Changing UILabel font

Changing UILabel font

Say I have three UILabels.
I create a font and assign that font to all three labels.
Now I edit this font's type/size etc and expect the fonts of those labels
to change too, which does not happen. I basically need to apply a single
font to multiple labels and I know this can be done with an outlet
collection but i'd just like some help in understanding the flaw in my
logic here so here's my code...
self.labelFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"System" size:12];
self.label1.font = self.labelFont;
self.label2.font = self.labelFont;
self.label3.font = self.labelFont;
self.labelFont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"Courier" size:30];
Thank