All true, except it’s not really a Whitney clone. It’s Source Sans very lightly adjusted to match Whitney’s metrics. It looks and feels exactly like Source Sans to me. It’s a little strange to present it as a prestigious project with a minisite like this.
Source Sans is nice and easy to read, but so overused it’s rarely a good starting point for a visual identity.
It's more about overall look and feel, which in large part comes from the glyph proportions (the x-height), spacing and weights - https://i.imgur.com/mygqn3H.png
Glyph proportions between Whitney and Nebula are almost identical. As are their weights. Source Sans is substantially heavier and more dense looking.
While individual glyphs may be closer between Nebula and Source Sans, but the overall feel of Nebula is that of Whitney.
This is not a clone. They just matched the *outer dimensions* of Whitney, so that they could swap out their old font and not have to remake all their typography.
Except for the ”H”, none of them are particularly similar to Whitney. It would have been more interesting to compare the glyphs to Source Sans. Its ”g” is basically identical to this one.
EDIT: I created such a comparison. See neighboring subthread.
I'd say this is Source Sans. I'm sorry to trivialise Nebula's effort, but this seems much ado about nothing—they warped Source Sans' glyphs to be metrically compatible with Whitney, renamed the result 'Nebula Sans', got a developer and videographer to produce a whole website and mini-documentary on the matter and called it a day.
That's what the parent commenter means by 'They just matched the outer dimensions of Whitney'.
In other words, metrically compatible. To the untrained eye, metrically compatible typefaces all look the same, because they're meant to be swapped between each other. In my view Whitney and Source Sans couldn't be more different. The stroke cuts in Whitney are angled, they're perpendicular in Source Sans. The lowercase 'b', 'e', and 'g' are very different in both fonts.
They forgot to add "...in the US". Some jurisdictions have more protection [1]. In practice though, it works as it always does: do what you want, you probably won't get sued, but if you do, it totally sucks - even if you do have the law on your side.
Wonderful video, thank you! The one on the linked Nebula page is also great.
It’s funny - I subscribe to Nebula (a “boutique” video platform) and subconsciously have felt these things that are talked about in both videos, but I needed someone to point them out to me for me to consciously notice.
I can't believe I am learning of tabular options for fonts from this post... I have always just used a different monospace font for the numbers, didn't realize it was an option that some fonts supported.
After the Handgloves specimen, the next part of the page is black with tiny writing. My awful eyesight and mobile scrolling priors caused my brain to assume I had reached the bottom of the page and stop scrolling.
Thanks for pointing out, indirectly, that there’s a lot more content than I had assumed!
Ok, it is a font alright. To me, it looks exactly as all the other fonts I have on my OS already, but I guess that's just how it is if you are not in the font bubble.
On the screen, in small print, you may not notice the difference between this and, say, Franklin Gothic. But in print the difference is more noticeable, even if not immediately visible without taking a closer look. If you encounter a booklet purported to be form Bank of America set in this typeface instead of Franklin Gothic, it will look very similar but you'll feel that something is slightly off.
Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer who gave a talk called (something to the effect of) “why do we need so many typefaces”. At one point, Erik simply shows a slide with “this is why”, in what is clearly the Marlboro font.
Fonts have different metrics which affect recognisability, legibility, and understanding. There are fonts which evoke a feeling (think heavy metal band), others which are practical (exaggerated letter forms to help dyslexia), and many many many bad fonts too, such as ones with bad kerning which make words like “therapists” read “the rapists” or “morn” read “mom”.
The fonts you have on your computer are all different and have their own strengths and weaknesses which affect you and your perception of what you read, even if you’re unaware of it.
Subdued, muted and neutral seems to be very much “in” at the moment. On one hand it definitely gives us highly readable, usable interfaces and text. But I do miss the chaos and vibrance of the early web. Modern web is starting to look really washed out.
The moment you let the low contrast gremlins out of the cage they start their mischief!
Flat design is the more sucky partner to neutral palettes in current design trends, IMO. I want color too but it's not a clear step towards usability. I think the return of gentle skeumorphism would be a good step for general usability.
All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans.
Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop.
At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs.
I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.
Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.
The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.
I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.
Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.
Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.
Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.
I also spent some time evaluating a lot of open fonts and I agree that most of them have flaws, especially when it comes to kerning. The exceptions are fonts that have been developed for and are used by very large organizations, such as Public Sans (US government), IBM Plex Sans, Source Sans (Abobe), etc. Then the quality is equivalent (or even better) than what you get from proprietary fonts.
Every time I thought about buying a font, I've been put off by the terms.
A few tens of euro for desktop use? Sure. But when that font's supposed to be part of an organisation's identity, I'll need it for web use as well, which can be 10x as expensive. And when I want to e.g. generate invoices, that's even more money again, yearly.
I only work with small clients on things like this, but I've never had anyone willing to pay the money. Free fonts might not be as good, but that's not relevant for me, because paid fonts just aren't an option.
Oh, non-Latin type faces are an entirely different ball-game, don't even get me started. I have massive respect for CJK type designers; there are thousands of glyphs! Designing a good new typeface must take years, if not decades.
This is weird to say, but it never occurred to me previously that an ISO-8859-1 font perfectly consistent with all variants of itself + CJK(by switching variants or whatever) would be massively useful. CJK speakers usually switch and mix fonts as needed to build a content than trying to pick single font for everything, and vast majority of people just don't understand multiple languages, so there are little driving forces towards a single universal font solution.
But a universal font makes sense. It's almost odd that this is so rarely said out loud.
I agree and I'd like to know what's your take on the Fira font family? I've configured my desktop and browser to use this font and now I can't go back. Subjectively I kind of developed a little crush on that font and I'm interested if it also has technical merit or if I'm just making things up in my mind.
Fira was designed by world-class type designers, and it’s only free thanks to the funding by Mozilla and Here, so yes, definitely a different category.
I do like Fira, and definitely one of the few exceptions. Although I wish the lowercase 'y' were a bit less busy, with the left stroke completely joining into the right descender rather than how it is now, with a little bit sticking out. Additionally I must point out that Fira itself is a derivative (I'd say 'clone') of FF Meta, which was originally commissioned by Deutsche Bundespost.
Another commenter pointed out IBM Plex which I also like, but I have a bit of an issue with the lowercase Roman 'a' glyph, where the bottom curve into the vertical is a tad bit too thin for my liking.
As a rule of thumb, if a company has paid a foundry a handsome sum of money for its corporate branding and wants to use the resultant typeface everywhere, the result is usually quite decent, and has what I call 'character without being excessively fancy'.
One of the things that made me interested in fonts was many years ago when I looked up the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and ever since I did that I react every time I see Arial used in print or signage because some of the letters are really awful in comparison. The most obvious difference is probably the capital R which to me looks terrible in Arial.
It's great to see more freely available fonts. But the site shows examples of a font in an elephant size; this seems to be the font for the main text so it would be nice to see a paragraph in a small size (like 16px, 14px, 12px, 10px). Out of curiosity I did it using Developer Tools in a browser - seems legible.
You're presumably referring to variable fonts, aka multiple master fonts/MMF.
Making a multiple master font is massively more work than discrete variations. The complete total number of MM fonts in existence is a 2- or 3-digit number, out of at least tens of thousands of fonts, if not millions.
Demanding or implying that fonts should be MM in 2025 is just plain out of touch with reality.
Why do the increasing weights also look larger? Also, since they've shown it white on black a few times, aren't fonts supposed to have different weights for black on white vs white on black to compensate for different perceived weight?
Science is not something to be believed in, it is a methodology that involves making and testing theories etc. People argue about it is and how it works and should work (philosophy of science is a significant field in itself) and it is not well defined, but what it is NOT is a body of facts.
Particular scientific theories may be believed in (or not believed in).
That said their samples sentences also include things such as "We’re assembling a crew for a heist" so maybe not take these things too seriously?
Some of the examples are references from the shows on Nebula. That one is likely from HAI Crime Spree. "Enter the Snack Zone" is from Jet Lag: The Game.
Little PSA:
a) This is a clone of Whitney, an incredibly beautiful and unique typeface from 2004
b) Whitney was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones
c) He was an equal co-founder of the H&fJ foundry
d) He designed the vast majority of their most famous fonts, including Gotham, Archer and Armada
e) Somehow, for years, Hoefler never did the paperwork to confirm FJ's co-ownership
f) When pressed, he instead kicked FJ out, kept all the fonts and renamed the shop "Hoefler"
Hoefler is an asshole. A free clone of Whitney is the least of what he deserves.
All true, except it’s not really a Whitney clone. It’s Source Sans very lightly adjusted to match Whitney’s metrics. It looks and feels exactly like Source Sans to me. It’s a little strange to present it as a prestigious project with a minisite like this.
Source Sans is nice and easy to read, but so overused it’s rarely a good starting point for a visual identity.
https://nebulasans.com/img/handgloves.png
I saw that. Here's a quick similar comparison between Nebula Sans and Source Sans I just whipped up: https://imgur.com/JPwgYkj
It's more about overall look and feel, which in large part comes from the glyph proportions (the x-height), spacing and weights - https://i.imgur.com/mygqn3H.png
Glyph proportions between Whitney and Nebula are almost identical. As are their weights. Source Sans is substantially heavier and more dense looking.
While individual glyphs may be closer between Nebula and Source Sans, but the overall feel of Nebula is that of Whitney.
Failed rebuttal of tobr's clearly true statement. Your own png refutes your position.
So, it's worse than Source Sans because it removed the differentiation between a lowercase L and an uppercase i.
I'd rather use Source Sans then.
Tangentially, there are two versions of Source Sans worth considering afaik:
* the latest OTF
* the Source Sans 2.020 TTF, which is the last version (at least, the last version released in the GitHub repository[0]) that has manual hinting
[0]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans/releases
The two typefaces couldn't look more different. Look at the stroke cuts on the ascenders of the 'd', 'l', the stroke cuts on the 'a', 'e', and 's'.
Is there some online tool for comparing fonts that way?
I’m wondering why they’ve added the slanted top on ‘t’, but not the other letters: https://nebula.tv/videos/nebula-sans?t=363
They're very upfront about it on the page:
> The majority of the adjustments we made were to adapt the metrics of Source Sans to better match those of Whitney SSm
While I’d truly love an open source Whitney alternative (and have looked for years for one), this isn’t it.
Nebula has flat terminals, Whitney has angled terminals.
(There’s a lot of other differences but that one effects most letter shapes).
This is not a clone. They just matched the *outer dimensions* of Whitney, so that they could swap out their old font and not have to remake all their typography.
They have a comparison at the bottom of the page. Some letters are dead ringers, some, like "g", differ significantly.
Except for the ”H”, none of them are particularly similar to Whitney. It would have been more interesting to compare the glyphs to Source Sans. Its ”g” is basically identical to this one.
EDIT: I created such a comparison. See neighboring subthread.
I'd say this is Source Sans. I'm sorry to trivialise Nebula's effort, but this seems much ado about nothing—they warped Source Sans' glyphs to be metrically compatible with Whitney, renamed the result 'Nebula Sans', got a developer and videographer to produce a whole website and mini-documentary on the matter and called it a day.
Excuse me?
Reminds me of that Bill Gates quote, "I get the laziest programmer to do the hardest job because he'll find an easy way to do it."
Not 1:1, but it has an extremely similar look and feel. In how glyphs are cut and the rhytm of the typeface.
Scroll down to "Comparison of Nebula Sans versus Whitney SSm" part of the linked page.
I was literally going to complain here that it was a Whitney clone before seeing them mention it on the page.
> the rhytm of the typeface
That's what the parent commenter means by 'They just matched the outer dimensions of Whitney'.
In other words, metrically compatible. To the untrained eye, metrically compatible typefaces all look the same, because they're meant to be swapped between each other. In my view Whitney and Source Sans couldn't be more different. The stroke cuts in Whitney are angled, they're perpendicular in Source Sans. The lowercase 'b', 'e', and 'g' are very different in both fonts.
It looks like every "designer's font" introduced since the designers went insane over the iPhone.
Anyway, I'd like sans serif fonts more if they were readable, including being able to distinguish Weird Al from Weird AI.
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I can't recommend this video enough about how digitizing fonts work and how copyright works for fonts. It's short (5 mins) but is so wonderful.
https://youtu.be/J06tluN7rtE
They forgot to add "...in the US". Some jurisdictions have more protection [1]. In practice though, it works as it always does: do what you want, you probably won't get sued, but if you do, it totally sucks - even if you do have the law on your side.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
Wonderful video, thank you! The one on the linked Nebula page is also great.
It’s funny - I subscribe to Nebula (a “boutique” video platform) and subconsciously have felt these things that are talked about in both videos, but I needed someone to point them out to me for me to consciously notice.
I can't believe I am learning of tabular options for fonts from this post... I have always just used a different monospace font for the numbers, didn't realize it was an option that some fonts supported.
{font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums}
Look for opentype features in https://practicaltypography.com/. There is more fun stuff, right next to tabular numbers.
And if you want more, there is also https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844....
You’re not the only one to be fair. I had to point this out to GitHub just last November: https://github.com/primer/css/pull/2680
Yeah it makes so much sense it's a feature I just feel like I have never seen it before.
The CSS hooks in to OpenType font functionality, and there’s a load of other features that can be built in. Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features
Not only that, some fonts have a vast number of tweaks available: https://rsms.me/inter/#features
Inter is a great suggestion to try out modern font features. The lab is really useful: https://rsms.me/inter/lab/
After the Handgloves specimen, the next part of the page is black with tiny writing. My awful eyesight and mobile scrolling priors caused my brain to assume I had reached the bottom of the page and stop scrolling.
Thanks for pointing out, indirectly, that there’s a lot more content than I had assumed!
Tabular numerics are great! Of course not all fonts implement them.
If only Apple could figure this out and use it for the iOS clock app.
This is neat, thanks.
Reminds me of how fira code (my favourite font for code) can be adjusted to match the preferences.
Ok, it is a font alright. To me, it looks exactly as all the other fonts I have on my OS already, but I guess that's just how it is if you are not in the font bubble.
I am not in *the font bubble*, but can immediately recognise, say, the Guardian by its typography alone.
It can absolutely be a part of a texts character and reducing this entire field to a *bubble* is a feeble attempt at spinning ignorance as a virtue.
On the screen, in small print, you may not notice the difference between this and, say, Franklin Gothic. But in print the difference is more noticeable, even if not immediately visible without taking a closer look. If you encounter a booklet purported to be form Bank of America set in this typeface instead of Franklin Gothic, it will look very similar but you'll feel that something is slightly off.
Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer who gave a talk called (something to the effect of) “why do we need so many typefaces”. At one point, Erik simply shows a slide with “this is why”, in what is clearly the Marlboro font.
Fonts have different metrics which affect recognisability, legibility, and understanding. There are fonts which evoke a feeling (think heavy metal band), others which are practical (exaggerated letter forms to help dyslexia), and many many many bad fonts too, such as ones with bad kerning which make words like “therapists” read “the rapists” or “morn” read “mom”.
The fonts you have on your computer are all different and have their own strengths and weaknesses which affect you and your perception of what you read, even if you’re unaware of it.
You've given examples of fonts for branding. Those are not everyday use fonts. We don't program with heavy metal band logos.
The fonts we actually use are interchangeable, and people outside the font bubble won't even notice the differences.
I'm not into fonts at all either, but this looks like more crispier and more readable that I anything saw before. I don't know exactly why.
So this is a free Whitney with some tweaks?
> Source Sans was the perfect foundation for Nebula Sans because it shares many primary characteristics with Whitney SSm, our previous brand typeface
One differing characteristic presumably being requiring payment to Hoefler & Co.
It looks more like a derivative then a copy/clone.
Their video explains it way further and is worth a watch.suprisingly captivating. (You can select no and view it without paying)
https://nebula.tv/videos/nebula-sans?ref=nebulasans
It's also worth watching this video if you are interested in how this works.
https://youtu.be/J06tluN7rtE
It's a super interesting video on the history of fonts and how digitizing it works.
Actually good comparison in the video: https://i.imgur.com/jSTJixC.png
Sadly to me Wittney feels clean yet coherent, Nebula Sans feels characterless like a UI thrown together without any real font choice made yet.
“neutral aesthetic”
Subdued, muted and neutral seems to be very much “in” at the moment. On one hand it definitely gives us highly readable, usable interfaces and text. But I do miss the chaos and vibrance of the early web. Modern web is starting to look really washed out.
The moment you let the low contrast gremlins out of the cage they start their mischief!
Flat design is the more sucky partner to neutral palettes in current design trends, IMO. I want color too but it's not a clear step towards usability. I think the return of gentle skeumorphism would be a good step for general usability.
[dead]
That seems like a lot of marketing effort for “we took an existing font and stretched some bits”?
All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans.
Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop.
At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs.
I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.
Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.
The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.
I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.
Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.
Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.
Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.
I also spent some time evaluating a lot of open fonts and I agree that most of them have flaws, especially when it comes to kerning. The exceptions are fonts that have been developed for and are used by very large organizations, such as Public Sans (US government), IBM Plex Sans, Source Sans (Abobe), etc. Then the quality is equivalent (or even better) than what you get from proprietary fonts.
Every time I thought about buying a font, I've been put off by the terms.
A few tens of euro for desktop use? Sure. But when that font's supposed to be part of an organisation's identity, I'll need it for web use as well, which can be 10x as expensive. And when I want to e.g. generate invoices, that's even more money again, yearly.
I only work with small clients on things like this, but I've never had anyone willing to pay the money. Free fonts might not be as good, but that's not relevant for me, because paid fonts just aren't an option.
My test is simple: does it have a monospace variant and does it support Japanese? If not, then it's worse than IBM Plex.
Oh, non-Latin type faces are an entirely different ball-game, don't even get me started. I have massive respect for CJK type designers; there are thousands of glyphs! Designing a good new typeface must take years, if not decades.
This is weird to say, but it never occurred to me previously that an ISO-8859-1 font perfectly consistent with all variants of itself + CJK(by switching variants or whatever) would be massively useful. CJK speakers usually switch and mix fonts as needed to build a content than trying to pick single font for everything, and vast majority of people just don't understand multiple languages, so there are little driving forces towards a single universal font solution.
But a universal font makes sense. It's almost odd that this is so rarely said out loud.
I agree and I'd like to know what's your take on the Fira font family? I've configured my desktop and browser to use this font and now I can't go back. Subjectively I kind of developed a little crush on that font and I'm interested if it also has technical merit or if I'm just making things up in my mind.
Fira was designed by world-class type designers, and it’s only free thanks to the funding by Mozilla and Here, so yes, definitely a different category.
Same goes for IBM Plex, by the way.
I do like Fira, and definitely one of the few exceptions. Although I wish the lowercase 'y' were a bit less busy, with the left stroke completely joining into the right descender rather than how it is now, with a little bit sticking out. Additionally I must point out that Fira itself is a derivative (I'd say 'clone') of FF Meta, which was originally commissioned by Deutsche Bundespost.
Another commenter pointed out IBM Plex which I also like, but I have a bit of an issue with the lowercase Roman 'a' glyph, where the bottom curve into the vertical is a tad bit too thin for my liking.
As a rule of thumb, if a company has paid a foundry a handsome sum of money for its corporate branding and wants to use the resultant typeface everywhere, the result is usually quite decent, and has what I call 'character without being excessively fancy'.
I agree the keming is off in places, like the alternates.
Touché.
It seems that you have included mostly old fonts as examples. And what is your opinion about free fonts like Roboto, Open Sans or Noto?
You seem to know a thing or two about typeface design. What do you think about Alegreya, Playfair, and Ubuntu fonts?
Most typefaces all look the same to me... I think I'm typeface blind if there is such a thing. It's all just text to me...
One of the things that made me interested in fonts was many years ago when I looked up the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and ever since I did that I react every time I see Arial used in print or signage because some of the letters are really awful in comparison. The most obvious difference is probably the capital R which to me looks terrible in Arial.
Here's an image showing some overlay examples: https://i.imgur.com/1sdXiNY.jpeg
I’m not a huge font nerd but this looks really swanky. Gonna use it as my DE default font for sure.
I appreciate the site’s overview and comparisons and such too
In what way are you finding it better than Source Sans?
It's great to see more freely available fonts. But the site shows examples of a font in an elephant size; this seems to be the font for the main text so it would be nice to see a paragraph in a small size (like 16px, 14px, 12px, 10px). Out of curiosity I did it using Developer Tools in a browser - seems legible.
Thanks for posting and commenting. The choice of font is a great way to add aesthetics to text - designers so use this opportunity a lot more IMHO.
Looks great! My first impression is the spacing is a bit wide, but that can be adjusted.
Same, the spacing is a bit odd. I am curious about the rationale, as I think this is not great for longer forms of text.
Of course you can adjust char spacing, but normally font designers will make a condensed variant to make that work for corner cases.
No variable format in 2025?
> No variable format in 2025?
You're presumably referring to variable fonts, aka multiple master fonts/MMF.
Making a multiple master font is massively more work than discrete variations. The complete total number of MM fonts in existence is a 2- or 3-digit number, out of at least tens of thousands of fonts, if not millions.
Demanding or implying that fonts should be MM in 2025 is just plain out of touch with reality.
I'd like sans serif fonts more if they were readable, including being able to distinguish Weird Al from Weird AI.
I don't get how they call a font “readable” where the lowercase ell looks way too similar to the uppercase aye. I for one would not use such a font.
yet nother font you cannot discern I l |. into the trash it goes.
Why do the increasing weights also look larger? Also, since they've shown it white on black a few times, aren't fonts supposed to have different weights for black on white vs white on black to compensate for different perceived weight?
This is one of the big benefits of variable fonts with a bold axis: you can tweak the optical weight for dark mode without needing a whole new face.
No smallcaps variant? Disappointing honestly.
well if they don't need it
> We believe in facts, science, and human rights
The font looks ok. This is an off putting sample sentence though. It sounds like a secular, pseudo-liturgical version of the Nicene creed.
It's a font demo, what exactly is the problem? Are you paid to lobby for quick foxes and lazy dogs?
Enter the Snack Zone!
Whats wrong with facts, science, and human rights?
Science is not something to be believed in, it is a methodology that involves making and testing theories etc. People argue about it is and how it works and should work (philosophy of science is a significant field in itself) and it is not well defined, but what it is NOT is a body of facts.
Particular scientific theories may be believed in (or not believed in).
That said their samples sentences also include things such as "We’re assembling a crew for a heist" so maybe not take these things too seriously?
Their samples sentences also include things such as "We’re assembling a crew for a heist" so maybe not take these things too seriously?
Some of the examples are references from the shows on Nebula. That one is likely from HAI Crime Spree. "Enter the Snack Zone" is from Jet Lag: The Game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism