Two corrections for esteemed colleague John Gruber:
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I don’t think it’s cricket to praise Pixar for devoting its homepage to a remembrance of Steve Jobs (“Perfect”) when they did so using a picture of text with no text alternative. In other words, the people with enough skills of persuasion to make you think one robot is a boy while another is a girl handle the Web like a tables-and-frames “designer” circa 1999.
Pixar’s source code:
<center>
<a href="index_normal.html"><img src="images/black_v2.jpg" alt="" width="1090" height="1006" border="0"></a>
</center>The
CENTER“tag” is a nice touch.I view this as a case of mild hypocrisy because Gruber had noted that Amazon finally began publishing open letters from Jeff Bezos as HTML, not pictures of text.
Assuming you actually can, look at the text that Pixar published, then try to Google it. You can’t. Why? Google is a blind user. And not the only one, either. (Others had to retype it just to make it usable.)
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Roboto is not really a “clone” or “ripoff” of Helvetica, as the concept of “clone” has been more or less conclusively debunked by Paul Shaw’s correspondents. Now, the issue of whether or not Microsoft’s UI font, Segoe, is also a clone comes up here. (Bookmarks.)
The underlying question in the Arial and Segoe cases is: Why didn’t Microsoft just license and use the real thing? The question with Roboto is: Why is the typeface so internally inconsistent? (However, I would point out a resemblance to Berthold Imago, a respected but rarely-seen typeface.)