Your probabaly here if you found this post on search because you may be puzzled as to why your Roboto font looks different on screen ?
Well thats because on Jan 14th it actually did change and was updated worldwide.
Here is a statement from Google.
Updated January 14 2015: Christian Robertson and the Material Design team unveiled the latest version of Roboto at Google I/O last year, and it is now available from Google Fonts. Existing websites using Roboto via Google Fonts will start using the latest version automatically. If you have installed the fonts on your computer, please download them again and re-install.
Do i like it ? Not really!
I noticed this change immediately in my Gmail as i have it customised to use Roboto as the font. You can find my Stylish Theme for Google Here if you want to transform for you Gmail interface into something wonderful.
Roboto used to look like this
(sorry for the lame screenshot, its the only one i had of my gmail of how it used to look like)
and now looks like this
What i noticed is different about the new Roboto font
When you take a look at both side by side or if you keep switching between the screenshots above, is that the old roboto was more narrow which seemed normal back then but compared to the new Roboto it seems as though it used to be condensed and now is more of a extended version.
It also looks more ‘chunky’ or ‘squashed’ compared to the old one.
Above you can see a blown up version of the old and new the new being up the top and the old being on the bottom, i could not find a generator that did not make the old font look bold, but you can see get the idea of the changes, especially around the R and the E. From what i see the R used to have a bit of a Serif look to it and top part of the ‘e’ used to be a bit higher.
Here is the same text above but not blown up. They say that Roboto used to be a Serif font but i don’t feel that anymore, its more of a Sans Serif now.
Maybe i need some time to to get used to it? But i feel that i still wished i had the chance to use the old version, not to mention don’t you just love how Google made this change and probably affected hundreds of thousands of websites across the world without warning. LOL
