Geneva: The story of Facebook's new font
Perhaps you've noticed that the posts in your Facebook timeline appear slightly off.
In fact, it turns out that Facebook is testing a new font for some desktop users. And if you're a typeface nerd, you'll likely recognize the new font as Geneva, a font developed at Apple in the early 1980s.
For reference, here's the old font -- Helvetica -- next to Geneva:
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So: What's the deal with Facebook's latest font?
To give a brief rundown of its history, we're taking it back to 1983, when a young designer named Susan Kare started her first typographic design job at Apple.
As she told Fast Company in 2014: "I was working at a furniture store at the time, and I didn't know the first thing about designing a typeface ... But I'd studied graphic design, so I said, 'How hard can it be?'"
She landed the job and went on to create some of Apple's most iconic bitmap fonts, including Chicago, Monaco and, of course, Geneva.
Geneva is a sans-serif font that's slightly narrow in width. But there are elements that distinguish the font from ones like Helvetica. In September 1991, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes -- highly accomplished typographical designers who also worked on Geneva -- published "Notes on Apple 4 Fonts," in Electronic Publishing, Volume 4, where they got into the details of what separates Geneva from its fellow sans-serif brethren.
They explain:
In particular, the semi-enclosed counters of letters like ‘a’, ‘c’, ‘e’,and ‘s’ are more open; the terminals do not enclose the internal spaces as much as in other Grotesques. Even though the terminals end with a horizontal cut-off, there is more breathing room for the internal white space. This keeps the counters open and the terminals from visually joining at small sizes, which allows for better differentiation of the letterforms.
FYI, "Grotesque" is pretty much just a fancy name for early sans-serif fonts. Moving on:
Also for better differentiation, the small white triangles that define the joins of letters like ‘n’ and ‘p’ are cut deeper than normal. That small, bright white nick in the outline helps define the individual characters. Better differentiation and individuation makes for better legibility, because readers can tell different characters apart more easily.
And finally:
The Geneva capitals, while following the main Grotesque style, have slightly more classical forms, and are designed to work well together. Hence, a line of Geneva capitals makes an interesting but readable pattern, and because of the slightly narrowed widths, is somewhat economical in space.
Where have I seen it before?
If you've owned a Mac or a PC, then you've seen Geneva in your Microsoft Office Suite, and you've very likely typed with it.
And if for some reason you don't own it, you can easily download it.
Now get the Helvetica out of here.
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