Behind the design: Aptos deep dive

"Reading is a magical technology; the closest humans have come so far to inventing telepathy,” wrote the late great Bill Hill. He was one of the inventors of Microsoft’s ClearType font display technology, and the former Director of Microsoft Advanced Reading Technologies. Hill said that by scratching marks on a shredded tree and using symbols to represent sounds, meanings, and ideas, we communicate across time and space. It’s how we share our thoughts with others who may never meet us.  

Those scratched marks, known as writing systems, are expressions of culture, identity, and creativity 🔠. They reflect our values and aesthetics. When we decided to replace our default font, we knew taking all of the above into account was vital. Like Calibri, the new default font will be our customer’s voice, brand, and personality (though you can also choose between hundreds of other fonts via our font picker). That’s why we had to include you on our journey to find the right typeface, and out of the five font candidates, you choose Aptos—but why? How did this humanist typeface disguised as a grotesque font capture the essence of our customers? And what about the companion serif and monospace fonts?  

Today on the blog, we dive deep into the designing of #Aptos and how it became the go-to font for western-language speakers.   

Read the full story: https://msft.it/6006cpjHM

🎨: Daniel Victor