You’re probably sick of the arial font, even if you don’t know it. as the default gmail font, known as “sans-serif” in the gmail interface, it’s the medium through which you’ve received years of spam, bills, pleas from family members in need, and demands from bosses and colleagues.
now the reign of arial may be coming to an end. Earlier this week, the Edge and Android Authority reported that they had received internal emails from Google about an impending redesign of Gmail. the gmail product, despite (or perhaps because of) its popularity and ubiquity, hasn’t been redesigned since 2011, eons in the years of the internet. The expected facelift appears to include a number of functional changes, including a “snooze” feature, which will temporarily remove a selected email from your inbox and then come back later, and more unified integration with Google Calendar.
But for font fans, the big news is the display. the gmail interface font (menu items, for example) will change from arial to product sans, while the default font for email and messages will change from arial to roboto. both product sans and roboto are fonts created by google, and if the leaked redesign comes to fruition, they’ll be a welcome change.
product sans is a future type font that Google designed in 2015 for branding purposes; You might recognize it from the current Google logo, which replaced the old serif logo in 2015 as well. Roboto looks like Arial or Helvetica; Google has been iterating on the font since 2011. It’s now the primary font on the Android operating system, and if Gmail’s redesign is any indication, it’s likely to become Google’s default font on all of its platforms.
product sans will be a relatively light design touch for headers and menus, but roboto will impact most of the words hundreds of millions of people read every day. So it’s worth thinking about how our gmail digital experiences will change now that arial is out and roboto in.
both arial and roboto are modern-style sans-serif fonts, and letter for letter they are quite similar. roboto has some small changes at the individual character level. the capital “q” (arial on the left, roboto on the right) is probably the biggest change:
another noticeable change is the dollar sign line:
Other character-level changes include changing a square dot in the lowercase “i” and “j”, as well as the question mark, to a circular dot:
but really the biggest difference is in the space between characters. roboto characters are thinner than arial, leaving more white space between each letter:
character spacing may seem trivial, but it makes a big difference in the appearance of long blocks of text. i’m an editor working mostly on google docs, where arial is also the default font, and the first thing i do when i get a new document is change the font. tight and claustrophobic arial encounter; I have a rotating set of fonts that I use instead, including roboto, a few others with an even broader natural following, like my current favorite, nunito. below, from top to bottom, are arial, roboto and nunito:
For most people, the difference between arial and roboto will be more noticeable on smartphones. google’s gmail decision is indicative of a broader shift by technology platform companies away from the familiar fonts of the desktop era (including arial and helvetica prime) and toward newer fonts. fonts designed specifically for mobile devices.
google was actually the first to test mobile fonts with the droid font family, released in the late 2000s for its first smartphones. but those fonts didn’t look quite right when the definition on the phone’s screen began to improve rapidly. roboto was google’s next effort; The first iteration of Roboto was released in 2011, and over the following years the company modified it until it reached the version widely used in its Android mobile operating systems in 2015.
Meanwhile, Apple released its own mobile-friendly sans-serif font, San Francisco, in 2014. By now, Helvetica Neue and Lucida Grande have been more or less completely replaced by San Francisco as the default font on MacOS and MacOS. apple ios apple, like google, opted for a taller, slimmer font with more room to breathe (helvetica neue at top, san francisco at bottom):
Not everyone likes these mobile fonts. They tend to be a bit curvier (both Google and Apple have said their fonts are “friendlier”) than their predecessors, which some designers say makes them harder to read. Design critics have specifically derided Roboto as a sky scam, and initial public reaction to San Francisco was decidedly negative (although the designers seemed to be on board with that at least). For my part, I welcome the invasion of airier, lighter types.
Whatever your opinion, you will feel these valley-designed OS fonts on some level. Unlike your choice to use Garamond on your resume, or the new coffee shop’s decision to have its registration in Bodoni, Google’s Arial selection has been inundating you every day, multiple times a day, for years. Now it’s time to bathe in roboto.