July 8, 2013
iOS 7 beta 3 came
out thiss morning with a surprisingly major change: as I first sawreported by Sebastiaan de With and later more
specificially identified by Neven Mrgan, the system font has allegedly been
changed from Helvetica Neue Light to Helvetica Neue (regular).1 Compare:
It’s a subtle
change in theory, but it has a huge effect — see for yourself. This paragraph
is in Helvetica Neue Light if you’re on a device that has the Helvetica Neue
family. (If not, you probably don’t care about fonts, so it will be Comic
Sans.)
It’s a subtle
change in theory, but it has a huge effect — see for yourself. This paragraph
is in Helvetica Neue if you’re on a device that has the Helvetica Neue family.
(If not, you probably don’t care about fonts, so it will be Comic Sans.)
See? Light weights
look cool (moreso at larger sizes) and work well in advertising and logos, but
are generally harder to read. The system font’s most important job is to be
legible to as many people as possible in as many conditions as possible, so the
previous choice was simply a bad design
choice.
It represented one
of Apple’s biggest recurring flaws: letting cool come before functional.2 With Ive’s new role leading UI design, I was
afraid that we were in for a long series of such failures. And with iOS 7 being
unveiled so publicly and confidently, I really didn’t think any decisions as
significant as the system font would change before release.
Now, we know
otherwise.
Apple’s stated
design philosophy of iOS 7 was “clarity, deference, and depth”. They nailed
deference and depth, but clarity has suffered in many big and small ways.
While the too-thin
font was far from the only design flaw in iOS 7, I’d say it was the biggest.
Just as the new APIs in iOS 7 were clearly the result of Apple listening to all
of us, we now have a sign that they’re listening on the design front as well.
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