Gadgetory

hello everybody I'm linois associate editor at Cena and this is Steve Madison creative type director at monotype imaging now Steve has designed countless typefaces for many popular devices including the Xbox kindle and Windows Phone steve i know you have a lot of strong opinions about fonts so let's get right into it what do you feel about the fonts featured in the ipad apple uses Helvetica in their mobile devices in the iOS and helvetic was designed in the 60s for large use for posters and signage it really wasn't meant to be used at small sizes for legibility reasons it's very tightly spaced the shapes kind of close in on themselves and so it really isn't the ideal quick glance user interface typeface now what kind of devices do fonts very well I I was involved with the Android project and I believe that their approach was very good to have a open open humanist style sans-serif as the main user interface font here you can see on this keypad the lowercase e is very open lower case a is very open in the numbers especially in the Helvetica style typeface there's a lot of ambiguity in the 6 8 3 and the 9 they can be very confusing for someone who's trying to dial a phone and everything's vibrating and moving so the the open forms of the Android sands design are personally what I would use for legibility and another font that you've designed for legibility would be the fonts that are featured in Windows Phone is that correct yes absolutely and how are they different from the droid phones the windows design was done first back in the about 2003 and with the same idea in mind and keeping things very legible and neutral not adding too much personality but not being so cold and impersonal that people don't want to use it for Windows Phone we made some adjustments to the design to make it a little bit more contemporary because after all it was seven years ago or eight years ago that we first worked on the sigo design so we made it a little bit more contemporary for the the Windows Phone platform and again with this design there's open forms there's a little bit more curvature a little bit more playfulness than the original sigo design that was done for Microsoft well thank you so much Steve I really appreciate you coming out of it absolutely thank you