![]() The rhythm has this kind of a swirl that is actually really nice to read. I equally hate any calligraphic ‘g’ that closes with a ball terminal.Ģ / I discovered that the type with a closed ‘a’ and ‘s’ and an open ‘e’ and ‘g’ has a really beautiful texture across longer blocks of text. It’s even worse with the geometric bowl on top. It’s like a ‘t’ or ‘f’ that hooks all the way around. You can’t do it with a pen the terminal always wants to end somewhere other than straight up (note that this is not true of s or a). If there is a single story ‘g’ it will often remain open, or even curve back the other way (up until it forms a two story g).Īs I experimented with this thinking I realized a couple of things:ġ / I have always hated the way Helvetica and all of her acolytes close the terminal on the ‘g’. It is common for the lower case ‘e’ to be more open than the ‘a’ for example. Interestingly, this is not the case for serif types, and certainly isn’t true for any kind of handwriting. It has been the hard and fast rule for sans serif types that the a, c, e, g and s must agree as to their angle of exit. Here’s the thinking with the open terminals on the ‘e’ and ‘g’. Update: Robertson has replied with his rationale for the design: Hodgepodge brutes like these usually have a short lifespan.įor a multi-class combo done right, see Fakt, Breuer Text, and Flama. In any event, Roboto probably won’t terrorize mobile screens for very long. There are some good shapes in Roboto, they just belong in multiple typefaces. But I can’t imagine that would erase the inherent problem with the design. ![]() To be fair, I haven’t seen the fonts on a phone, in person, and Google promises that they are built specifically for that medium. Either Google tied him down and made unreasonable demands or there’s something nasty in the water down in Mountain View. The font files credit the design to Christian Robertson, whom I know to be a very bright professional with some decent work under his belt, including the convincing handwriter Dear Sarah and the adorable Ubuntu Titling font. ![]() You never know which personality you’ll get.įor now, I can only speculate on how this beast came to be. When an alphabet has such unrelated glyphs it can taste completely different depending on the word. The crime is in the way they were combined: grabbing ideas from the Grotesk model, along with a Univers-inspired ‘a’ and ‘G’, welding them to letters from the Humanist model, and then bolting on three straight-sided caps à la DIN. There’s nothing wrong with combining elements of these two styles to create something new. Its parents are a Grotesk sans (like a slightly condensed Helvetica) and a Humanist sans (like Frutiger or Myriad). Roboto indeed has a mixed heritage, but that mix doesn’t have anything to do with the gibberish from the press release. I’m all for the strategy of developing a unique identity typeface, and I commend Google for employing type designers in house, but this is an unwieldy mishmash. I know it when I see it because I’ve had to write a few glowing descriptions about typefaces that don’t really glow. At the same time the font’s sweeping semi-circular curves give it a cheerful demeanor.” - GottaBeMobile It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. Google describes it has having a “dual nature. It was built from scratch and made specifically for high density displays. Just in time for Halloween, from the depths of the Android 4.0 laboratory emerges a frightening cross-breed creature called Roboto. Written by Stephen Coles on October 19, 2011
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