When considering fonts, the main difference between a good one and a bad one is legibility. Text is still one of the primary forms of communication between a product designer and its user, and we can rarely design good digital products without it. Hover over an icon button in any well-designed piece of software, and you’ll get a tooltip that explains what the button is used for. Navigating most software requires jumping from one piece of text to another. Before we identify an app icon with its app, we need to read the app’s name underneath it first. While an increasing amount of the digital content we consume today is visual, images and video, text is still crucial in our digital products. But why do top-level designers care so much about text? And how does this influence font selection? Text is Still Tops in UI If you’re a digital product designer you owe it to yourself to read Hurff’s book: it’s a product design goldmine. In it, Scott Hurff, author and ex-Tinder product manager and lead designer, dedicates a whole chapter to the importance of the written word in UI. I read this in the fantastic book, Designing Products People Love: How Great Designers Create Successful Products.

In fact, Jef Raskin, pioneer of the Macintosh project at Apple – yes, the first commercial graphical user interface in the world-believes that a designer should start designing with text. How to Choose Fonts for Localized ProductsĪsk any good graphic designer and she’ll tell you that typography is the core of any user interface.

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