How to change the system font?

Closurdo's recommendation of https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite to restore Lucinda Grande worked fine for me too.

If you go to System Preferences > Display and change the resolution from "Best for Display" to a lower resolution (ie fewer pixels in width and height (eg) "1600 x 900"), you will lose all the resolution and clarity you paid for and want, but the desktop font will appear larger. A crummy solution, I know, . . . but more effective (imho) that sending feedback to Apple.

Incorrect

Pixels remain the same irrelevant of resolution setting.... It uses Scaling...

If it was the way you explain the "best for retina resolution" would in fact be 2880X1800

Best for retina may have some advantages... More pixels is not one of them.

Apple offers five scaled settings including the default pixel doubled option: 1024 x 640, 1280 x 800, 1440 x 900, 1680 x 1050 and 1920 x 1200. Selecting any of these options gives you the effective desktop resolution of the setting, but Apple actually renders the screen at a higher resolution and scales it to fit the 2880 x 1800 panel. As a result of the upscaled rendering, there can be a performance and quality impact. It's also worth noting there's no default option for 2880 x 1800, which is understandable given just how tiny text would be at that resolution.

Forgive me: Scaling. The point is that this can effectively increase the real readable size of the desktop font. Correct?

Yes 🙂 bigger fonts/menus etc... are obviously easier to read

Well said...

Just saying he will not have less pixels, or be at any disadvantage with regards to not getting the most out of his retina display.

I didn't say it's easier to read bigger fonts. I said that if you change what Apple calls resolution (see System Preferences > Display) you can get a larger font. You said that was incorrect, when what you meant was that my remark about clarity was incorrect. Big difference, since the topic is font size.

Oh stop being childish.

We all know you can increase display resolution for larger text/visibility... Yes that part is correct...

The rest of the statement was not... I was obviously referring to the part that was wrong...

If you really want to get childish... I can say a half true statement is still not correct and therefore can be termed Incorrect...

antiyosemite wrote:

I have visual impairment and spent ages on phone with Apple Support only to be told the Yosemite font can't be changed and was chosen for consistency across Apple products.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

I happen to like Helvetica Neue, but it is a poor choice for use as a screen font at small sizes. If you were using it at small sizes in a document for print, you would adjust letter spacing appropriately, and the printed result would not be fuzzy (assuming a competent printing job). Way too much design that involves text these days is being done by "designers" who know little to nothing about type, typography, and legibility. The proliferation of dark or black UIs in applications is an unfortunate manifestation of this trend. The grey-on-grey trend is another. Legibility and elegance are not mutually exclusive, but apparently a lot of designers seem to think that they are.

So Apple makes a dumb move with iOS, and rather than fix it, they perpetrate it in the Mac OS. It's more and more painfully obvious that Tim Cook does not have the aesthetic expertise to rein in the people making these questionable choices. Steve Jobs did.

I was concerned that your pronouncement of "Incorrect" would steer people away from the one solution to the tiny fonts I have seen in this discussion.

For me too. Nice!

The new UI in Yosemite is a usability disaster for professional use in my opinion. I mean using grey on grey..... low contrast. Poor font selection. Tiny fussy icons. Blurring. Inappropriate use of transparency. All of this really makes me want to downgrade. I have sent my feedback to Apple but I'm realistic about how likely they are to change this. It reminds me of Sun Solaris from twenty plus years ago. And not in a good way.

I think some of the legibility problems can be helped at least somewhat by proper monitor calibration. The grey-on-grey stuff is still a bad idea, but it is readable on my screens. I use a ColorMunki Display device. Yosemite is OK on my calibrated NEC.

It also made a big difference to two MacBook Pros with high-res screens (not Retina). Both looked washed out and skewed toward blue out of the box. Calibration improved them greatly.

I have "downgraded" to Mavericks after a couple of days seriously struggling with the Yosemite UI. I tried increased contrast, reducing transparency, dark mode, and scaling. Nothing worked. I was getting eye strain and headaches after just a few minutes. My eyesight isn't bad, but I'm a little bit short sighted (+1) and have a bit of an astigmatism. I already have a special set of glasses for computer work to reduce eye strain, as I sit for hours behind a screen for work. Downgrade to Mavericks was successful. It really wasn't my imagination. Whereas with Yosemite I struggled to read the menu bar (upper left) at 12 inches distance, I can read the same text easily at 48 inches distance from the screen or more on my late 2013 non-retina 27 inch iMac .Safari pages are also much much clearer. There's definitely something seriously wrong with the usability of Yosemite. This isn't just a case of culture shock or not liking the new UI. I also use Windows 7 (multiple themes), Ubuntu Linux 10.04, IOS 8 ... and a bunch of historical OSes without any problems. It's a real shame as I really wanted to use the airdrop integration between IOS and OS X.

Good discussion of of Helvetica Neue's shortcomings in UIs: https://cloudfusion.co.za/****-no-helvetica-the-yosemite-backlash/

The critique that remains after 6 months with Yosemite are the choice of Neue Helvetica, which I remedied using my system font customization, and, more importantly, that the contrast is very low in some places, like inactive windows. When you use palettes or multiple windows in one app, the palettes are styled like inactive windows, but of course they are used for important tasks, and the low contrast, grey in grey, makes it very hard to find what you are looking for. Things like that slow me down in my work, and I find it tiring.

Right? This sure seems like discrimination to me. Also, many people over 40 may not have 20/20 vision and would likely struggle with Yosemite. This is unacceptable.