Almost everything about the iPhone seems to be brilliantly designed. Almost. The big exception is the font. What on earth were they thinking? Helvetica?
Helvetica has many virtues, as the recent movie makes clear. But the same thing that makes it so smooth, so all-of-a-piece, is what makes it hard to differentiate one letter from another – and particularly one number from another. Helvetica’s numerals are among the hardest in the world to tell apart, yet Helvetica gets used over and over again in situations where telling those numerals apart is essential: on business cards, for instance. I am continually irritated by Apple’s Address Book program, where it’s hard to tell at a glance whether I’m looking at a 3 or an 8, a 6 or a 5. The same thing crops up in Apple Mail, where the number of messages in a mailbox is communicated in little Helvetica numerals, faint against a pale background.
Apple is a company whose corporate culture understands design. So it’s astonishing to see them make such a foolish choice. Does Apple’s designers’ visual resolution not extend to fonts? Do they never look up a phone number, or quickly glance at the date on a calendar?
As an exercise for the user, here are the most easily confused numerals. At the top is Helvetica, first in black and then with each numeral in a different color. On the left is a composite of all of them overlaid on top of each other. The four lines below show the same numerals in ITC Franklin Gothic, ITC Stone Sans, FF Meta, and Calibri. I’m only showing the “lining” or uppercase figures, which are all the same height. Which do you find easiest to read?
Does it have to be sans serif? If so, I like Euphemia. Or Lucida Grande.
“Helvetica is the Textura of this century.”
That must be the best comment this blog has generated yet. Thanks, JFP.
I’m not a big fan of this by defaut typeface…
I agree generally with you John, but frankly, Helvetica on iPhone work ok for me; specially because they use light on large size. I don’t see from usual web fonts (the ones generally well hinted) present on many platforms a good alternative enough light for big sizes.
Perhaps Apple used the same trick as Gutenberg when he launched printing, rather than to use the up to date typeface style, based on humanistic hands, he selected a conservative type, Textura. Helvetica is the Textura of this century. :)
Indeed, I wait for years that Apple bring back typography into their todo list, as it was with MacOs7 and the bunch of new families created specially for the new tech they have launched at the time.
http://www.typographe.com/article/709/les-fontes-iphone
David – Yes, they were all set at the same point size. The variations didn’t seem large enough to worry about, and I didn’t want to get into too many variables. (Or too many typefaces.) While it’s true that the Stone Sans numerals are taller than the other alternates, they’re only a hair taller than the original Helvetica numerals.
I have long wished for an alternate world in which the original LaserWriter was issued with Stone Serif and Stone Sans, instead of Times Roman and Helvetica, as its default text typefaces. Imagine how much easier to read the average office document would have been for the last twenty-odd years!
I’ll chip in another vote for ITC Stone Sans (and agree Helvetica is about as bad as it gets for normal sans-serif designs). However, I’ll note that the comparison is a bit skewed by the varied height of the figures (with Stone being the tallest). I presume these were all set at the same nominal size, so the Stone figures are simply larger on the body. Then you have to decide what you’re measuring: the most readable at a given nominal size, of the most readable at an absolute size? Either could make sense, depending on the use.
I vote for Stone Sans as well. As I get older, and my eyes get worse, I get grumpier and grumpier about readability. Maybe we have to wait for enough baby boomers to get grumpy?
The typeface that’s second from the top of your counter-examples is easiest for me to read. What’s that one called?
Apple’s Garamond is a special version of ITC Garamond. I’ve always wished the ITC had named it something else, when they introduced it in the ’70s, since ITC Garamond is not a book face at all; it’s an advertising face, with a passing resemblance to the letterforms of Garamond’s types.
And as for easiest to read – Stone Sans.
Didn’t Apple design their own version of Garamond? I’m not a Garamond fan in general – I never liked those Flying Nun serifs on the T, but I always liked the Apple version. I doubt it would be a suitable screen font. It is surprising, though, that they’re not paying as much attention to typography when it’s always been a feature to boast about for them.