Waiter, There’s a Helvetica in my Interface!

Written April 13, 2008 in apple

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Sebastiaan de With covers the encroachment of Helvetica into Mac OSX UI Design. Via Daring Fireball.

With the most recent re-do of my blog, I was very careful with the typography. Essentially, the entire interface is typography — there are no images. No backgrounds, no toothpicks, nothing. White space is used to separate elements. The very occasional use of a sans-serif font (Verdana, unless you don’t have it, in which case it unfortunately degrades to Arial.) is used to highlight some otherwise lost transitions between categories of information on the front page. Where it’s not needed, it is not used.

It’s likely that the creep of inferior fonts into the previously impeccable OSX UI is due to Apple’s lack of updates to their Human Interface Guidelines. It would be nice to see a greater focus on UI from Cupertino in general and ol’ Steve in particular.