Font Bureau takes credit for Palm's custom 'Prelude' fonts; our hearts melt
By Paul Miller 
posted June 12th 2009 5:48PM
posted June 12th 2009 5:48PM
posted June 12th 2009 5:48PM
HP Pre 3
HP webOS 3.0
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Y'know, something that's always bugged me about the iPhone and iPod touch was that they used Neue Helvetica, of all things, for the entire UI. Even the Pixo-based iPod firmwares used Chicago at first (heh), and then Myriad, for their text, and it looked super classy. Apple has a few "signature" fonts that identify with them, like the aforementioned Myriad, Lucida Grande (which, IIRC, they specifically commissioned to be a good readable screen font), and stuff like Garamond if you go back. Considering that, I would've liked to see something with more character on the iPhone OS. It makes me happy to see that Palm at least cares about the typography of their new mobile UI.
"welcome to 2007"
lmao....from the supporter of a phone that still doesn't have copy and paste support until next month.
@CL - Were you -really- "laughing your ass off"? I'm fascinated to find out what you pinheads are gonna do when iPhone 3.0 is out. What will be your talking points then? I'm definitely not saying the iPhone will be perfect after 3.0, but really, what WILL you haters bash on next? Are you losing sleep at night because your beloved "HA HA HA IT DOESN'T CUT AND PASTE" will be gone?
@Frankfurter
Are YOU losing sleep over the fact that not everybody loves the phone you think about when you touch yourself?
Seriously though, they're just phones, and both the iPhone and the Pre are lame compared to pretty much any phone you can get in Japan right now.
@Miles: LOL, it's reverse-iPhone-discrimination... WTH-ever. The article wasn't about Palm Pre being better or worse than the iPhone, and in fact, there's not a mention of the iPhone in the article. Unfortunately, if it isn't the iPhone-nazis who work _for Engadget, it's the iPhone-nazis who reply to every article posted on Engadget that make the comment boards very hard to slog through for a rare kernel of information.
My thoughts on the FONT (i.e. the reason for the article): not a big fan of the condensed version, but as far as I can tell, nicely legible at small sizes. Haven't seen the phone in person though, so I'll reserve judgment until I can see it on the slab! (As far as the condensed subset is concerned, it seems from the sample provided that all they did was shrink the capitals, which makes the wider lower-case letters seem to have a visually heavier weight than the upper-case! )
It's not that I'm hating on the Pre, it's just that I think it's horribly overhyped.
It's being treated like the 2nd coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
And the release of anything Apple is different in what way?
Apple actually innovates.
Remember before the iPhone came out?
No multi-touch, hardly any touchscreen phones.
Now we have a ripoff like the Pre stealing Apple's rightfully earned thunder.
Apple deserved the praise it got, Palm just rode off their success.
Call me a fanboy if you'd like, but you know this to be truw.
@Miles, trust me, Pre isn't stealing anyone's thunder. This weekend will be pretty telling - watch for the sales reports on Monday, and notably, watch for Palm management's spin on why so fewer units were moved.....
Really??? Almost no touchscreen phones? Every phone Palm has ever made is a touchscreen phone. And it appears Apple "appropriated" the mutlitouch interface from a researcher at NYU: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/the-multi-touch-screen/. So really, all Apple innovated was CPU-wasting animations moving from screen to screen. Whoopie....
And this from a fanboi of the ORIGINAL JESUS PHONE....LOL....
This must be the same font that undeniably reads "dick" when it is meant to read "click"
see here: http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/10/webos-homebrew-community-says-hello-world-to-palm-pre/
Cue endless jokes a la "dick here to upload", "dick here for great savings", etc.
And a blurry camera phone JPEG is definitely rock-solid proof. The letters are obviously blown out from the terrible photo, so how could you possibly tell? The second photo on that page clearly shows that all the type is an unreadable smudge! How can anyone use a phone with such a blurry display?!
I haven't used the Pre enough yet to know if there are actual letterspacing issues, but clearly neither have you.
Isn't the Pre font called Coconut?
That's what it is in the ROM. Get the ROM and look in /usr/share/fonts.
century gothic? pretty close.
With all these great fonts, why the hell won't Apple, Palm or anyone else let me view appointments when showing the calendar in month view? Tiny text is way more useful than a stupid dot. Shrink the date number and print the first 8 characters or so of my first 4 appointments. Or at least give me the option. My prehistoric HP100LX did this and it was incredible helpful.
how the hell do you design fonts?!? Sounds like someone wasn't very popular in high school!
This coming from someone posting on a tech blog. (In between throwing the football and drinking a cup of beer, I presume).
They're called type designers and, in fact, your world would be an entirely different one without them. Fonts are actually pretty important whether you know it or not. Also, troll.
In the sign business, we call a typestyle who's lowercase is just a smaller version of the uppercase a "Superscript".
But it's not usually done inside the font, but rather the rest of the letters are downsized, or changed within the editor. I'm just assuming the font is known as a superscript font.
Not a giant fan of the phone, but they're right- that's a great font. I wonder how it would look on my pc...
Seriously.... fonts ?
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1908292
Looks a lot like Segoe UI, except for the "Condensed" version.
I really don't understand the hype over the Pre either...the form factor just looks awful...all those little keys jammed in there like that.
I'm holding out for the HTC Touch Pro 2.
Who cares? I guess it's exciting when a company releases a product with legible fonts.
What's so great about this font? Who gives a damn what font is used as long as it's as readable as possible. Usually that alone makes a font look good. I can't believe that Palm felt compelled to spend the extra $ for a brand new font when they could have used any number of sans serif fonts with proven good looks and readability.
PS: Isn't this the font that makes "click" look like "dick"? If so, what a waste of $ and fail.
Might as well of just used fucking Helvetica, right. I mean who wants to create an entire new design ecosystem for this phone, right!?
When 90% of the UI of your big, important, company-saving product consists of type, why not commission a unique typeface to make it look like nothing else on the market? Hundreds of thousands of typefaces exist, and yet, hundreds of new ones are designed every year. It's also safe to say few, if any, existing typefaces were designed with mobile devices in mind. Many newspapers and magazines have commissioned their own typefaces, even though there are lots already available. Because, again, they consist mostly of type. It's kind of like saying "There are already many perfectly good phone shells (or car designs, or house designs, or clothing designs) available. Why do they bother designing new ones?" And have people already forgotten Android has its own unique typeface as well?
For reference, please consult the Blackberry or Windows Mobile to see what happens when you don't care about what typefaces you put in your OS.
easy to read
For the record, the screenshot at the head of this article is not a final version of the released Pre webOS interface, it is an early development mock-up, used for demonstration purposes. As such, it actually does use Avenir. Don't know why Paul Miller grabbed that image for this post. (cf. this thread)
Prelude is clearly in the same family of designs as Avenir & Futura, because that's what Palm's team requested. But they wanted something a little different and specially tuned to the Pre/webOS interface. When designing type for system interfaces, the engineering of details can be more important than the broader, more obvious design characteristics -- but subtleties can make all the difference.
@ToniCipriani : "Coconut" was the codename for the fonts in development. Didn't think that made it into the final fonts that got loaded into ROM. Are you looking at a final release?
Oops. HTML link didn't come through. First paragraph should end with -- cf. this thread: http://typophile.com/node/56579
They definitely should have used Comic Sans.