San Francisco (sans-serif typeface) San Francisco (sans-serif typeface) San Francisco is a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface made by Apple Inc. It was first released to developers on November 18, 2014. It is the first new typeface designed at Apple in nearly 20 years and has been inspired by Helvetica and FF DIN. The San Francisco typeface has four variants: "SF" (or "SF UI") for macOS, iOS, and tvOS; "SF Compact" for watchOS; "SF Mono" (based on SF Compact) for the Xcode application; and "SF Serif" for Apple Books. The main difference is that the sides of letters with round shapes, such as "o", "e", and
Helvetica Nimbus Sans. This is an extremely large font family with optical sizes spaced for different sizes of text and other variants such as stencil styles. Florian Hardwig has described its display-oriented styles, with tight spacing, as more reminiscent of Helvetica as used in the 1970s from cold type than any official Helvetica digitisation. Monotype's Arial, created for IBM and also used by Microsoft, is indistinguishable by most non-specialists. Matthew Carter, who was a consultant for IBM during its design process, describes it as "a Helvetica clone, based ostensibly on their Grots 215 and 216" (Monotype's old 1920s sans-serif family, popular