In the digital age, the printing press has largely gone the way of Dodo, but we still treat the design of typefaces as being as permanent as if it was made up of centuries-old metal blocks. You just don’t ‘tweak’ a typeface… do you?

Google thinks you do. Today, Google announced an overhaul to Roboto, the Android system font first unveiled two years ago. More than just a series of optimizations to ready Android for an entire new wave of devices, Roboto 2.0 aims to prove that typefaces don’t need to be written in stone anymore.

Roboto’s designer, Christian Robertson, has always argued that the font is a work-in-progress. “The old model for releasing metal typefaces doesn’t make sense for an operating system that is constantly improving,” Robertson says.





In other words, as Android evolves, so should Roboto. Every time Android supports a new type of device–which now includes phones,tablets, computers, TVs, and watches–or changes it’s design philosophy, Roboto should be re-evaluated and tweaked to make sure it’s still doing what typography is supposed to do: be the skeleton of interface design.

“Compare Android Wear to Android TV,” says Matias Duarte, Google’s Director of Android Experience. “On a 2-inch smartwatch, text will have to be squeezed into a small, narrow column, which gives it a different rhythm than seeing the same text on a wide 50-inch television screen.” But Roboto has to work well on both, as well as hundreds of other contexts.

Rhythm is a hard thing to quantify. If your typeface looks too scrunched together in some places than in others, for example, you can’t just average out the distance between characters and call it a day, because our eyes interpret spaces differently: a capital ‘F”, for example, might look farther apart next to a lower case ‘e’ than if it were next to an ‘a’, even if the distance between them was exactly the same.

Roboto should be re-evaluated and tweaked to make sure it’s still doing what typography is supposed to do: be the skeleton of interface design.

Hence the need for an evolving typeface that is just as responsive to criticism as it is to user testing. “That’s the way we plan to keep Roboto robust over time,” says Robertson. “Most people can’t really articulate their reaction to a typeface. The most important thing is to get it in front of people and see how they interact with it.”