Google has a new version of its Roboto font, and it is bringing serifs again: the aptly named Roboto Serif, designed in collaboration with Greg Gazdowicz of an industrial kind to create an extra readable serif associated with its Roboto Sans typeface.
The brand new font isn’t just the old Roboto letters with some serifs slapped on, even though rather a substitute, each letter was redrawn from scratch to create a font that “thinks about Roboto, but is a new and original design,” in step with Google UX supervisor Rob Giampietro. The new font still uses the same vertical proportions of Roboto Sans, making it possible to mix the serif and sans-serif versions in a single layout.
It probably also helps that chunkier, retro-styled serif typefaces are coming back in style in a big way after years of minimalist sans-serif designs dominating, as stated using Vox. Serif fonts are also considered to be simpler to read, way to the more distinct letter shapes, something that Google’s new font expands on via virtue of being a variable font that could mechanically change and optimize the letterforms for specific size displays.
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Google has been using its Roboto font in one form or any other for over a decade; it was first introduced alongside Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) as the default font for the enterprise’s cell OS. Roboto has visible plenty of editions over the years, but it’s slowly steadily being superseded as the enterprise’s primary font by Product Sans (and its Google Sans variants, also referred to as the “Pixel” font) across its various products.
For now, Roboto Serif is simply being added to Google Fonts as some other alternative for the organization’s Roboto family of open-supply fonts__ but, Google might one day use the new, pleasant-looking font in its marketing, too.