A case for the usage of system fonts
Piggybacking on big companies’ design & research.

I am a big supporter of simplicity, and sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed by the choices you have to foresee when starting a new project, or the ramifications in work and costs based on some aesthetic decisions. This is why I try to use the least possible amount of tools in every project I do.
Sometimes I get approached by people who are just starting to build their business and branding, and I believe that (specially when on a tight budget) there are some ways in which it is perfectly fine, even encouraged, to just cut corners on their design choices, piggyback on bigger currents and previous research, and finding an easy and consistent up-to-date look made by someone else.
Hence why today I am making a case about the usage of system fonts.
Tech companies invest millions a year in the creation of tools, graphic user interfaces (GUI’s), processes, and put a lot of time and effort in the development of a common visual language. While a lot of people put efforts into making their own individual experiences and aesthetics, you can find great tools out there designed for the specific purpose on saving you time, costs, and the effort of re-inventing the weel, specially when designing for something to be used within another company’s product and operative systems (like Google’s Material UI, Windows or the MacOS environment) in a world-wide unequal access to resources like internet speed.
If you have a tight budget/schedule why would you have to research, choose, upload, code, refactor, adjust, and give maintenance to a whole bunch of font files, their dependencies and rendering when you could just write this?:
font-family: -apple-system, "San Francisco", BlinkMacSystemFont, “Segoe UI”, Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, “Apple Color Emoji”, “Segoe UI Emoji”, “Segoe UI Symbol”;And boom! you have something lovely and compatible with 95%+ of the computing and handheld terminals’ market share? While obviously this requires some nuance and respect to artistic choices, you can look at bigger, more complex cases of the implementation and will realise the effort and costs it will save you in the future is worth it.
Don’t be ashamed of choosing to go for the easier path. It is short for a reason. Times New Roman lasts forever.
Credits
Photo by Tanja Heffner on Unsplash. “Designed by Apple in California” is Apple’s signature emblem, and I used the San Francisco font.

