Elizabeth Woyke at Forbes discusses Droid, the font developed by Ascender for Google's phone OS.

The sweet spot--and the final look for Droid--fell somewhere in the middle. Matteson's first design was "bouncy": a look in line with the Google logo's angled lowercase "e." Google passed on the design because it was "a little too mannered," Matteson says. "There was a fine line between wanting the font to have character but not cause too much commotion."

Another proposal erred on the side of "techno" with squared-off edges reminiscent of early computer typefaces. That too was rejected, along with several others, in favor of a more neutral design that Matteson describes as "upright with open forms, but not so neutral as a design like, say, Helvetica."

As Gizmodo points out, it's nice that the font provides some coherence to the Android's design, because the rest of the OS suffers from a jarring inconsistency it describes as a "scrambled UI" and "a mash-up between the Nintendo DS and a '90s Windows desktop manager."

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