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Comment by cpr | Hacker News Reader

Is it OK to say the emperor has no clothes?

I think this is an ugly, clumsy typeface, designed primarily for legibility in a particular small application (the watch). Now it's now rumored to be destined as the system font in 10.11.

Going from graceful, readable Lucida to ok-only-in-Retina-but-even-then-hard-to-read-and-overused Helvetica to this new San Francisco is just plain frustrating. Maybe readability trumps taste, but in that case, just go back to Lucida.

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"Is it OK to say the emperor has no clothes?"

Not really. That particular expression (and others like it such as "the elephant in the room" is more to get across the idea that there is an obvious truth staring people in the face and they don't see it / talk about it. I don't know that you can really say that San Francisco is objectively ugly - an opinion that I advance based on the fact that there are an awful lot of people out there that haven't even noticed what font is being used. If it was a truly ugly font, you would have every second post about the Apple Watch talking about how ugly the text is...

Yeah, this is just an attempt to imply some sort of consensus while shielding yourself from any disagreement, a way of enlarging your own opinion into something bigger than it really is.

It’s not that simple.

I have a theory that every type family looks ugly when it replaces another one in a familiar context. We become so acclimated to a particular rhythm of strokes and counters that seeing them changed in situ inevitably looks wrong. In time, though, our brains adjust and the new typography comes to look right.

What's ugly about it? It doesn't even seem interesting or different enough from anything else to call it beautiful or ugly.

It is reminiscent of German industrial typeface DIN [1], which looks stylish in certain contexts (advertising), but arguably too stylish and cold for general use. An OS font will be used for everything from obituaries to love letters. Helvetica is a horrible screen font [2], but, unlike San Francisco, it doesn't impose a certain mood on text.

(On the other hand, SF's readability kicks Helvetica's ass, so at the end of the day, I do welcome this change. But Apple could do so much better.)

[1] FF DIN, an adaption for use in graphic design: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontfont/ff-din/

[2] See e.g. http://spiekermann.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/helveti...

I think this is a case of https://xkcd.com/915/

But is it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597348

I always thought that XKCD was something of a Rorschach test: If you're already convinced that everything is subjective, you laugh at the idea of nerds becoming connoisseurs of something with no depth. If you believe everything can be judged objectively, you laugh at how true it is that even something with no apparent variance can hide subtle details that distinguish its better expressions.

Both of those seem silly to me. Aesthetics isn't a fact about the universe, but nor is it something people just make up. Aesthetics is an objective property of how an individual human's brain will react to a stimulus, summed across whatever group-size you want to talk about (humanity in general, some culture/subculture, etc.)

And those brains are pretty predictable; you can figure out what someone's "tastes" will be from their DNA and formative experience far in advance of actually exposing them to the stimuli in question.

Or, to put it another way, "human aesthetics are an arbitrary result; they 'could have' been anything. That doesn't mean you should ignore them—your arbitrary path-dependent values are literally all you are."

(This is just the aesthetics interpretation of the LessWrong http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence, if you're wondering.)

What am I supposed to see in [2] exactly? All of these fonts are perfectly readable at small size.

Try it at a bigger distance. I can notice a difference. Helvetica and Arial make it hard to distinguish the "l"s from the "i"s, while the other two have distinguishing features: a round dot and sloped stem for FF Meta, and the little overhang on FF Unit. That makes the two of them easier to distinguish at a glance.

You're right, Helvetica is and was a poor choice for Yosemite, even if you have a retina screen. It's not a screen font. Lucida Grande was a great screen font, but the boldness of it worked much better on 1x screens. With the added fidelity of retina screens, it just looks too strong. Apple probably should let you choose or choose for you depending on your pixel density, but that's not their style and they've always been willing to make compromises in choices for the sake of forward progress.

San Francisco as a system font in OS X on a retina screen is very good, even if the current hacked implementation has it's quirks. The thinner stroke intersections are somewhat reminiscent of ink traps. I'm not certain, but I'd be willing to bet it has to do with sub-pixel anti-aliasing and not making the stroke intersections look too heavy. To my eye, the taller but symmetrical bowls look really good and help keep an even cadence between all the vertical forms. The wide range of weights is also really useful. Maybe Apple will put that to use in 10.11 for retina and non-retina screens.

I'm with you, I think it's hideous. And it's not, as another commenter wrote, just the fact that we're seeing a new font replacing an old one in a particular context. I haven't seen this new font in the wild — just on the spec page — and I still thought "Surely no-one's putting their name to this…"

Can you point out specifically what makes it hideous?

It's probably a personal aesthetic, but the variable stroke widths make it look cartoony. It's also got a tendency to big loops — the a, p, h, and g in the sample all have very large, arched, oval shapes (this is probably what they're referring to as the large x-height). That makes it look exaggerated to my eye, and doesn't help the cartoony appearance either.

But if it is a personal dislike and other people are fans, I can't object. It wouldn't be the first time I disliked an Apple initiative that turned out to be very successful.

The big loops seem necessary to me, at least when staring at the 8pt size on my retina screen. It's the same sort of contortions you go through to make a "pixel" font look good at 8x8 or 5x5, or an icon look good at 16x16—abstract overemphasis to survive reduction.

I think, if the font didn't literally have to be continuously zoomed in a lot of places, they would just lose the overemphasis at larger sizes.

You're unhappy with the readability of San Francisco? I've heard the opposite from most people who have seen it on the Watch.

I think it's quite a beautiful typeface, and I'm glad they're expanding its usage to their new keyboards and iOS/OS X. I think it will work out great for them.

No, I'm unhappy with its style, which is clunky and clumsy.

It does look good on the Watch. But that doesn't automatically mean it would be a good choice for other uses. In my subjective opinion it looks pretty bad as OS X system font. Take a look: http://9to5mac.com/2014/11/19/how-to-use-the-apple-watch-fon...

We're operating off of rumors and a font hack that uses a font designed for hi-fidelity mockups of Apple Watch apps. I'm going to wait and see what Apple releases.

Thanks for the link to that page, which contains a large image of a screenshot using San Francisco as the system font.

To me, it looks really great as a system font.

The reason is that it is legible. That legibility comes thru the junk on my glasses and the fact that my prescription is out of date so things are just slightly blurry. Yes, I need new glasses.

But that's a proxy for people who don't see as well. Apple's serving everybody. And not all of us can see so good.

There's an argument that this line of thinking will take Apple down the path of mediocrity-- lowest common denominator and all that. But hopefully it's only an option and they continue to use the "Best" font (of which I'm not the best judge) for the system.

And then make San Francisco an option as a system font in accessibility.

The statement that it's "like a Starship Enterprise" in that screenshot hit on exactly how the system-font-ization looks to me. It feels clinical somehow. It's definitely not a neutral statement—which is usually what people presume a system font should be.

Instead, it feels like something I'd expect to come with a redesign to the OS itself to make it all a bit more brutalist-feeling; maybe something that relies on Gestalt windows-menus-and-pointers less, and a narrative interface like Siri more. A HAL9000 chat-transcript.

San Francisco is at least more readable than Helvetica Neue. Lucida is gone, but it can't get much worse than it is now.

I'm going to go out an a limb here and just say it. That looks just like other fonts to me....

but good work anyway apple.

I'm going to plead guilty to being in the publishing (and thus font) business for 35 years, so these things matter to me.

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