Hi everyone, I'm sure some of you already faced the challenge of finding a close alternative to Apple's new default system font to build a consistent cross-platform experience. My goal is to use San Francisco Display on iOS and Mac as primary platforms for our app and find something similar on other platforms (eg Windows, Android etc). I would really appreciate any suggestions.
The closest one I could find is Graphik (Commercial Type). It does support Extended Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, proportional and tabular lining for figures, it has hinting and most importantly it looks... well, not similar, but close to SF UI. I still have to set text tracking tighter than default (about –20) but the main problem now is that the weight is distributed differently: Graphik Light is thiner than SF UI Light, Graphik Medium is bolder than SF UI Medium and so on.
The only other suggestion I found was Akkurat here, but I'm still not satisfied.
Comments
I think Graphik is indeed the best commercially available match. You might also like Colfax, Calibre, or Neuzeit S. But why have you chosen San Francisco Display for text? It is too tightly spaced for the smaller size you show above. That’s what San Francisco Text is for — which you’ll find to be closer to Akkurat (though, really, SF Compact is closest to that predecessor).
SF Text
vs good old Helvetica Neue
I guess the new one is more readable and all, but I still can't get used to. What do you think?
As far as alternative typefaces go, I bet Commercial Type is making a decent number of sales on Graphik for this purpose alone. I'm not sure what your project constraints or goals are, but perhaps giving the users a native experience across devices is more important than attempting a consistent experience and is worth considering. Or maybe a hybrid approach where iOS and Macs get SF, Android gets Roboto, and you save the rest from Arial by using Graphik.