Typography - Generic #1

Why system fonts?

Each OS comes with a specific typeface. By telling our components “use the system’s default typeface, whatever that is,” we’re giving our apps fewer things to have to look for, so they load faster. This is important in big apps, where you need every little bit of performance help you can get. This of course, means that it might appear a little different on each OS, but contextually to that user on that OS, it will not seem out of place at all.

System fonts also offer many benefits that many web fonts don’t. They are broadly tested and have many styles and variations to support internationalization, code, tabular data, data viz, etc... As a new design system, we need to be pragmatic, and system fonts seem to cover our present and potential future use cases.