Apple fonts, a typographic timeline

Back in 2019, during Apple’s annual event, the company delivered its latest installment in its system font library. New York is an Apple-designed serif typeface based on essential aspects of historical type styles and designed to work on its own as well as alongside San Francisco, the iOS font system since 2014. 

“What if I were to tell you that Apple’s New York typeface has been around for thirty years?” noted Ashley Bischoff on Twitter referring to Susan Kare’s New York bitmap typeface. 

Designed in 1983 New York is a transitional serif typeface by Susan Kare, undoubtedly a woman in tech who made a difference by shaping our digital environments, the typeface has been reworked in 1988 by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. 

New York, the original, was the standard bitmap serif font for the early Macintosh operating systems and although it was originally titled “Ardmore”, it was renamed to New York before its initial release as part of the “World Class Cities” naming scheme by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs.  Designed as a bitmap face, New York was later released in TrueType format, though the design differed from the bitmap version. This is how New York and more typefaces got their city names per Kare.

“Landing in the Macintosh group as a bitmap graphic designer was a lucky break for me, and one interesting part of the job was designing screen fonts. It was especially enjoyable because the Macintosh was able to display proportional typefaces, leaving behind the tyranny of monospace alphabets with their narrow m's and wide i’s” writes Kare.

“The first Macintosh font was designed to be a bold system font with no jagged diagonals and was originally called 'Elefont'. There were going to be lots of fonts, so we were looking for a set of attractive, related names. Andy Hertzfeld and I had met in high school in suburban Philadelphia, so we started naming the other fonts after stops on the Paoli Local commuter train: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. (Ransom was the only one that broke that convention; it was a font of mismatched letters intended to evoke messages from kidnapers made from cut-out letters).”

“One day Steve Jobs stopped by the software group, as he often did at the end of the day. He frowned as he looked at the font names on a menu. 'What are those names?', he asked, and we explained about the Paoli Local. 'Well', he said, 'cities are OK, but not little cities that nobody's ever heard of. They ought to be WORLD CLASS cities!' So that is how Chicago (Elefont), New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco (Ransom), Toronto, and Venice (Bill Atkinson's script font) got their names.”

Icons by Susan Kare: a must-see exhibition on a trailblazer of graphic design

“As an undergraduate student in the 1970s, Steve Jobs would occasionally attend calligraphy classes simply out of interest: ‘I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces,’ he said, ‘... about what makes great typography great ... Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer ... we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.’ This was largely due to the groundbreaking work of Susan Kare, who designed Chicago, the first Apple Macintosh typeface, in 1983. Intended for use on-screen in one size only, 12 pixels high, Chicago was robust but exceptionally user-friendly and it remained integral to both the Mac interface and to Apple's identity for over a decade” writes Paul McNeil, a typographic designer with experience in brand and corporate communications and co-founder of London graphic design studio MuirMcNeil, in his book, The Visual History of Type, published by Laurence King.

“Chicago is an object lesson in aesthetic and technological restraint. Working only in pixels on a limited grid, with no references other than the raw computer bitmaps of the time, Kare achieved a well-modulated typeface with subtly contrasting stroke widths and proportional letter spacing, making it easy to read even on the low-resolution Mac computer screen.”

A big change came decades after. In 2015 Apple released San Francisco, the first in-house typeface Cupertino has designed in more than 20 years.

With clean, compact shapes, subtle roundness, and ample space between letters, San Francisco was designed for maximum legibility on the Apple Watch and beyond. The font replaced the previously off-the-shelf fonts used in its interfaces aka Lucida Grande from 2000 to 2014 and Helvetica Neue Light which was released along with the introduction of iOS 7 in June 2013 with its introduction arousing numerous complaints about the less legible typography. And then came San Francisco. 

Although the differences between Helvetica and San Francisco seem subtle, even to the trained eye, they are not. A bolder and friendlier sans serif, San Francisco design references a number of different other typefaces, notably FF DIN (used in the UI of the Camera app in iOS 7 and above), Helvetica (used in the UI in iOS 6 and below), Helvetica Neue (used in the UI of iOS 7 and iOS 8 as well as OS X Yosemite), Roboto (Google's new UI typeface), and Univers (used on Apple's early keyboard designs).

San Francisco is tall, skinny, space-efficient, and provides the characters with more breathing room for a better experience on relatively tiny mobile screens. 

In an interview with WIRED’s David Pierce, Alan Dye, Apple's head of human interfaces, explained how the typeface was optimized for the Watch’s tiny screen: “That led to the typeface that's a little more square, but with gentle, curved corners,” Dye said. “At the same time, it's very condensed. It also had a taller x-height, which means the lowercase letters are taller, which makes it a little more legible.” 

Today San Francisco is used for user interface across all of Apple's product line, including watchOS, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS (with the notable exception of subtitles on tvOS which continues to use Helvetica). 

The three main variants are SF Pro for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS; SF Compact for watchOS; and SF Mono for the Terminal, Console, and Xcode applications. It was first introduced alongside the Apple Watch,[4] where it was used for enhanced legibility and taller x-heights for easy reading on a small display. 

It was widely speculated that San Francisco was going to be the long-awaited font that Apple had reportedly been developing for independent use in their products, and the font's name was leaked in November 2014 when the WatchKit SDK was released to developers.

Apple’s SF Symbols 3 won this year’s D&AD Type Design Gold Pencil Award. With over 4,000 symbols, SF Symbols is a library of iconography designed to integrate seamlessly with San Francisco, the system font for Apple platforms. Symbols come in nine weights and three scales, and automatically align with text labels. They can be exported and edited using vector graphics editing tools to create custom symbols with shared design characteristics and accessibility features. 

Today SF Symbols 4 features over 700 new symbols, variable color, automatic rendering, and new unified layer annotation.