Google’s new retro-style font brings again serifs for extra snug studying

Google has a brand new model of its Roboto font, and it’s bringing serifs again: the aptly named Roboto Serif, designed in collaboration with Greg Gazdowicz of Commercial Type to create a extra readable serif companion to its Roboto Sans typeface.

The new font isn’t simply the outdated Roboto letters with some serifs slapped on, although: fairly, every letter was redrawn from scratch to create a font that “thinks about Roboto, but is a new and original design,” in response to Google UX supervisor Rob Giampietro. The new font nonetheless makes use of the identical vertical proportions of Roboto Sans, making it doable to combine the serif and sans-serif variations in a single design.

It most likely additionally helps that chunkier, retro-styled serif typefaces are coming again in model in an enormous means after years of minimalist san-serif designs dominating, as noted by Vox. Serif fonts are additionally thought-about to be simpler to learn, because of the extra distinct letter shapes, one thing that Google’s new font expands on by advantage of being a variable font that may routinely change and optimize the letterforms for various measurement shows.

Google has been utilizing its Roboto font in a single kind or one other for over a decade; it was first launched alongside Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) because the default font for the corporate’s cell OS. Roboto has seen loads of variants over time, though it’s slowly however steadily been outdated as the corporate’s main font by Product Sans (and its Google Sans variants, often known as the “Pixel” font) throughout its varied merchandise.

For now, Roboto Serif is just being added to Google Fonts as another choice for the corporate’s Roboto household of open-source fonts — but it surely’s solely doable that Google might in the future use the brand new, pleasant trying font in its personal advertising and marketing, too.