The user interface (UI) is one of the most important pieces of software real estate on your mobile phone. UIs serve as a “canvas” to brand, personalize, or engage each individual user. However, one of the more vital components of a UI might raise your eyebrow, simply because you haven’t given it much thought—the fonts. The humble typeface is often forgotten as a critical communication tool.

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Before the introduction of feature-rich smart phones, mobile developers relied on bitmap fonts in a couple of sizes for UI design and application development. But today’s mobile phones offer much more sophisticated features in many models, as well as large displays and high-resolution screens.

With mobile devices expected to perform like PCs in many cases, it’s more important for text to display clearly and consistently. Multiple font styles and rich, typographic capabilities allow developers to design UIs and applications that are easy to read, fun to look at, simple to navigate, and true to a brand’s expected appearance (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Scalable fonts enable a consistent, typographic look and feel. You can develop and design your offering with type that complements your brand’s appearance in other media, from the Web to print. (image used with permission from courtesy of Ninja Mobile)

Scalable fonts and font technologies make it possible for OEMs and mobile developers and designers to impart typographic continuity across a variety of screen resolutions, device designs, and applications regardless of the languages required. Because of their scalable nature, scalable fonts and font technologies are smarter to implement than fixed-in-size bitmap fonts to support text across a wide spectrum of mobile phones.