OUGD504 Summer Brief - Type in Context: Typography in Interface Design

I forgot to take my photos in Barcelona and Wales, so ended up doing them in Edinburgh, which turned out quite interesting in its own right. Though it being a capital city meant a lot of the type there was from mainstream brands and corporations, a lot of it was also from establishments and systems only existing there, such as the Fringe. 

It's also the location of a large Tesla store, and that's where I had an epiphany. 

My ultimate design focus is on practical interface design, particularly regarding consumer technology and future modes of transport. I managed to shoehorn a bit of UI design in last year, but never really had a chance to focus on it exclusively as a project, and so I've now decided to focus on type in interfaces for this brief, Type in Context. 

The screenshots above are from the first conceptual Mac interface, the second is from the early 2000s, and the third is from the most recent release, macOS Sierra. What's interesting is that although the interface itself has changed somewhat - colourful icons, beautiful wallpapers and translucency have all been introduced - the actual user experience has remained almost entirely unchanged. And type remains at the epicentre of that experience.

 

Windows 8 and the Metro UI was an attempt by Microsoft to shift the balance from typography to iconography. Whilst their attempt was courageous in many respects, almost all of their symbols were paired with a type label. This is similar in the original Xbox One and Windows 10 interfaces seen below. 

And even though icons were starting to creep in over type, there was always still a back-up list of apps written below. Almost no widely used digital interface (if any at all) is purely symbol based. With Windows 10 there is some awkward hybrid between type and icon, an attempt to merge the best of 8 and 7. Its success as an experience is debatable but admirable.. 

Typography in interfaces is now being put to the test. Wearables demand information in very small spaces, cars demand information relayed very quickly and efficiently, and VR/AR

demands information to work in a 3D environment. 

Apple's watchOS interface, or at least the home screen, is entirely icon-based. It's proof that a user can interact, at least partly, with an item without needing typography in any way. It's also true that this almost always requires years of adaptability and user learning. Arguably the only reason these icons work is because they've been present in iOS for many years before, slowly indoctrinating the user to their purpose. 

Many in-house vehicles interfaces are heavily based on type, but Apple's CarPlay repeats the iOS method of large icons/small text. The user in most cases interacts with the symbol alone, without reading the text. It's only there to serve as a backup for new users or new icons.