“As the system evolves over time, the type should evolve along with it.” “ The old model for releasing metal typefaces doesn’t make sense for an operating system that is constantly improving,” Duarte said. And in subsequent editions, the typeface got a face-lift. Unlike pre-digital fonts, which were essentially set in stone after being finished, Google got to keep working on Roboto. (Google isn’t alone in this Apple’s choice to use an existing typeface for iOS, rather than create its own custom typeface, has also come under heavy scrutiny from designers.) It’s a tossed salad.” And though others were more complimentary – Glenn Fleishman wrote that “Roboto pricks at your sense of the familiar at first, but then, like a person you see passing in a crowd that you believe is a friend, and then on fully facing realize is a stranger, the font asserts its own identity” - Roboto was never truly embraced by the small community of designers who pay close attention to things like exit angles and ball terminals. Typographer Stephen Coles labeled it “an unwieldy mishmash ,” and said, “ This is not a typeface. It’s Google’s Arial ,” tech blogger John Gruber wrote. Some type geeks dismissed it as a “Frankenfont,” a pastiche that borrowed heavily from other popular fonts, including Helvetica, the famous font that inspired a 2007 documentary. Like the typeface Apple uses on iOS devices, Helvetica Neue, Roboto is what’s known as a “grotesk” - a sans serif face that uses modern letter proportions - but Google added its own twist: “straight sided capitals and distinctive racetrack-shaped rounded letters.” Roboto, which was developed by an in-house team of Googlers led by Christian Robertson and released with Android’s 2012 “Ice Cream Sandwich” update, was a more compact typeface than Droid had been, which allowed designers to squeeze more letters into the same amount of space without creating a cluttered look.
#Droid font by google android#
In 2011, Google released a new font family called Roboto, which it hoped would work across the Android universe. Whatever fonts Google designed had to look just as good on the 3.6-inch screen of a Casio G’zOne Commando phone as on a giant, 65-inch tablet viewed from across the room. Unlike Apple - which only has to make its system typefaces look good on the iPhone, iPad, and a handful of laptops and desktops - Android’s open-source nature means that its default typeface will invariably be seen in hundreds of sizes, at thousands of resolutions, and on a million different apps.
#Droid font by google for android#
In many ways, designing a system font for Android is like trying to pick an outfit that will look equally good at the beach and a black-tie dinner. “ Droid struggled to achieve both the openness and information density we wanted,” Duarte later wrote in a Google+ post. The bold letters were too blocky, and some of the non-bold letter forms, which had been designed for low-pixel-density screens, looked insubstantial and oddly spaced in high resolution. But on the larger, high-definition screens that were introduced in later models, the fonts looked off. Droid fonts worked best on small, low-resolution screens like the ones on early Android phones. Droid looked markedly better on smartphones than those typefaces, but it had problems of its own. Until Droid, many fonts used in mobile applications were holdovers from the desktop age - Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, and other household names. Two years later, it released Droid, a family of fonts designed by type-design firm Ascender specifically for use on Android devices. Google’s efforts to perfect a universal typeface began in 2005, when it acquired a small operating-system-maker named Android. “ We’re trying to give people one logical, consistent system.” It’s the unsung hero,” Matias Duarte, Google’s vice president of design, said in an interview this week. And now, as Google is installing Android into cars, TVs, and watches on your wrist, the company is attempting an audacious task: making a typeface that looks good on all of them. It’s spent years trying to create the perfect fonts for Android devices, a sprawling ecosystem that includes small phones, big tablets, and everything in between. We might pick Garamond over Comic Sans for a cover letter, but on a phone, who cares? Typography is involved in almost everything we do on our devices - the emails we send and receive, the texts we compose, the tweets we scroll through - yet to most of us, letters are just letters, numbers are just numbers. Among the thousands of features on your smartphone, one you’ve probably never thought about is which fonts it uses.
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