Since its release in 2011, the Roboto font has expanded to include several variants and just got a reading-optimized Serif version in February. Roboto Flex was officially unveiled today as a “major upgrade” and “Google Fonts’ biggest project to date.”
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As we reported back in late June, the Chromium team – which creates a public, open-source browser that was forked to create the popular Chrome browser from Google, and who’s updates are regularly merged into Chrome – is working hard on a “Reader Mode” for the Android version of the browser. This mode would recognize articles and pages with lots of text, display a “Make page mobile-friendly” button and, when tapped, strip a page of all extraneous content, leaving just the page’s body text, title, and images. The feature is getting ever-closer to completion, so we’re taking another look at what has changed recently.
If you have a pair of sharp eyes and watch cat videos on YouTube a lot, you may have noticed today that the font used on Google’s video streaming website has changed. It is now Roboto, subtlety different from the previous font—Arial.
Roboto is the official type family used for Android. The font comes in several weights but the one Google has gone with is slightly lighter than what users may be used to compared to the Arial font. This will surely lead to some complaints about it being harder to read, but I think it looks fine, and going for consistency across platforms is logical.
The company previously tested the change with a small group of users, so they at least have data to back up their decision.
Have you noticed the new font? What do you think about it?
Roboto tends to be Google’s font of choice across many of its services and software, but some of the company’s websites—like YouTube—use the more common and standard Arial by default. That doesn’t mean Google hasn’t thought about using Roboto, though, as Google Operating System has noticed. As you can see in the screenshot above, Google’s in-house designed font looks pretty snazzy on the ubiquitous video sharing website.
Update: It looks like Google has killed this little hidden experiment for now. It worked fine this morning, but it doesn’t look like users have the ability to play with YouTube’s font anymore (at least via this method).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K4HImSqR1k&start=850]
Following a lengthy interview in October where he gave us insight into the future of Android and Google’s view on iOS and Windows, Android’s head of user experience Matias Duarte sat down with The Verge to discuss his work on Android and more specifically, Ice Cream Sandwich. During the interview Duarte elaborated on his competitor’s design choices, where he says iOS looks cartoonish and explains if it were “put on a website or magazine, you’d laugh at it, it would look childish”. Host Joshua Topolsky also calls him out for saying Windows Phone looks like “bathroom signage in an airport”, to which he didn’t comment.
Matias gave a few demos using a Galaxy Nexus, including one of live video chat effects like blurs and warps that alter your face in real-time. He also explained his view on photography features calling traditional features of point and shoot cameras such as white balance “crap”, saying “if it’s not immediately obvious, it’s something the machine should be taking care of for you”.
Duarte also defended Google’s choice to create the new Roboto font for ICS, which he also recently explained in a blog post, as well as addressed the controversy of ICS’s Face Unlock feature (which was recently tricked using a photo).
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