[grantheaslip]

I have no idea how much you know about type design, but I get the sense that the vast majority of people disparaging Roboto don't actually know shit about typography, and are just parroting what's been said by a handful of bloggers (many of whom also aren't particularly well versed). If a lot of these guys were asked to rate a bunch of unnamed fonts without the benefit of the internet to tell them what they think about them, they would probably make some terrible font snob faux pas.

I'm not an expert of typography, but to my eyes, it's a nice, clean, readable screen font. So is the Droid font family. It's not my absolute favourite, but there are more pressing issues in the world.

[karl_nerd]

Typographica featured a more educated slashing blogpost about Roboto: http://typographica.org/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-f...

[mtts]

This is actually a very educational article. To my layman's eyes, at least, which found Roboto a bit "off" or "wobbly" but couldn't figure out why that was exactly.

[Steveism]

John Gruber is extremely well versed in typography. He talks at great length about typefaces in his podcast and has worked for Bare Bones Software on BBEdit, a well known text editor. I would tend to trust his judgements on this matter.

[grantheaslip]

Gruber does seem to know a lot, thought I'm not sure that talking about type on your podcast or working for a company that develops a text editor exactly proves that. That said, he's clearly got a snarky agenda about Android, which makes me take anything he writes about it with a grain of salt.

What annoys me is not so much Gruber or other bloggers having an opinion, it's the followers who take what they write as fact. Roboto probably isn't a font for the ages, but it seems to do what it set out to do very well. The people who worked on it aren't idiots.

Android has its issues, but I'm sick of the little cabal of Apple writers who portray it and everything surrounding it as a trainwreck.

[skeletonjelly]

Gruber knows a lot according to Gruber. And his legions of fans.

[snotrockets]

It seems the word "only" was omitted from your comment.

[mda]

How about you trust your own eyes and feelings about this sort of things?

[Steveism]

All I did was mention that I agreed with Gruber not that he swayed me one way or the other. I think the fonts in ICS along with the rest of the Android interface is just awful. And obviously saying that in a thread which would appeal to an android user would go over like a lead ballon. Just thinking for myself.

[ajross]

I'll put up good money that you couldn't tell the difference between Helvetica Neue and Roboto in a blind test. Calling a near clone font "awful" is just dumb, sorry.

[Steveism]

I'll choose to ignore the insult. Actually, I'm a web designer and I could quite easily tell them apart. Couldn't you?

[rimantas]

Near clones have a big potential to be awful. Uncanny valley and all that.