Font Hipsters ⇥

John Gruber:

No one — no one — is criticizing Roboto because it isn’t Helvetica. If anything, the complaint is that it’s too similar to Helvetica. […] The criticism is simply that Roboto ungainly, homely, unharmonious.

Roboto is an enormous improvement over Droid Sans, but it’s still not quite there. Google is in a bit of a bind because they can’t use any commercial typeface (that I know of) in their open-source OS. Therefore, they can either include an existing free-license family, or commission one. They’ve chosen the latter, but they need someone of the calibre of HF+J to make it worth the effort.

On the plus side, the 1% of people visiting this site on an Android phone will now see it as slightly closer to what I intended (it’s set in Helvetica Neue).