Roboto Puffery ⇥ thomasphinney.com

Thomas Phinney busts up a Wired puff piece on Roboto, but makes a much greater, more valuable point near the end:

Now, if Google/​Android and Apple want to claim that they are making their UI font choices for design reasons, that’s fine. But when they (or Wired) start touting the awesome legibility of their choices, I have to call them out on it. Nonsense.

Yosemite’s switch from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue¹ is obviously controversial. It may create some consistency on Apple’s platforms, but at the cost of being less legible at UI sizes, even on a high-resolution display. No matter how much I like the way it looks, I can’t deny the decrease in legibility.

In addition, it’s strange how Phinney himself confuses “design” and “aesthetics”. If Apple were to choose a UI typeface for design reasons, it wouldn’t be Helvetica. Where’s Apple Sans when you need it?