Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
uses a large variety of
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands o ...
s in its
marketing
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
,
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
s, and
industrial design with each product cycle. These change throughout the years with Apple's change of style in
their products. This is evident in the design and marketing of the company.
Marketing
For at least 18 years, Apple's corporate typeface was a custom variant of the
ITC Garamond
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and bo ...
typeface called
Apple Garamond. It was used alongside the Apple
logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
for product names on computers, in many ads and printed materials, and on the company's website. Starting in 2001, Apple gradually shifted towards using
Myriad in its marketing. Starting with iPhone 7 in 2016, Apple switched the typeface of the word mark "iPhone" to
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
on products and its website.
Hand-drawn logo
Prior to adopting the bitten Apple as its logo, Apple used a complex logo featuring
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author (described in his time as a " natural philosopher"), widely recognised as one of the grea ...
sitting below an
apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
tree. The words ''APPLE COMPUTER CO.'' were drawn on a ribbon banner ornamenting the picture frame. The frame itself held a quotation from
Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's '' ...
: "Newton....A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought...Alone.", taken from Wordsworth's autobiographical poem ''
The Prelude
''The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem '' is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Intended as the introduction to the more philosophical poem ''The Recluse,'' which Wordsw ...
''. The logo was hand drawn and thus did not use an established font. However, the type is similar to
Caslon
Caslon is the name given to serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (c. 1692–1766) in London, or inspired by his work.
Caslon worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp the moulds or matrices used to cast metal ty ...
.
Motter Tektura
Before the introduction of the first Macintosh, alongside the Apple logo, Apple used a typeface called Motter Tektura, which was designed in Austria by Othmar Motter of Vorarlberger Graphik in 1975 and distributed by
Letraset
Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements using the dry transfer method. Letraset has been acquired by the Colart group and become part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton.
Corporate his ...
(and also famously used by
Reebok
Reebok International Limited () is an American fitness footwear and clothing manufacturer that is a part of Authentic Brands Group. It was established in England in 1958 as a companion company to J.W. Foster and Sons, a sporting goods company ...
). At the time, the typeface was considered new and modern. One modification to the typeface was the removal of the dot over the ''i''. The ''s'' was also modified for the label on the
Disk II 5.25-inch floppy disk drive.
According to the logo designer,
Rob Janoff, the typeface was selected for its playful qualities and techno look, which were in line with Apple's mission statement of making high technology accessible to anyone. Janoff designed the logo in 1977 while working with
Palo Alto
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was es ...
marketer
Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...
Regis McKenna. The Apple logo's bite mark was originally designed to fit snugly with the Motter Tektura ''a''.
In the early 1980s, the logo was simplified by removing ''computer .'' from the logo. Motter Tektura was also used for the
Apple II logo. This typeface has sometimes been mislabeled Cupertino, a similar bitmap font probably created to mimic Motter Tektura.
Apple Garamond
Since the introduction of the
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...
in 1984, Apple adopted a new corporate font called Apple Garamond. It was a variation of the classic
Garamond
Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and bo ...
typeface, both narrower and having a taller
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...
. Specifically, ITC Garamond (created by Tony Stan in 1977) was condensed to 80% of its normal width.
Bitstream
A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits.
A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...
condensed the font, subtly adjusted the stroke widths, and performed the
hinting
Font hinting (also known as instructing) is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible tex ...
required to create the font, which was delivered to Apple as the Postscript font "apgaram".
In cases where the Apple logo was accompanied by text, it was always set in Apple Garamond. Aside from the company name, most of Apple's advertising and marketing slogans, such as "
Think different
"Think different" is an advertising slogan used from 1997 to 2002 by Apple Computer, Inc., now named Apple Inc. The campaign was created by the Los Angeles office of advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day.
The slogan has been widely taken as a resp ...
.", used the font as well.
The typeface was virtually synonymous with Apple for almost two decades and formed a large part of the company's
brand recognition
Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions. Brand awareness is one of two dimensions from brand knowledge, an associative network memory model. Brand awareness is a key consi ...
. It was used not only in conjunction with the logo, but also in manuals and ads and to label products with model names.
Apple has not released the true Apple Garamond font. ITC briefly sold ITC Garamond Narrow—Apple Garamond without the custom hinting—as part of its Apple Font Pack in the 1990s. A version of the font was also included under a different name in some versions of Mac OS X prior to 10.3 as it was used by the Setup Assistant installation program.
Gill Sans
In the marketing of the
Newton/Notepad/MessagePad
PDA (starting in 1992), Apple used
Gill Sans instead of the regular
Apple Garamond. Gill Sans Regular was used in the logo, for the model name on the computer, on the keyboard and in advertisement materials, though it was not used as a screen font (except as part of the Newton logo).
Myriad
In 2003, Apple gradually started using a variant of the Adobe
Myriad font family in its marketing and packaging. As new revisions of its products were released, the text changed from the serif Apple Garamond to the sans-serif Myriad Apple. The family's bolds were used for headlines, and other weights accordingly.
The Myriad font family was designed by
Robert Slimbach
Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Inter ...
and
Carol Twombly
Carol Twombly (born June 13, 1959) is an American designer, best known for her type design. She worked as a type designer at Adobe Systems from 1988 through 1999, during which time she designed, or contributed to the design of, many typefaces, i ...
for
Adobe. Adobe's most recent version of Myriad is Myriad Pro, which has some additional enhancements and character set extensions, but is not significantly changed in design. Myriad Apple, a modification produced by Galápagos Design Group, incorporates minor spacing and weight differences from the standard varieties, and includes Apple-specific characters, such as the company logo. In 2006, Myriad Apple was superseded by Myriad Set, which contains extra ligatures and other minor changes.
As of November 2013, lighter fonts are prevalent in Apple's marketing, with headlines in Myriad Pro Light. Occasionally an even lighter variant of Myriad is used for specialized marketing materials and press releases.
San Francisco
Starting with the release of the
Apple Watch
Apple Watch is a line of smartwatches produced by Apple Inc. It incorporates fitness tracking, health-oriented capabilities, and wireless telecommunication, and integrates with iOS and other Apple products and services. The Apple Watch was rel ...
, Apple has begun usage of
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
as the typeface of word marks such as "iPhone", "AirPods", and "MacBook Pro" on the devices themselves. This change is also reflected on some headlines on product marketing webpages. Apple modified the majority of its website's text to use the San Francisco font on January 24, 2017, and San Francisco became the universal official font for Apple.
System fonts
Apple has used a variety of system fonts for the
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...
of its products.
Early fonts
Apple's earliest computers, along with other personal computers of the period, had extremely limited graphical capabilities and could originally display only uppercase
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
using a set bitmap font. The
IIc and Enhanced
Apple IIe
The Apple IIe (styled as Apple //e) is the third model in the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. The ''e'' in the name stands for ''enhanced'', referring to the fact that several popular features were now built-in ...
expanded on this, supporting 40 or 80 columns of text and an extended character set called
MouseText
MouseText is a set of 32 graphical characters designed by Bruce Tognazzini and first implemented in the Apple IIc. They were then retrofitted to the Apple IIe forming part of the Enhanced IIe upgrade. A slightly revised version was then released wi ...
. It was used to simulate simple graphical user interfaces, similar to the use of
ANSI
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...
X3.64.
The first Apple computer with a purely bitmapped display, the
Lisa Lisa or LISA may refer to:
People
People with the mononym
* Lisa Lisa (born 1967), American actress and lead singer of the Cult Jam
* Lisa (Japanese musician, born 1974), stylized "LISA", Japanese singer and producer
* Lisa Komine (born 1978), J ...
, shipped in 1983. It used a system font with distinctive V and W letterforms.
Chicago and Charcoal
The
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...
, introduced in 1984, used a
bitmap font
A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for print ...
,
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
, designed by
Susan Kare. In
Mac OS 8
Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of System 7, approximately six years before. It places a greater emphasis o ...
, introduced in 1997, the system font of Mac OS was changed to
Charcoal. Charcoal was designed by David Berlow of Font Bureau, to be easier to read than Chicago, while retaining similar metrics for backward compatibility with existing application software.
When released in 2001, Apple's
iPod music player reused the Macintosh font Chicago as the system font. Later versions of the iPod drew from the larger character repertoire of the
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
, adding a number of characters not present in the bitmap Chicago, such as
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and
Cyrillic. Even though the screen supported grayscale, the characters were not
anti-aliased.
Geneva
For smaller user interface elements, such as the names of files displayed with icons in the Finder, Apple used the
Geneva
, neighboring_municipalities= Carouge, Chêne-Bougeries, Cologny, Lancy, Grand-Saconnex, Pregny-Chambésy, Vernier, Veyrier
, website = https://www.geneve.ch/
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevr ...
typeface, a redesigned version of Helvetica.
Shaston
Introduced in 1986, the
Apple IIGS, had very tall pixels (pixel aspect ratio of 5:12 or 5:6, with 640 × 200 or 320 × 200 pixels in a 4:3 image), thus requiring a stout, 8-point bitmap font called Shaston 8 as the system font (for menus, window titles, etc.). Shaston was described in Apple II
GS technote #41 as "a modified
Helvetica
Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...
", but the similarities are not striking. The fonts of the original Macintosh were also available for the
GS.
Espy Sans
In 1991, Apple's Human Interface Group contracted with LetterPerfect Fonts' Garrett Boge and Damon Clark, to design a family of bitmap screen fonts to replace Chicago and Geneva for the Mac OS version 7.5. The family consisted of Sans & Serif, Regular and Bold in discrete bitmap sizes of 8, 9, 10, 12 & 14 pt. The Sans, proving most useful for screen readability, was also used for the
Newton OS GUI. The Newton used the font Apple Casual to display text entered using the
Rosetta
Rosetta or Rashid (; ar, رشيد ' ; french: Rosette ; cop, ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ ''ti-Rashit'', Ancient Greek: Βολβιτίνη ''Bolbitinē'') is a port city of the Nile Delta, east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. The Ro ...
handwriting recognition engine in the Newton. The same font found its way into the Rosetta-derived writing recognition system in Mac OS X—
Inkwell
An inkwell is a small jar or container, often made of glass, porcelain, silver, brass, or pewter, used for holding ink in a place convenient for the person who is writing. The artist or writer dips the brush, quill, or dip pen into the inkwell ...
. The
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating ...
font can be made available to any application by copying the font file, which is embedded in a system component, to any
font folder. (See
List of macOS fonts for more information.) The Newton logo featured the
Gill Sans typeface, which was also used for the Newton keyboard.
Espy Sans was later used as the font for Apple's
eWorld online service in 1994. (eWorld also used the larger bold condensed
bitmap font
A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for print ...
eWorld Tight for headlines. The metrics of eWorld Tight were based on
Helvetica Ultra Compressed.) The
iPod mini, released in 2004, also used Espy Sans.
Lucida Grande
Since its introduction in 2000 up through
OS X Mavericks
OS X Mavericks (version 10.9) is the 10th major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. OS X Mavericks was announced on June 10, 2013, at WWDC 2013, and was released on October 22, 2013, wo ...
,
Lucida Grande
Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It is a member of the Lucida family of typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. It is best known for its implementation throughout the macOS user interface from 1999 to 2014, as ...
was the system font used in Mac OS X user interface elements, such as menus, dialog boxes, and other widgets. It was superseded by Helvetica Neue.
Podium Sans
Starting in 2004, the iPod photo, 5th-generation
iPod, and 1st- through 2nd-generation
iPod nano
The iPod Nano (stylised and marketed as iPod nano) is a discontinued portable media player designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. The first generation model was introduced on September 7, 2005, as a replacement for the iPod Mini, usin ...
feature a bitmap font known as
Podium Sans
Podium Sans is the typeface used on all models of iPod with color displays previous to the iPod lineup refresh on September 5, 2007.
When the iPod photo was first announced Apple claimed that the device featured a "new Myriad typeface," stat ...
, displacing the use of
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
as the iPod system font. Although originally promoted as Myriad, Podium Sans is missing Myriad's trademark features, such as the splayed "M" and distinctive "y".
Helvetica
Since the introduction of the 1st-generation iPhone in 2007, Apple has used
Helvetica
Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...
in its software design. iOS for the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV employs the font, alongside its use on iPods beginning with the 6th-generation iPod classic and 3rd-generation iPod nano.
In conjunction with the iPhone 4 in 2010, Apple began using Helvetica Neue on devices with Retina display, while keeping use of Helvetica on non-Retina devices.
Around 2012, Apple started using Helvetica in
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
(then named OS X) application software.
iTunes,
iMovie,
iPhoto
iPhoto is a discontinued digital photograph manipulation software application developed by Apple Inc. It was included with every Macintosh personal computer from 2002 to 2015, when it was replaced with Apple's Photos application. Originally so ...
,
GarageBand, and Apple's professional applications started to feature heavy use of Helvetica, while the majority of the OS X (now named macOS) environment retained the comparatively more legible Lucida Grande typeface, which was designed specifically for on-screen use.
After the introduction of iOS 7 in June 2013, Apple began using an extra-thin weight of Helvetica Neue for the user interface of iOS 7, arousing numerous complaints about the less legible typography. For the final release of the operating system, Apple changed the system's font to a slightly thicker weight of Helvetica Neue, although some have complained that readability is still compromised compared to the font weight used in former versions of iOS. Older iOS devices continue to use Helvetica or Helvetica Neue in regular font weights that display with higher contrast on low-resolution displays.
With the introduction of
OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" in June 2014, Apple started using Helvetica Neue as the system font on the Mac. This brought all of Apple's user interfaces in line, using Helvetica Neue throughout.
San Francisco
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
is currently used for user interface across all of Apple's product line, including
watchOS
watchOS is the operating system of the Apple Watch, developed by Apple Inc. It is based on iOS, the operating system used by the iPhone, and has many similar features. It was released on April 24, 2015, along with the Apple Watch, the only d ...
,
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
,
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...
,
iPadOS
iPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. for its iPad line of tablet computers. It is a rebranded variant of iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones, renamed to reflect the diverging features of the two product ...
and
tvOS
tvOS (formerly known as Apple TV Software) is an operating system developed by Apple Inc. for the Apple TV, a digital media player. In the first-generation Apple TV, Apple TV Software was based on Mac OS X. Starting with the second-generation, ...
(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
Apple Watch is a line of smartwatches produced by Apple Inc. It incorporates fitness tracking, health-oriented capabilities, and wireless telecommunication, and integrates with iOS and other Apple products and services. The Apple Watch was rel ...
, where it was used for enhanced legibility and taller
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the le ...
s for easy reading on a small display. The design references a number of different other typefaces, notably
FF DIN
FF DIN is a sans-serif typeface in the industrial or "grotesque" style. It was designed in 1995 by Albert-Jan Pool, based on DIN-Mittelschrift and DIN-Engschrift, as defined in the German standard DIN 1451. DIN is an acronym for ''Deutsches Inst ...
(used in the UI of the Camera app in
iOS 7
iOS 7 is the seventh major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 6. It was announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, 2013, and was released on September 1 ...
and above),
Helvetica
Helvetica (originally Neue Haas Grotesk) is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann.
Helvetica is a neo-grotesque design, one influenced by the famous 19th century (1890s) ...
(used in the UI in iOS 6 and below), Helvetica Neue (used in the UI of
iOS 7
iOS 7 is the seventh major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 6. It was announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, 2013, and was released on September 1 ...
and
iOS 8
iOS 8 is the eighth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 7. It was announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 2, 2014, and was released on September 17, ...
as well as
OS X Yosemite
OS X Yosemite ( ; version 10.10) is the eleventh major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers.
OS X Yosemite was announced and released to developers on June 2, 2014, at WWDC 2014 and rel ...
),
Roboto
Roboto () is a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface family developed by Google as the system font for its mobile operating system Android, and released in 2011 for Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich".
The entire font family has been licensed un ...
(
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
's new UI typeface), and
Univers
Univers () is a large sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-century German typefaces such a ...
(used on Apple's early keyboard designs).
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 WatchKit is a framework provided by Apple to develop interfaces for Apple Watch applications. To develop using WatchKit, Apple provides more information and resources in the WatchKit library
A library is a collection of materials, books or me ...
SDK was released to developers. On June 8, 2015, at the
WWDC
The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in t ...
2015 conference, San Francisco replaced Helvetica Neue as the system font for both macOS and iOS operating systems. The version used, known as "SF UI", was modified to make it wider than its Apple Watch counterpart, more akin to the previously used Helvetica Neue. The original version has since been renamed "SF Compact".
New York
In 2019, Apple released
New York, a serif counterpart to San Francisco.
Keyboards
Apple's keyboards were long labeled with
Univers
Univers () is a large sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-century German typefaces such a ...
47 (Condensed Light Oblique), a design choice by Apple's industrial design partner,
Frog Design
frog (styled as ''"frog, part of Capgemini Invent"'') is a global creative and design consultancy founded in 1969 by industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger in Mutlangen, Germany, where it was initially named “esslinger design”. Soon after the ...
. This began in 1984 with the
Apple IIc, which had tilted front-panel buttons to match the inclination of the lettering.
Univers was eventually replaced on Apple's keyboards by
VAG Rounded
''VAG Rundschrift'' or VAG Rounded (''Rundschrift'' is German for 'round typeface', short of ''abgerundete Schrift'', 'rounded typeface') is a geometric sans-serif typeface that was designed as a corporate typographic voice for the Volkswagen AG m ...
, which was used on all
iBook
iBook is a line of laptop computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from 1999 to 2006. The line targeted entry-level, consumer and education markets, with lower specifications and prices than the PowerBook, Apple's higher-end ...
models,
PowerBooks introduced after 2003, and
MacBooks,
MacBooks Pro,
MacBooks Air, and Apple Keyboards from August 2007 until early 2015. The font was developed by
Sedley Place Ltd. for German car manufacturer
Volkswagen
Volkswagen (),English: , . abbreviated as VW (), is a German motor vehicle manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front under the Nazi Party and revived into a global brand post-W ...
and was used in much of their marketing materials.
On March 9, 2015, Apple introduced a new generation of
MacBook that utilizes the
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
designed
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
typeface.
See also
*
Fonts on Macintosh
Apple's Macintosh computer supports a wide variety of fonts. This support was one of the features that initially distinguished it from other systems.
Fonts
System fonts
The primary system font in OS X El Capitan and above is San Francisco. ...
*
List of Apple typefaces
This is a list of typefaces made by/for Apple Inc.
Serif
Proportional
* Apple Garamond (1983), designed to replace Motter Tektura in the Apple logo. Not included on Macs in a user-available form.
* New York (1984, by Susan Kare), a serif ...
*
List of typefaces included with macOS
This list of fonts contains every font shipped with Mac OS X 10.0 through macOS 10.14, including any that shipped with language-specific updates from Apple (primarily Korean and Chinese fonts). For fonts shipped only with Mac OS X 10.5,
please ...
References
General references
* Apple Computer:
*
Fonts on Mac OS X Retrieved 2004-09-25.
** (January 29, 2003). ''Using and Managing Fonts in Mac OS X''
PDF Retrieved 2004-10-01.
** (October 8, 2003). ''Fonts in Mac OS X'
PDF Retrieved 2004-10-04.
*
Retrieved 2004-10-01.
** (November 11, 2002).
LastResort Font'. Retrieved 2004-10-03.
** (June 10, 2004)
Retrieved 2004-10-22.
** (September 14, 2000)
Retrieved 2004-10-22.
** (1996-07-06)
Retrieved 2004-10-27.
** (November 1990)
Apple II GS TN #41 — Font Family Numbers Retrieved 2004-10-28.
** (December 19, 2002)
ROMAN.TXT, MacRoman to Unicode map Retrieved 2004-11-09.
* Jaques Moury Beauchap
Retrieved 2004-10-28.
*
Michael Everson
Michael Everson (born January 9, 1963) is an American and Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which he has published over a hundred books since 2006.
H ...
(2003-11-11)
Multilingual Macintosh Support Retrieved 2004-10-27.
* Erfert Fenton (October 1994). Inside QuickDraw GX Fonts, ''MacWorld''. , retrieved 2004-11-01.
* FreeType
Retrieved 2004-10-29.
* Nobumi Iyanaga (2000-09-26)
Retrieved 2004-10-27.
* Tony Kavadias (2004-07-24)
Apple II User Interfaces Retrieved 2004-10-28.
* Steve Gibson (2003-04-10)
Retrieved 2004-10-27.
* Jens Hofman Hansen (July 2, 2002)
Apple-logoets historie Retrieved 2004-09-22.
* Susan Kare
World Class Cities Retrieved 2004-09-25.
* John Kheyt (2003-05-23)
The Devil's Advocate — MS's ClearType KOs Apple's Quartz In The Lightweight Division Retrieved 2004-10-27.
* Microsoft (2003-03-12)
Press release: Microsoft Announces Expanded Access To Extensive Intellectual Property Portfolio Retrieved 2004-10-27.
* Jonathan Ploudre (June 1, 2000)
Retrieved 2004-09-21.
* Ed Tracy (1998-10-15).
'. Retrieved 2004-10-27.
* Norman Walsh (August 14, 1996)
comp.fonts FAQ: Macintosh Info Retrieved 2004-09-21.
* XvsXP
XvsXP.com — Fonts Retrieved 2004-10-27.
External links
Advanced Typography with Mac OS X TigerText & FontsApple's typography developer site
TrueType Reference ManualLastResort Font*
** LastResort glyphs:
236 pages PDF5 pages PDF— Survey of Unicode fonts included with Mac OS X and
Microsoft Office 2004
Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac is a version of Microsoft Office developed for Mac OS X. It is equivalent to Office 2003 for Windows. The software was originally written for PowerPC Macs, so Mac transition to Intel processors, Macs with Intel CPUs ...
.
Microsoft's_Microsoft's_ClearType_website">ClearType">Microsoft's_ClearType
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Fondu
–_program_to_convert_(and_separate)_Mac_OS_X_dfont_data_fork_files_to_TrueType,_OpenType,_Type_1,_and_Glyph_Bitmap_parts
MacKeys_—_online_tool_to_convert_Apple_keyboard_keys_to_their_Unicode_equivalents_(e.g._Cmd_→_⌘)
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Fondu– program to convert (and separate) Mac OS X dfont data fork files to TrueType, OpenType, Type 1, and Glyph Bitmap parts
MacKeys — online tool to convert Apple keyboard keys to their Unicode equivalents (e.g. Cmd → ⌘)
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Digital typography">Apple
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