Originally designed in 2008 for easy reading, the Slate font is now realizing its potential. BlackBerry's new BlackBerry 10 interface, hardware and advertisements are all using Slate, thanks to its focus on readability. Slate was crafted by Nova Scotia-based type designer Rod McDonald.

McDonald designed Slate after working on a legibility study with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind; his aim was to create a typeface that would work as well on screen as it did in print. "I wasn't sure if that was feasible. Screens were pretty crude back then," McDonald said. "Until you see it on a device like this, you really don't know if you've got it right or not. Seeing what BlackBerry has done, I'm going, 'omigod!' It's much better onscreen than I thought it would be," he said.


For the new phones and OS, BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion) worked with Steve Matteson, creative type director at Massachusetts-based Monotype Imaging, to expand Slate's character set for use in multiple languages.

"In order for type to read really well on a screen, you don't want the pixels to glob up and form dark spots. The white space inside Slate's characters is very generous," Matteson said. Its relatively larger lower case also made it ideal for mobile devices. "The lower case is where we do most of our reading," he said.

All told, upwards of 9,000 characters were added to the sans serif font's family, in regular, light and italic. "There aren't that many typefaces that cover that many scripts and writing systems," Matteson said. "It did require a pretty big team effort." The Latin-based font's capabilities were broadened for languages using Cyrillic and Greek alphabetic writing systems, as well as Vietnamese and phonetic characters.


Different languages presented different challenges. "With a language like Russian for example, where there is many up-and-down straight stems, you get this picket-fence look that can be hard to read," Matteson said. He added that perhaps the most difficult were languages such as Swahili, because their long history as spoken languages and shorter history as written scripts can result in awkward, less harmonious aesthetics.

"Slate was the perfect choice as it could serve not only the needs of the BlackBerry 10 onscreen's experience, but also extend to our physical keyboard keycaps, our advertising and internal communications," reads a statement from Don Lindsay, BlackBerry vice president of user experience design. Previously, the company used a variety of fonts and hadn't settled on a corporate-wide foundation, Matteson said.