Aptos, our modern successor to Calibri | Hacker News Reader

Aptos, our modern successor to Calibri

medium.com

208 pointsTomte174 comments

While the name Aptos is explained in the article, I was more curious about the previous name Bierstadt (because the font is "inspired by Swiss typography", but the Swiss are not especially famous for their beer), and I found it in https://medium.com/microsoft-design/beyond-calibri-finding-t...:

> As for the name, Bierstadt is named for one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks. When I think of Swiss type, I think of the Alps, and since I’m based in Boulder, my Alps are the Rockies

So it was more of a multi-step reasoning: Switzerland -> Alps -> Mountains -> Rockies -> peak in the Rockies with German-sounding name -> Bierstadt.

Digging deeper into the rabbit hole, according to Wikipedia Mount Bierstadt was named after Albert Bierstadt, an American landscape painter who made the first recorded summit of the mountain in 1863. Bierstadt was born in Solingen, which is pretty far away from Switzerland (and more known for its fine knives than for its typography or its beer)...

This is exactly the kind of Wikipedia excursion I would’ve gone through. thanks for saving me the time!

I've always wondered if Ariel was named such so that it sorts at the top of the list of fonts. Thereby making it the default. Then, that brings the question -- is it default because it is the first in a sorted list? Or did they name it purposely so that it would sort to the top?

that's an interesting question, like "AAAA Plumbing" back when the physical phone book was the route for discovery. Folks would deliberately vie for position in that thing.

Same for Apple, so it would show up before Atari in the phone book.

Asus was either originally going to be or originally intended to be Pegasus, but it was changed to "Asus" to be alphabetically first. I'm sure that's also the story behind the name Abit.

Interesting, that would imply it should be pronounced uh-sis not Ay-sus.

Probably not. Here's something I read: Arial: originally called Sonoran Sans Serif, the designers changed the name to Arial because they wanted a name that would evoke a modern, industrial feel, and because it sounded similar to "aerial," as in "aerial view," which they felt captured the font's modern and futuristic qualities.

When they refer to Swisss typography, they're likely referring to the International Typographic Style, which is also known as the Swiss Style (it's on Wikipedia). It's a style of graphic design. It typically uses a Grotesque sans serif font, like Helvetica or Univers (as opposed to a humanist sans serif).

Closing the loop a bit, Helvetica is the second word of the Latin name of Switzerland (Confoederatio Helvetica). It's why the ISO 3166 code for the country is .ch.

That would be a great name for a font site, but it’s Helvetia, from the same root in the Helvetii peoples’ name.

No, it's really "Confoederatio Helvetica", as you can see e.g. on this coin: https://worldcoinsinfo.com/world_coins/swiss-5-franken-1888-...

"Helvetia" exists too, as the female national personification of Switzerland.

Both are indeed derived from the Helvetii.

That interview is a great example of fluff responses with Bierstadt being the fluffiest where the fluff starts to conflict with itself.

First:

In today’s world, I believe a grotesque typeface’s voice needs a bit of a *human touch* to be more approachable and less institutional. Bierstadt’s systematic design contains organic touches to help *humanize* digital environments and *soften the regimented order* of grid typography.

Later:

My approach was to design a sans serif that would contrast with Arial by being *far more mechanical and rationalized.*. The terminal endings are *precisely sheared at 90°* — a modern note *contrasting the softer, angled endings* in Arial — and a lack of somewhat fussy curves found in Arial’s “a,” “f,” “y,” and “r.”

Maybe Arial was too human?

Its' a better looking arial, I've long avoided the new MS core fonts and tend to stick with arial on windows documents I create.

Changing the default fonts in Office acts as a generational marker for documents.

A lot of non-professionally designed content gets produced with these defaults: Excel sheets and memoirs and school essays and wills and corporate PowerPoints and the haphazard printed sign on the coffee shop’s door that announces a job vacancy.

All of that was in Calibri, but soon it will be in Aptos. And in a couple of years Calibri will start looking oddly nostalgic to people born around 2000.

These Office font generations are also useful for detecting forgeries. There was a court case involving an inheritance where documents supposedly printed in 2005 were set in Calibri, which wasn’t available yet.

Corruption involving a Pakistani prime minister was also subject to similar forgeries: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961354/pakistan-calibri...

Calibri literally toppled the government of a nuclear power

Here's an article going into detail regarding the forgeries: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/not-for-the-firs...

Memes too, as analysed by Linus Boman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJYm-de_UHE

that was an interesting diversion, didn't expect to hear a reference about a fifth generational warfare bit either. Very surprising.

8:36 on the other hand, Reddit has been known to be a target of organized foreign trolling campaigns by organizations like Russia's Internet Research Agency. A common tactic amongst these troll accounts is to post to popular subreddits in order to build Reddit Karma. Choosing to use one obscure Cyrillic alphabet font does not prove things one way or the other but there is a good reason to consider using this font type a graphically suspect. https://youtu.be/cJYm-de_UHE?t=516

And of course there was the time when Dan Rather got busted using forged documents in "Memogate" due to something very similar - fonts from Word pretending to be a document from the 70s. The Wikipedia article has a nice animated GIF comparing the forged document to Word's default settings in 2004.

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

One datacollada discovery (Dan Ariely sign at top/bottom) hinges on original cells in Calibri and forged cells in Cambria.

https://datacolada.org/98

> For 15 years, our beloved Calibri was Microsoft’s default font and crown keeper of office communications, but as you know, our relationship has come to a natural end.

I couldn’t see in this article, or in the linked one, any rationale for what prompted the change, why the relationship with Calibri has come to a natural end, or why the new font is better than the old font.

Is this just pure fashion churn?

Font fatigue is indeed the likely cause

It's more likely that the patent on calibri will expire soon

Do you have a number for that patent? I'm curious.

The rationale is this: "we believe":

--- start quote ---

Calibri has been the default font for all things Microsoft 365 since 2007, when it stepped in to replace Times New Roman across Microsoft Office. It has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve.

--- end quote ---

It's literally designers keeping their jobs by running in an endless hamster wheel.

Edit: to those downvoting. Read the articles. This is the entirety of their rationale over two articles. The quote above is from the article they linked as "Calibri has come its natural end": https://medium.com/microsoft-design/beyond-calibri-finding-t...

This is really sad, and it's distasteful for them to mention Calibri in their "rationale". The change made 15 years ago wasn't a fashion churn - it was improving legibility and ergonomics by taking advantage of capabilities of new display technologies.

The switch to Calibri & friends was a real, tangible quality improvement, as those fonts were optimized for - then also new - subpixel rendering, known on Windows as ClearType. Anyone who remembers using Windows at that time, and experienced switching from CRTs to flat panel displays, can surely attest for how big jump in comfort it was to enable ClearType and ditch Arial & Courier & Times New Roman for Calibri, Consolas and Cambria.

(I've lost count of how many programs, on how many machines of various people, I've reconfigured to use Calibri and/or Consolas as default, going as far as extracting and copying over the whole font set to Windows XP machines, and by force of habit, also Windows 2000 and Win 2003 machines - which IIRC didn't have proper ClearType, but the new fonts still looked better than defaults.)

Well, I agree with you in general, but Calibri actually seems to have some / cause some trouble. I recently filed a bug against LibreOffice regarding the rendering of ligatures in documents with Calibri, where you see things like:

https://bug-attachments.documentfoundation.org/attachment.cg...

... and it turns out that this is due to the use of hard-coded bitmaps for ligature hinting provided for some glyphs but not others, which confuses rendering engines.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155199

Calibri was never that great IMHO. Just like Apple with their San Francisco font, it’s worth a change to get a really great modern font and it looks like Microsoft went all out for Aptos. I like it

Compare this to how Apple introduces San Francisco: https://youtu.be/OpveNRh-jXU

Call me old fashioned but there's only one San Francisco[1] to me. (Modern recreation[2] for current use.)

[1] https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/31774/san-francisco-1984

[2] https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/urbanrenewal/

Calibri was a big deal when introduced because, along with the other fonts in that cohort[0] (like Consolas), it was optimized for subpixel rendering (known on Windows as ClearType), which was a new thing too, and made huge difference in quality and comfort of reading text on flat panel displays. It was a good, practical reason to create new set of default fonts.

[0] - See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#ClearType_Font_Colle...

I always liked that they all began with 'C'. Made it easy to remember which were the default fonts that would be available on any Windows system.

perhaps because high-dpi screens are getting common in the PC world?

Not seeing much signs of that here: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware#graphics-metric-...

Do you know if that counts "retina"/"2x"/"HiDPI" resolutions as their real or displayed resolution?

(i.e. would a "retina" 4k display be counted as 1920x1080, or as 3840x2160? I suspect the former, and I believe this font is designed to show well at those doubled resolutions.)

I don't have a high-DPI display, but the display size shown on about:support (which I suspect is also what is being transmitted via telemetry) seems to properly handle Window's display scaling – I've experimentally changed it to a value > 100 % and the display size reported by Firefox remains unaffected, only the scaling changes accordingly.

Plus if you hover over the diagram, you can eventually discover some screen resolutions > 1920x1080, although all of them in the low single-digit percents. (And some might be lumped together underneath the "Other" category.)

Pretty much.

Designers feel the need to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security. So once in a while they'll convince corporate they absolutely HAVE to change everything up for no reason, and they'll spew out pages of poetic nonsensical Gish gallop along with it, to hypnotise everyone into agreeing and let corporate convince themselves that they haven't wasted millions that could have been spent on anything else to benefit the company or, dare I say, humanity.

Ever notice how the more pointless or frivolous a change in design is, the more BS the designers include to back up their case? Think of any of the major design milestones of the last few decades - those striking, arresting works of design that revolutionised society. Did any of those come with a high school C-grade creative writing essay attached to it? Of course not. The design speaks for itself. When you have good design, you feel no need to back it up with a mental gymnastic exercise explaining why it actually is a better design and that everyone who disagrees obviously just doesn't have the intellect to appreciate the artistic vision that you have.

The job of designers is solely to make pretty things. The backup plan of designers is to make people feel good with dopamine-inducing verbiage. In the myriad cases where they fail at their job and produce something ugly and demonstrably worse than the previous version, they go into overdrive with the backup plan in the hopes that their mushy sugar-coated words will hide the bitter taste of their regrettable design choices that they've already spent millions of corporate (and, in some cases, taxpayers'!) budget 'executing'.

Notice also how they try to pass it off as just the natural passing of things, like these things happen, get used to it, as if gratuitous interface changes and jarring layout reshuffles are just a fact of life, like taxes, laundry or fruit flies. Like this idea that one's relationship with a font of all things can "come to a natural end." Again, it's a form of hypnosis. Because God forbid the higher-ups snap out of this trance before they sign off another multi-million-dollar contract for some tacky new coat of paint to be slapped all over the old just for the sake of it.

You see the same with cPanel: "It's time to switch to the Jupiter theme." Says who? Who dictates that "the time has come" in this way, as if it's a universal truth and not something they're coercing us into using? Look at any cPanel forum thread where someone asks why they're forcing this godawful new theme upon us and how exactly it's better. The cPanel staff can never give any meaningful answer to those questions, because there are no reasons. So they repeat the same designer nonsense, or better yet, give no reason at all. And so the design of things continues to get worse, the icons less and less readable, the screen space more and more wasted, the corners more rounded, the jobs of normal working people that little bit harder and more unpleasant as they have to squint for the less-readable icons and moved-around UI elements when the previous version worked perfectly fine and was loved by everyone, all for the sake of the ego of some designer somewhere, who I dare say is very pleased with themselves about making life that little bit worse for everyone else.

That's such a cynic and may I say arrogant take on things and on the important work designers do. One could equally argue engineers refactor code just "to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security". Or Product Managers rejig priority lists only "to justify their continued existence for the purpose of job security" etc etc etc

You can refactor all you want, but you maintain API compatibility. Otherwise it is a full rewrite.

Design changes are most often more rewrite than refactor.

That is so ridiculous. You only think this because you genuinely do not understand the work that designers do.

Let me offer you a small light to guide you should you wish to be enlightened:

Stable API <--> Brand (Loyalty|Image|Perception)

There's a difference between designing because they are designing to please a middle-manager that has directed them to "innovate" in that corporate sphere and design that is meant to be used and enjoyed by an end-user in comfort, i.e. human ergonomics.

A design language fad I hated from day one is MS's Metro design language which Apple also adopted in iOS 7, the format of which is that there must be as much glaring white space as possible, the user must be kept guessing which part of the screen is a button or switch and stab randomly at it until they find it, fonts must be spindly and thin, etc.

We're talking about default fonts that were last changed 15 years ago. 15 years between jobs isn't going to provide job security for an industry.

> Is this just pure fashion churn?

Has to be. I stopped believe long ago in visual changes in software being anything else than marketing done in "we do improve things" fashion.

I mean, just look at this video of Office icons: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=VvOaGTtY6Y8 It's a new icons set and they're trying to portray it as a technological breakthrough.

Of course changes to the UI and UX are important and always interesting, don't get me wrong - I just despise the all that mindless fluff that always comes with it. Each time I'm having flashbacks of document by Arnell Group who introduced new Pepsi logo: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Oh I loved this gem on the last page of the Pepsi logo PDF [1].

> 1 light year = 671 million miles per hour

x Distance = y Speed

[1]: https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_grav...

Oh my… the amount of BS that was written in that document was something truly enlightening. To think that BS cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars…

There's a pretty convincing theory that the BS is intentional.

This document has been circulating for many years and keep being reshared and the Pepsi brand is reinforced everytime.

I think this comment helps me to finally understand the concept of memetic evolution - you are seeing intelligent design, but it's possible that this document just organically was chosen through its version of "natural selection" to be one that has propagated.

What do you think sells pepsi cans? Why are there only two brands in the United States that have meaningful market share in the dark syrup + water industry? Do you think it's because of something done by engineers in a basement with papers stacked up to the ceiling, or do you think it is possible that these two companies are global experts in capturing the attention and imagination of billions of people and have done so better than anyone else in human history using the shape of a can, a logo, and a font. If you don't buy the rationale provided in that document, fine, but rationality doesn't sell trillions of cans of syrup water, Vitruvian Man, Golden Ratio, Feng Shui, earth Geodynamo 'woowoo' does.

    x = 671 million miles per hour

Designers need promotions, too...

Compare that icon introduction to the insane amount of work and research that actually went into the original ribbon 20 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...

And the miserable failure of it.

The failure is mostly because there's no one left at Microsoft (or anywhere) to do the same research: gather and evaluate data over decades, make informed decisions, iterate on designs etc.

Fashion churn is probably part of it, but high-DPI screens are commonplace now and were more-or-less nonexistent when Calibri (which was designed to look good on screens of its era) was introduced. That alone seems like reason enough to have a different default.

It's been 15 years; from my point of view, understanding and application of fonts has changed or been improved radically. Smartphones and the mobile internet were only beginning around that time; the amount of people with internet has multiplied fivefold [0] since then, the quality and resolution of screens has gone up by leaps and bounds, and yes, fashion and design changed since then, like how before Calibri, Times New Roman was starting to look and feel old-fashioned.

[0] https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm

Is this just pure fashion churn?

To the degrees and manners typography matters, there are better and worse typefaces.

For example, in the past some typefaces were better for optical character recognition than others and a different set of typefaces were easier to read on a CRT.

This is in addition to cultural connotations like are associated with typefaces like Helvetica or Comic Sans where typefaces themselves can say something based on how they have been used over many years.

There is a rationale at the beginning of the article:

> The technology we use every day has changed. And so, our search of the perfect font for higher resolution screens began. The font needed to have sharpness, uniformity, and be great for display type.

It explained nothing. How was Calibri imperfect for higher resolution screens? Was it not sharp? Uniform? Great for display type? How?

US font design patents last 15 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

Wow. I did not know that “design patents” were a thing, but that puts some additional context into the churn of typefaces. Thanks!

If HN had a "pin" feature for comments, this would take the cake.

It feels far too coincidental for this not to be relevant. Fashion/busybodies of font stylists and marketing and display variance may play a part, but the timing cannot be unrelated.

Fwiw you can "favorite" comments - you need to select/"go to" the comment (click the timestamp) - then click "favorite".

Like with stories, upvotes ar private, favourites are public:

https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=e12e&comments=t

It is driven by a few things.

Part of it is display technology. Calibri was chosen for an era where typography was increasingly digital but serif fonts rendered badly on the low-resolution screens of ~2009.

Aptos is still sans-serif but I think its shapes are too subtle for a low resolution monitor from that era. It looks much better on "Retina"-esque devices that are viewed in closeup.

The psychology of type is complicated. Some of it is fashion; some of it is innate; some of it is cultural which is neither completely arbitrary nor completely immutable.

In addition consumers begin to spot things that look out of place and attribute negatively to that. Calibri definitely looks "quaint" these days with its very rounded, extremely soft shapes.

I still use fonts with good hinting that pre-date Calibri (e.g. Verdana) because they were hinted for displays that didn't always have anti-aliasing available. On this display I intentionally turn AA off and override browser choices because I like crisp fonts not blurry smeared fonts.

I don't have a 4K display and I would suggest to OS makers to smarten up and turn AA off today because you don't need AA on higher ppi displays.

Fonts, like layout and design goes through fads and I dislike the current trend of "let's make everything spindly and hard to see in a sea of endless whitespace". For me, my perspective on typography is that the most important part of it is the user experience, i.e. readability!

I don't care how uniquely sculpted an individual single character in isolation is. What's important is readability. Can the reader view the text with flow in comfort? If yes, then it is successful. If not, then it's just faddish presentation that needs overriding with more sane choices. Part of that is also the weight of the type, there needs to be balance with the page background also so the letters don't shimmer, etc.

> I dislike the current trend of "let's make everything spindly and hard to see in a sea of endless whitespace".

Actually, the peak of that phase is gone for several years now. We’re already back at proper contrast, borders, and shadows. Take a look at more recent redesign, or just the front page of Dribbble, to notice that.

Looking forward to the Linus Boman video about this.

Also am I the only one who finds the design of the images in that article ugly?

I don't mean the font itself, I mean the choice of colors, the busy/distracting visual clutter everywhere, and the brightness/intensity of everything.

I really hope that's not a sign of things to come in terms of popular design.

That is intended to display the typeface as it appears in a variety of scenarios

> I really hope that's not a sign of things to come in terms of popular design.

I think it is. I think design goes in cycles of clutter, minimalism, clutter, minimalism, repeat. We had our clutter in the 90s and 00s, then minimalism from the 10s on, now we could very well be headed back to clutter.

> Similar to mid-20th-century Swiss typography, Aptos is a sans serif.

Starting this paragraph immediately underneath an image of a serif version of the typeface made me briefly question everything I know about the subject.

Yeah. I have no idea what those images have to do with the surrounding text. Even ignoring the context, they don’t demonstrate what the font actually looks like all that well. That and, as others mentioned, it being published on medium.com instead of microsoft.com makes the whole thing look very unprofessional.

It's kinda fitting that this type of content-free designer-fluff is published on Medium, but also weird to not be published under a microsoft.com domain. How do I know this isn't a random imposter?

It's bizarre isn't it? To read the sort of horse shit people write about fonts you'd think the same text in different fonts conveys different meaning. Maybe this is just yet more wrong -by-design AI output?

In this particular instance I disagree. The default Office font is the font that many people will read/write a very significant portion of the text they consume/produce in. So it’s nice if it’s a decent font.

I totally agree though when it comes to longreads of some over funded startup that redesigned their “brand identity” and commissioned some custom “fun, quirky but still authoritative and inclusive” font. That is just designers cirkcle-wanking.

Assuming you’re sincere :) The same text in different fonts, or different type setting with the same font, absolutely does convey different meaning. Most simply, UPPERCASE IS SHOUTING.

Letterforms make a huge difference to how text is read, perceived, and remembered, and how much it affects us. Unless you’re a wild outlier in some way, you are affected by type treatments.

I don’t know if you can visualize it, but I clearly can: the word “Daisy” set in (a) an elaborate script font, (b) a blocky slab sans-serif, (c) child-like hand-drawn letters. Most people will assign different meanings to each, and many people will derive more meaning from the type than from the word.

Do you have a child? Would you recognize their hand writing? Same thing.

I am sincere. You've picked some pretty obvious differences. I'm talking about the vast majority of fonts which are to all intents and purposes identical. I don't know if you have a kindle but to restate my original question - if you read the same book using each of the 8 or so built-in fonts, do you seriously believe you are reading 8 different books? I'm sorry, it's just a nonsense. Sure, you can have a favourite font or dislike how..i dunno..descending letters look, but I simply don't believe normal human beings look at a (normal, not comic-sans etc) font and a) give a shit about it, and 2) feel that one is more "professional" or "zippy" or some other adjective, like a designer has reached into their soul.

I read most of the article thinking it was satire and that was partly because the domain was medium.com not microsoft.com

> Si Daniels

> Principal Program Manager for fonts and Typography, Microsoft Office Design. Formerly Senior Lead PM for fonts and icons, Microsoft Operating Systems Group.

Well that settles it: if they claim to not be an imposter, clearly they can't be an imposter!

It does seem totally bizarre to me to make a big product announcement on a third party's website.

Peak "Shadow IT"? Maybe it took too much effort to post it on the company blog.

(Maybe they maxed out their user account quota on Jira and couldn't post a ticket to get someone to publish their article. Not that anything this silly could happen in a multinational corporation. I'm surely imagining experiencing that.)

Maybe it's their new approach to marketing. To reach people on popular sites in "look, we're using this site too - we're cool and so modern and no different than you ordinary human" way

In case you haven’t figured this out:

Go to https://www.microsoft.com/design

Scroll to the bottom.

Look for the set of social media links; the first one is an “M”.

Microsoft are know to mess with their internal blogging platforms every 3-4 years, breaking everyone's links, the formatting of the posts, embedded images, and killing all the comments (see: The Old New Thing). Maybe their staff have had enough?

Well if they base them on Sharepoint it’s understandable that the staff would avoid them

Is there a link to the font displayed in a longer example? I found the inline images both incomplete examples and hard to read with poor contrast. And even the paragraph about the double stacked g was next to an image without a g.

It looks like it could be a really nice font but it isn’t displayed well to show off!

Here's what it looks like in Word for Mac for me https://kalleboo.com/linked/aptos.png

edit: and vs some other fonts https://kalleboo.com/linked/aptos-roboto-sf-helvetica.png

That's a meaty lorem ipsum you've got there

At some point I started using https://baconipsum.com just for some variation

Thank you for doing what Microsoft, or really all those news outfits reporting on this, should have done!

So interesting to me that they kept the kerning of Aptos so tight. At least it looks like a modern, good font.

That said, Helvetica FTW (although I might actually like SF the most; certainly the most legible).

I see only two differences: J is narrower and l has a curved tail, which is good, less chance to confuse it with 1 or I.

what font size are you using for the four font comparison?

I think it was point size 24 but with some arbitrary view zoom to fill my screen more

https://jdsalaro.com/note/comparison-new-microsoft-default-f...

I was really confused thinking why would Microsoft launch an E-Book management solution. But then everything made sense.

lol. same

You're thinking of Calibre (or lowercase "calibre" as they write it)

I’ll say it: Calibri is a horrible, remarkably ugly typeface.

It really is. I don't know how they managed to create a font that is so unremarkable and remarkably ugly at the same time.

I disagree. I’ve always quite liked it.

Well that solves that. Case closed!

Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Taste is subjective.

It's entirely too full of itself. It might even be "embrace, extend, extinguish" as a typeface. Ruins anything you use it in.

To me it seems completely innocuous and unremarkable, which is its purpose.

Callibri is a nice business font actually, slightly opinionated and definitely not good for everything. Like a Prius when it came out.

It just exists, its not pretty or ugly. And that was the appeal and point of it.

Interesting that they picked a name that tends to be mispronounced, at least according to those who live there; locals pronounce it like "app-toss" but non-locals tend to pronounce it "app-tose" (second syllable like "toast" without the trailing t). And the locals will correct you if you pronounce it wrong.

https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/wi1rw6/aptos_how_d...

Hate English.

"Aptos" isn't English, it's a word in an indigenous language. To an ordinary English speaker it would appear to be Greek, hence why people unfamiliar with the name pronounce it as though it were a Greek word.

There are too many such words in English, and you need to memorize all this shit. Unlike any other major language.

Spanish vs. English pronunciation. The Monterey peninsula has a ton of Spanish speakers. Spanish has exactly 5 vowel sounds: ah, eh, ee, oh, ooh.

So take the a sound from "papa" and add in o sound from "gross " and you get the right pronunciation.

Gross has two pronunciations.

Interesting, everyone I knew in Santa Cruz pronounced it app-tose when I lived there for a couple of years.

Eh. It’s not really much of a difference. At least it’s not called Queue or Quinoa

I don't understand why the changed the default font.

In the post it says:

> For 15 years ... Calibri was Microsoft’s default font ... but as you know, our relationship has come to a natural end [link here]. We changed. The technology we use every day has changed.

Do we know? I followed the link, and it says:

> Calibri ... has served us all well, but we believe it’s time to evolve. To help us set a new direction

and this sounds like there's really no reason. In the fashion industry, they arbitrarily change things every year because this planned obsolescence means they sell more clothes, but it's not like MS will see its bottom line grow with artificial inflation of font license sales.

Going back to the first paragraph - what's actually changed? Font technology? Not fundamentally. I suppose there is the evolution of OpenType specification:

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

but why should that require a font redesign? Are there specific capabilities that Calibri didn't make use of, and could not be refined into using?

Finally, we read about how the designer

> ... wanted Aptos to have ... the astute tone of The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

seriously?

Microsoft is bad at picking names: if I search for Aptos I found a blockchain. When they launched their .NET technologies .net was a popular domain suffix making meaningless to add .net in a search query. For the COM [1] technology they started at the same time that Internet was being popular and but lost the battle for the .com keyword.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

You weren't kidding about Microsoft having trouble with naming.

The original name for .NET was Next Generation Windows Service (NGWS), and before that it was Project 42.

And then the first .NET tutorial site we built was called GotDotNet.com. Engineers didn't get a say in the name.

Source: I was a SWE (SDE) in the .NET Framework team in 2000.

I hate the name Azure too. It is at least unique in tech but people pronounce it differently.

I quite like the name .net quite a bit especially when stylized with the ".". Aptos I'm neutral on.

I am also talking about the marketing of the brand. Choosing .net misses millions of searches around the world.

> He wanted Aptos to have the universal appeal of the late NPR newscaster Carl Kasell and the astute tone of The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

What is this even supposed to mean? In the context of font design.

It's a person trying to explain their feelings about something in the context of font design; it's not actually real. Think of how people use various phrases to describe wine, e.g. the list here https://www.thebacklabel.com/10-most-ridiculous-wine-descrip...

Imagine a lot of documents with broken layout again, because of previous MS Word versions does not have this typeface.

No particularly interested in MS Word or this font though I guess it's an improvement over the Calibri one, but it's kind of funny it's already 2023 and they seem to be more more worried about the default font than fixing once and for all the issues with unexpected layout breaks - unless the memes about it make for advertising

I’m guessing Microsoft has different teams dedicated to different tasks. They can probably work on layout problems and change the default font simultaneously.

They'd rather people buy the new version of Office than fix older versions. It's like a kind of indirect planned obsolescence.

I'm pretty sure Calibri is included with Windows since Vista (along with Segoe UI)- they wouldn't just simply stop bundling it. But if that would happen for whatever reasons then probably Office would ask user if missing font should be downloaded and installed on the system, to provide "best experience" in viewing and working with the document that uses it.

Office has options to embed fonts in the document file since I could remember.

That's a lot of pages of marketing/designer BS for what is essentially a clone of Google's Roboto.

I was also thinking "that looks remarkably like Roboto" so I had to compare it.

Here's Aptos (MS) vs Roboto (Google) vs San Francisco (Apple) vs Helvetica

https://kalleboo.com/linked/aptos-roboto-sf-helvetica.png

The savings in total width by Aptos is very surprising

Ah! That'll be why I instantly preferred San Francisco, the widest typeface.

Compared side-by-side, Aptos looks rounder and less square, and it has more natural looking curves.

The problem is that differences in fonts are kind of subtle when their goals are very similar. Both Roboto and Aptos seem like they're trying to be high x-height grotesque sans serif fonts. They're going to look similar to some other font, because there are so many in that category already.

(However, the capitals of Aptos remind me more of Gill Sans than of Helvetica, so I guess it's not strictly grotesque.)

Capital Q looks similar to capital O - like an O with large dust speck on your monitor. Since Q isn't common, I guess the chances for confusion are also rare.

Lowercase g looks weird since other letters with circular strokes have a lower baseline (bcdeopq).

I loved the Segoe font that was introduced with Windows 8. The Aptos font looks a bit like a modern refresh of that. Clean aesthetics is a win anyway.

It's the same designer for both.

Segoe was introduced with Vista, you might be thinking of the refreshed version that came with Windows 10? I'm actually a big fan of the Windows 11 Segoe refresh, really makes what used to be a bland font (to my tastes) quite nice.

While I don't have Aptos on Outlook, I do have Bierstadt and so I was able to compare it with Calibri. All I know is that I'm glad they differentiated between uppercase 'I' and lowercase 'l' so I don't get that confused anymore. In Calibri, it's almost impossible to tell the difference unless you zoom in close.

an entire article about a new font replete with fancy graphics and not a single quick brown fox to demonstrate it

I thought Arial Nova was their boy? Anyway Aptos looks better than Calibri, but Arial Nova looks better than Aptos

Why the heck does big tech use medium for publishing articles ?

Here is a good review of the relevant fonts: https://jdsalaro.com/note/comparison-new-microsoft-default-f...

I've never seen a font designed with both serif and sans-serif faces before (though it's seemingly unclear whether the Aptos Serif variant shown in the article is going to make it into wide availability.)

Makes me wonder: could "serif to sans-serif" be an OpenType variable-font axis — i.e. could a font be designed to gradually "grow" serifs out of a sans-serif base, and to look good at any "degree" of serif-ication, the way modern variable fonts are designed to look good at any "degree" of weight?

What would a 30% serif'ed font even look like? Would it have little vestigial bumps only visible at large optical sizes?

There are a few fonts exploring this concept here: https://v-fonts.com/tags/C114

TT Geekette Variable there is especially bizarre/interesting, in that it conflates weight and serification, in that some, but not all, serifs appear only at the lightest weight. Which almost makes a strange kind of sense, given that a fat enough main stroke erases serifs anyway. You can almost say that serifs as ornaments can only usefully exist below some ratio of optical weight to optical size.

It's not uncommon for contemporary font families to include both Serif and Sans versions.

The "Best of" page by FontFont, a famous foundry, includes several of these pairs (FF Meta, FF Tisa, FF Yoga):

https://www.fontshop.com/people/fontshop-team/fontlists/best...

Apple's San Francisco has a serif counterpart in New York. ABC Dinamo has a dual serif/sans typeface called Arizona^[1]. It even has that set as a variable axis!

[1]: https://abcdinamo.com/typefaces/arizona

They exist. You can read about the free Reforma typeface for example which goes from sans to serif. https://pampatype.com/blog/reforma

ITC Stone exists in both Sans and Serif options, and Lucida Sans is paired with Lucida Bright (serif) as well as Lucida Fax (almost slab serif).

Adobe's Penumbra font has a sans--serif axis, well, had.

Similarly there was the font Walker which had "snap-on" serifs:

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/139311

Yes, the distinction is quite subtle for the variable axis options.

Tahoma. I miss it. Better times.

According to [1], Aptos download coming soon.

>The Aptos font will be available for download (coming soon).

[1] https://archive.is/3c2tZ

Aptos: almost but not quite Helvetica.

Yeah, but MS won't use Helvetica because:

- NeXT used it (and properly paid for a license)

- Linotype sued them over the early Windows stroke fonts Roman and Sans being aliased to "Tms Rmn" and "Helv"

I hated Calibri because of the narrow interword spacing. I found it hard to read.

You can not make me stop using Consolas though.

> He designed the font with a slight humanist touch. He wanted Aptos to have the universal appeal of the late NPR newscaster Carl Kasell and the astute tone of The Late Show host Stephen Colbert.

Wow that's crazy, radio personality Carl Kasell was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw Aptos. Nailed it.

Absolutely. And I was immediately reminded of the astute tone of The Late Show host Stephen Colbert. Nailed it indeed.

For Office. If Segoe UI ever goes away, I'd be nostalgic for it immediately.

It’s sad, the debate community used calibri as it was found through experimentation to be uniquely easy to speed read compared to other fonts, and in my opinion it is pretty. Sad to see it go…

Interesting. Is the font of choice really a competitive advantage for speed reading? Is there somewhere I can read about this?

Anyway, the font is not going away, you can still select it and according to the article, it will be pinned to the top of the menu in the Office applications.

I haven't used Office in a while but I remember you could alter the default template if you want.

Looks handsome and versatile. I don’t mind the serif variation either. Also, designed by Steve Matteson, who also designed Open Sans which for my money is one of the very best UI typefaces around.

The height of the letter "t" is extremely short, especially in comparison to "l" and "b". This makes it very hard to read as it affects the shape of words at a glance.

That‘s the traditional height, see almost every typeface that‘s used for book printing. Only in the computer world has the excessively long t been dominant.

And handwriting styles that are commonly taught in schools today?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaner-Bloser_(teaching_script)

All have full height t, and predate computers (significantly in the case of the latter two)

The t is much shorter in comparison to b and i in Helvetica Neue and Calibri too. I didn't see that much of a jarring difference with Aptos.

Now the question is, who will make a metric-compatible font for this? Or is there one already, for us non-Windows users?

The irony in naming a typeface "Aptos" is lost on folks who have never driven around Santa Cruz County: in the mid-90s, there was at least one highway sign indicating Aptos, where the lowercase "p" had a displaced descender far above the baseline, for no good reason. Also there is no good reason why I'm unable to locate a photograph of that sign today.

My girlfriend was a graphic design artist, and she and I would always cringe-laugh when we drove by. It was more or less like this: https://xkcd.com/1015/

Just saying Calibri still looks better than Aptos on Mac. It's almost an objective truth at this point.

For the curious, here's a direct comparison of the different fonts they commissioned for this. Bierstadt won and is now known as Aptos - https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1387421368581455874/

Personally I was behind Grandview, which was based on Bahnschrift – my go-to font for basic printouts at work. But I've no issue with what they've picked.

Download link?

From [1], coming soon:

>The Aptos font will be available for download (coming soon).

[1] https://archive.is/3c2tZ

At least it's not Arial-like.

Looks like DIN x Segoe UI.

will other people be able to use it freely?

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