Introducing the San Francisco system font

https://developer.apple.com/fonts/

by davidbarker • 11 years ago

98 82 11 years ago

developer.apple.com

inguinalhernia• 11 years ago

has someone patched it for Yosemite yet?

https://github.com/dtinth/YosemiteSystemFontPatcher

tonyspiff• 11 years ago

long time ago. https://github.com/supermarin/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont

cmelbye• 11 years ago

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).

hyperbovine• 11 years ago

I find this font weirdly difficult to read. I'm on a rMBP.

intsunny• 11 years ago

I too am on a rMBP (13"). I also agree that the font is weirdly difficult.

It seems to be on the thinner side, and in turn off-putting.

joshuapants• 11 years ago

The lightest weight on the page does seem way too thin, but the heavier face above it looks great to me.

to3m• 11 years ago

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

SG-• 11 years ago

did you turn off font-smoothing? personally i prefer it and looks great on 10.11 DP with my 13" simulating 1440 x 900.

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

On a hidpi Thinkpad running Linux, it's certainly readable but I like the bold version better.

The lowercase letter strokes seem to end in non-right-angles a lot, which bothers me a bit.

Bonus picture of font rendering: https://d.maxfile.ro/amaflffqtz.png

Most importantly, the restrictions on the fonts:

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.

cr__• 11 years ago

The font in that picture is Myriad Pro, I believe.

brazzledazzle• 11 years ago

I can't put my finger on why but it feels a little cramped.

keyle• 11 years ago

For an introduction, it's a bare one.

cschmidt4• 11 years ago

I wonder how many HN readers are too young to remember the original San Francisco font on the original Mac. It was the "ransom note" font.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%281984_typeface...

jhugg• 11 years ago

Ransom note?

function_seven2• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_note_effect

scelerat• 11 years ago

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.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=World_Class_Citie...

r0naa• 11 years ago

Damn, this font is glorious.

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.

robinson7d2• 11 years ago

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.

cschmidt4• 11 years ago

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:

http://www.emigre.com/EFfeature.php?di=101

Through their fonts, and in Emigre magazine, the did spend a lot of time discussing what was aesthetically pleasing.

Then the LaserWriter took over, and postscript fonts became more of the norm.

underwater• 11 years ago

Counterpoint: Emoji 🙋

handojin• 11 years ago

The 80s birthed the smiths. Their like has not been seen again.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

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.

ilovecomputers• 11 years ago

A testament to how the early days of Apple was more playful like Google's current culture.

copperx• 11 years ago

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.

gdubs• 11 years ago

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.

girvo2• 11 years ago

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.

jd33• 11 years ago

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...

[0] http://i.imgur.com/Q1tZknV.png

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/splorp/8289012748/in/photostre...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20030807223056/http://www.ms-stud...

mietek• 11 years ago

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.

whoopdedo2• 11 years ago

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.

oxc0ffee• 11 years ago

Nice! Mind sharing a download link of said converted .dfonts that you have so far? Sounds like a nice Apple/typography history project.

Speaking of Mark Simonson, I recently realized that he was the very same as the Mark Simonson behind Atari Classic fonts — http://members.bitstream.net/marksim/atarimac/fonts.html

cpeterso2• 11 years ago

Why would Apple reuse their own San Francisco font name? There are plenty of other world class cities.

petecooper• 11 years ago

Introducing the San Francisco system font

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