Why did Apple come up with and introduced in iOS a new font San Francisco?

Apple has used the Helvetica font set as a system font for iOS since the release of the first iPhone. They also replaced them with Lucida Grande on Mac OS X, starting with version 10.10 of Yosemite. So why now Apple decided to get rid of the most beloved font in the world?

iOS 9 is officially available to everyone, and a new font family called San Francisco has unobtrusively replaced Helvetica Neue.


Helvetica (left) and San Francisco (right)
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At this point, they were already used in the Apple Watch. Now San Francisco has become one standard font for all platform products: Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Apple has used the Helvetica family as a system font for iOS since the release of the first iPhone. They also replaced them with Lucida Grande on Mac OS X, starting with version 10.10 of Yosemite. So why now Apple decided to get rid of the most beloved font in the world?

Small size - a weak spot Helvetica

It is believed that Helvetica is not suitable for small text sizes. When Helvetica replaced the previous family in Mac OS X Yosemite, many designers found this replacement inappropriate.


“Helvetica sucks” from Erik Spiekermann's blog.

In the small readability of Helvetica you can be convinced as follows. Type small text and "blur" it. At the same time, some of its fragments will “mix” so that it will become difficult to disassemble their contents. Apple is said to have developed the San Francisco family just to make the Apple Watch text of a smaller size more legible.



However, the resolution of modern smart devices exceeds the resolution of the print edition, and the texts on the iPhone are not always as small as in the Apple Watch. Why did Apple then replace it, not only in Apple Watch, but also in iOS and Mac OS X?

San Francisco is diverse

San Francisco fonts have many features that make them easy to read. In fact, the San Francisco version for Apple Watch and the iOS / Mac version are two different fonts.

The font family called “SF” is used for iOS / Mac, while the Apple Watch uses “SF Compact”. You can see the difference with the example of rounded letters, such as 'o' and 'e'. The vertical lines in the SF Compact are flatter than those of the SF.



This difference leads to the fact that the text typed using the SF Compact increases the padding between characters, which as a result makes the text more legible when reading it from small devices such as the Apple Watch.

In addition to this, each of the families is further subdivided into two subfamilies: “Text” and “Display”. Apple calls it “Optical Sizes”. The Text subfamily is intended for small texts, while Display is for large sizes.


San Francisco Font Family

As mentioned above, in grotesque fonts (or chopped), such as Helvetica, two adjacent letters “mix up”, and such letters as 'a', 'e', ​​'s' become very similar to each other with small text sizes. .


Comparing indents between characters in fonts in the Display and Text subfamilies


Comparing fonts of Display and Text subfamilies using a single character as an example.

At the same time, the Text subfamily is conceived in such a way that the spaces between the characters in it are increased compared with the characters of the Display subfamily, and the gaps in them are expanded to improve readability with small text sizes.

San Francisco is dynamic

One of San Francisco's great features is that the headset is dynamically optimized. Display and Text replace each other in accordance with the size of the displayed text. As a threshold, a size of 20pt is defined here.



Designers and engineers do not need to worry about choosing the appropriate option from the family. Just add the system font in UILabel, for example. The system will determine which headset you need.

However, the way the colon is displayed is really impressive in the San Francisco fonts. Usually in other fonts we see it directly above the bottom line, so when it is located between the numbers, the colon is not aligned vertically in the center. However, in the San Francisco family fonts, this alignment occurs automatically.


Automatic alignment of the colon vertically centered

San Francisco came to us from the digital age

As you can see, San Francisco fonts are designed and thought out for easy perception of text of any size and on any device.

Helvetica, which they replaced, was created in Switzerland in 1957, when there were no digital devices yet. It is, nevertheless, still used by many companies as a corporate font, and, no doubt, will be used in the future as a good classic font.

San Francisco, on the other hand, is a modern typeface. His headset changes dynamically, in accordance with the context. It can be called a kind of "native font" of the digital age.