Hey Folks!
We’ve been playing and discussing Calibri, Aptos ( Bierstadt ), Grandview, Seaford, Tenorite and Skeena over on Tildes and I figured you folks would enjoy clicking around and seeing what the differences between them actually are.
I wrote the article, so let me know if there’s something you’d like to see as well :D
Cheers !
Wow I always new I hated Calibri but looking at it up close REALLY made me hate it. I don’t know what it is about that font but I just can’t stand it.
I don’t mind Calibri, but Aptos does look like an improvement. I particularly like the serif added to the lowercase L… it has always annoyed me how that and uppercase I look exactly the same in many fonts. It’s one of the reasons why I’m partial to fonts with serifs.
but Aptos does look like an improvement
I think so too! Did you click through the Lorem Ipsum examples? Aptos is much easier on the eyes even in dense paragraphs.
I particularly like the serif added to the lowercase L
For the record, my calling those serifs has been a point of contention. To me Aptos feels like a semi-serif, not a sans-serif, although it’s officially one! However, it’s been suggested to me that I should do away with the serif terminology and call them simply stroke terminals!
Still mulling over this.
Oh my god yes! future generations will be shocked that it took us that long to solve that particular typography problem.
OK, debate solved,
serifs
->stroke terminals
Still adapting to Calibri … I liked arial because it was usually near the top of the font list so it was easy to find, lol
Maybe that’s why the new one got renamed to Aptos, ha.
Why? I’m not getting the joke :D
It will be near the top of the list of fonts since it begins with “A”. I think that was what they were getting at.
Thank you for getting the joke :-)
Haha big brain time :P
I liked arial
OK, you’re the only person who has managed to make me angry hehe :)
Someone actually likes Arial ??!!
Aside from using it to make jokes? It’s not bad, a legible sans-serif that renders well on low resolution screens. A lot of discussions about “clean” fonts seem to squabble over minutiae while the important part of being readable seems forgotten.
I agree wholeheartedly, it’s readable, but oh so ugly and brutalistic :P
Grandview seemed to do the best in clearly identifying the character 0. Is it an O, 0, I, l, or 1? Even without an example of O clearly visible in the sample text, the shape of 0 was very clear and seems like it should stand apart. Not the only reason to select a font, but it might be important to some.
That was a fantastic article! There’s so much that I would never have noticed.
Thank you so much, this sort of feedback warms my heart, it really does !
Feel free to stick around via the Mailinglist or the Fediverse (Y), links are in
whoami
!
Seaford* looking good
I agree, I like the variance in line weight on it. I’m a dirty serif-lover, though.
And so the Aptos era begins.
What are the “display” variants of the new fonts in that article? In the examples, they’re the ones with a * appended. They look much narrower to me (which I like).
I’m not at my PC right now, so it may just be that there’s an “Aptos Display” font or something 😅
Yes they’re usually called “<fontfamily> Display”. IIRC Display variants are optimized to be used on digital displays (usually on the web), where a lower resolution (72ish DPI) than printing (~300 DPI) is quite common.
What are the “display” variants of the new fonts in that article? They’re called that, at least on Office 365: Aptos Display, Grandview Display, etc.
I’m gonna miss the compactness of Calibri. I might have to reduce my font sizes now if I want to use Aptos in my pre-existing spreadsheets.
You’re not wrong about compactness, that’s a really good point!