“The well-dressed man”, said Somerset Maugham, “is he whose clothes you never notice.”
In the upcoming releases of Mac OS X, iOS and watchOS, Apple is changing the standard system font — used in widgets, menus, etc — to a new typeface created especially for the purpose, named San Francisco.
I think it’s very simple and elegant, and will work well, but, in most situations, typefaces are successful if you don’t notice them. Occasionally, however, it’s intriguing to see what goes on behind the scenes when a type designer sets out to create something that we should appreciate but not actually notice.
This talk from Apple’s WWDC shows that there’s a lot more involved in the creation of something like San Francisco than you might suspect.
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