.
That's a play in this 'freebie' that is extraordinarily offensive.
Helvetica Neue wasn’t designed specifically to be read at small sizes on digital screens. Apple’s new font is, as it has a noticeably larger x-height and tracks wider on narrower letters, meaning it’s much easier to read.
That's not the same font. It's San Francisco Compact, the Apple Watch font. El Capitan's font is different (and available for download on the linked page).
