San Francisco - a perfect system font?

This headset has been known since the first announcement of Apple Watch. "San Francisco" has been specially developed with an eye on the small screen of smart watches, in which even small text must remain the most legible and readable. And now a new headset has appeared in iOS 9, replacing the already familiar "New Helvetica." What is the new headset is so good?

Designer Ventin Zan within its personal project "Typography in the details" He paid attention to the font "San Francisco"By analyzing its basic characteristics. If you compile all the details, indicated a designer, font is actually very easy to read.

One of the key characteristics of legibility is the height of lowercase letters, which for San Francisco is 75% of the height of the capital, which is somewhat higher than that of many other fonts. More than usual in a new headset and vnutribukvenny clearance letters "a" and "e", and the aperture (the degree of openness of characters).

Located on the screenshot below (click on image to view in full resolution), "San Francisco" is shown in various sizes, styles and with varying degrees of saturation. Even when only 8 pixels Kegle letters are well distinguishable.

Undoubtedly, the new font is very successful, and it takes into account, perhaps, all the claims of professional designers, script-writers, brought against the classic "Helvetica" as part of iOS and OS XThat really does not matter for long texts and small sizes. However, it seems to me that Apple designers have to exert more effort than simply replace Helvetica Neue to San Francisco. New font much smaller and has not yet been provided with all the necessary special characters - it must be organically implemented in iOS and OS X, so as not to disrupt the usual visual appeal of both operating systems and to provide a new system font required functionality.

And though the "Helvetica" on Macs lived in all year, I like the idea of ​​bringing "font language" all Apple software products to a common denominator. Especially "San Francisco" is a bit like a compressed font "Chicago", which was the system for Mac OS until the ninth version. In a sense, Apple returned to its roots, is not it? :)