If you have any kind of Apple developer account, even the free one, you can watch Typedrawers’ own
Antonio Cavedoni as he
hosts his own keynotësque video about the San Francisco family of fonts for the Apple Watch and iOS 9 (indeed replacing Helvetica).
(
General WWDC Videos page. San Francisco as iOS 9 default font was
quite openly illustrated during the WWDC 2015 opening keynote.)
Comments
Not exactly “Think different”.
This is isn’t quite true. You’re right that San Francisco has some features that are unique to OS fonts, but, as David says above, all the features are quite common in professional fonts used for editorial and corporate design work.
The new system APIs are applicable to all fonts with compatible features out there…
This is a nifty use of the contextual alternate feature, which is common among OpenType fonts. I’m sure there are other vertically centered colon alts out there, but not many. They could also be applied to case-sensitive punctuation.
The features you mention are not typeface-specific.
I’ve included “automatic” features such as the ones you mention in many typefaces, activated by the <calt> feature and e.g. <case> effects that are automatically activated when selecting lining figures.
The clock colon is UI stuff, outside of the normal realm of Editorial or Corporate work of the past. And while a whole new era of colonization is born for some, some of us have had that glyph on our plates for UI work before.
The rest, figures and size masters, are available, though specific breaks between size masters are up to the designer to recommend, and the user to choose ultimately when trying to achieve a particular weight balance between sizes of the same typeface. For a pair of environments, like Mac OS and iOS, the UI designer can fine tune this pretty well.
What happens when this generalizes to the web's plethora of devices, where the font's responsive requirements, just in weight, make families large, is everyone's next guess. But for now, IMHO, on the Mac, there is less room for improvement than on any other platform.
The iA website uses a different font today (Nitti by Blue Monday), but at the time they were experimenting with their own font, “iABC Regular”.
The basic idea of fonts adjusting to their environment is not that new, as we all know. In traditional tyopgraphy, typefaces were cut in different sizes and their anatomy was adjusted accordingly. Sometimes these changes were a natural result of the materials being used, like wood or lead — some features couldn’t be articulated well in such small sizes, or became softer from repeated use of the typeset.
I think typography becoming more responsive to the application environment, the context in which it is being used, is increasingly important and there is still a lot to do in this field. So far our best tools and features we use today stem from technologies 10 years old or older, when there was no “retina display” in sight. Which isn’t a bad thing per se, but clinging to traditional paradigms can fog the view for new ideas. I would love if Apple took the introduction of San Francisco as a kiss of the Sleeping Beauty, and began to improve typography across the board.
Look at iBooks, with too tight leading and questionable font choices, or the inconsistent rendering engines across the OS. I hope this is going to change with OS X El Capitan and iOS 9.