Apple Watch's new font isn't the first Apple font named San Francisco
Today Apple released WatchKit, the tools for developers to start building apps for the Apple Watch. Buried inside the kit is a brand new font called "San Francisco" specifically designed for use with the Apple Watch. Given the challenges of reading text on such a tiny screen Apple needed to ensure it came with a font that met the device's needs. In the release notes for developers the company describes the font thusly.
The system font was designed specifically for legibility on Apple Watch. At large sizes, the font's slightly condensed letters are set tight to take up less horizontal space. But at small sizes, they are spaced more loosely and have bigger apertures in glyphs like 'a' and 'e' to make these easier to read at a glance. Punctuation is also proportionally larger when the font gets smaller. And as text size changes, Apple Watch dynamically switches between fonts to maintain clarity and legibility at all times.
It appears the "San Francisco" font is going to be an important part of the Apple Watch experience. Of course it isn't the first Apple font to go by that name. No, there was another "San Francisco" which was one of the original bitmap typefaces for the Apple Macintosh. Designed by Susan Kare, the font allowed for users to mimic the effect of a ransom note, for any number of presumably reasonable "ransom note mimicking" reasons.
H/T to The Next Web for originally noticing the similar font names.
