Apple’s San Francisco font: adding double-decker g’s and humanist a’s

The letters "gaga" using both original and alternate a's and g's in Apple's San Francisco font.

Apple’s new San Francisco font is going to be a vast improvement on Helvetica as a system font in iOS 9 and OS X 10.11. But it features a double-story a without a double-decker, looptail, or eyeglass g. It’s always seemed right to me for a font to have either both, or neither, of these special letters.

Turns out the font world disagrees with my intuition. Futura is the only one of my favorite fonts with a single-story a, and while Gill Sans, Trebuchet, Times, Palatino, Optima and American Typewriter all have both double-story as and double-decker gs (left side), Helvetica, Arial, Courier, Verdana, and Lucida Grande (right side) all have mixed double-story as with simple humanist gs.

The letters a and g in various popular fonts, showing the range of variation.

However, I still wanted to see a more Futura-like and a more Gill-Sans-like San Francisco, and although the font is only available at the moment to Apple developers, I was able to get a copy, and I’ve made alternate glyphs.

Here’s the original:

The word "hamburgefons" in Apple's San Francisco font.

And here it is with a simple humanist a:

The word "hamburgefons" in Apple's San Francisco font, with an alternate humanist a.

And here it is again with a double-decker g:

The word "hamburgefons" in Apple's San Francisco font, with an alternate double-decker g.

And just for fun, here are SVG versions of my alternate a and alternate g, and an animated version over on tumblr.

Update: I hereby release it all into the public domain. Apple, if you’re listening, feel free to incorporate one or the other of these into San Francisco.