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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Like with stories, upvotes ar private, favourites are public:
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...
> 1 light year = 671 million miles per hour
x Distance = y Speed
[1]: https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_grav...
This document has been circulating for many years and keep being reshared and the Pepsi brand is reinforced everytime.
x = 671 million miles per hour--
[0] - See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#ClearType_Font_Colle...
[1] https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/31774/san-francisco-1984
[2] https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/urbanrenewal/
> 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.
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.
--- 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...
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.)
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.
(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.)
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.)
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.
Design changes are most often more rewrite than refactor.
Let me offer you a small light to guide you should you wish to be enlightened:
Stable API <--> Brand (Loyalty|Image|Perception)
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.