WORLD’S MOST BELOVED TYPEFACE DUMPED

After two years as Apple’s typographical identity, Helvetica Neue is being replaced by a bespoke font, San Francisco, as the default font on both OS X El Capitan and IOS 9 this fall. San Francisco is the first in-house typeface Cupertino has designed in more than 20 years. The sans-serif typeface comes in 23 variations. With its clean, compact shapes, subtle roundness, and ample space between letters, San Francisco was no doubt designed for maximum legibility on the 3.8-centimetre Apple Watch display although it was quietly added it to the keyboard of 29LT Kaff is a contemporary typeface family designed by Pascal Zoghbi of 29Letters (29LT) and Ian Party of Swiss Typefaces, in which the Arabic and Latin letterforms were created simultaneously. Its name is taken from an Arabic word meaning ‘adequate, sufficient, necessary and essential’. Kaff’s family of eight weights (Thin, Ultra Light, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Semi Bold and Black) is designed to be the suitable typeface that answers the need of designers and publishers in most of their typographic projects. Said to work best as a corporate typeface as well as a sleek fashionable typeface, the new Macbook and used on IOS. At WWDC it was clear that San Francisco was always meant for more than the Watch’s tiny screen. The clues were everywhere: jackets given to attendees featured “WWDC 2015" embroidered in white San Francisco letters. Screenshots plastered on the enormous screen before the audience showed San Francisco implemented in the new operating systems. Quickly, Twitter lit up with type enthusiasts weighing in on whether it was San Francisco or Helvetica Neue onscreen, and the pros and cons of each. For a company whose fortune stems in no small part from its commitment to design, you’d think Apple would be quick to make some noise about it, but it was low key about it all. Why? It could be that Apple wants to save face.