11 ms·
The Interface font family
- rcarmo 9y agoI actually came across this yesterday and set it as a system font on my Linux machine, which runs Elementary. Although I don't have a HIDPI display, it is nicer and (subjectively) more readable than what I've tried before (I still use Fira Code for coding and Fira Mono inside the terminal, but for the UI tried various variations of Fira, Roboto and other sans serif fonts, yet none of them stuck).
- rasmusfabbe 9y agoHappy to hear this! Would love to see a screenshot of what it looks like (I'm @rsms on Twitter)
- thinbeige 9y agoA disproportionate sans serif without any letter spacing. It's free though, so better than nothing. Edit: Dear downvoters, what I am saying is that you can take any ramdom sans serif, reduce the letter-spacing and you end up with a similar looking font face which might be even more balanced. Despite my criticism, I expressed my high appreciation that the creator offers his work for free. If you disagree let me know why instead of downvoting, maybe I am wrong and missed something.
- nathancahill 9y agoAbsolutely valid criticism for a font. The page hurt to read.
- eadz 9y agoI wondered if I was the only one to feel dizzy. Maybe it was the colors.
- gjm11 9y agoBy "disproportionate", do you mean "badly proportioned", or merely "proportional" as opposed to monospace?
- thinbeige 9y agoBy disproportionate I meant that it feels like a slightly condensed font without really being a condensed font. This paired with this too small letter spacing creates this disproportionate look. Another poster just commented that it looks like Roboto (or is even based on Roboto) and Roboto faces the same issues but not that worse. Roboto itself is a mutated Helvetica Neue which is admittedly a reference sans serif where every other sans looks inferior amd kind of turned out badly in comparison.
- jlgaddis 9y ago> Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- khedoros1 9y agoIMO, it's balanced out by the fuller explanation of what they intended to say and the request for clarification of what was wrong. It's not like they just added a "Why am I being downvoted?" without adding any further value.
- unethical_ban 9y agoI'd say people should resist downvoting without commenting, unless the comment is very clearly vulgar or spammy.
- RX14 9y agoI'm looking at the rendered image and the letter spacing seems vastly better than it is when rendered on the page (Freetype, Linux, with a few simple fontconfig improvements).
- ricardobeat 9y agoWhat platform/browser are you using? It looks great on iOS, feels similar to San Francisco.
- thinbeige 9y agoiOS + Safari
- virtuexru 9y agoVery very clean. I love it. The easier read the better imho.
- sagichmal 9y agoIt's nearly identical to the new Mac OS system font San Francisco (SF) but with tighter spacing and (subjectively to me) nicer finials and terminals. Looks great.
- wyager 9y agoI'm sure this is like tabs vs spaces for typographists, but why the hell do people make and use sans-serif fonts? Even ignoring aesthetics, the fact that there are horrendous ambiguities (like between I and l) renders these fonts completely inappropriate for computational tasks like copying passwords or secret keys. I have run into this problem multiple times on OS X and iOS, where the password managers use sans serif fonts.
- philjohn 9y agoBecause in the days of lower resolution screens the commonly accepted (correct) view was that a serif font reduced readability. With retina/high DPI displays? Not so much.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoI don't want to obsess over the analogy but just want to point out that it's not a typical holy war in the tabs/spaces or vi/emacs sense because no one is claiming that only one of serifs or sans-serif is best. Most acknowledge the benefits of both.
- ahhhhhhhhhh 9y ago>the fact that there are horrendous ambiguities (like between I and l) renders these fonts completely inappropriate for computational tasks like copying passwords or secret keys Don't hate the player, hate the game.
- nerdponx 9y agoWhat? Would you rather HackerNews be rendered in a serif font?
- rasmusfabbe 9y agoThis is valid commentary and subject to much discussion throughout the recent history of typography. There's always a blance condition between personality, legibility, character ambiguity, pace, and so on. Every typeface needs to go in some direction on these dimensions, which is why we have different font families for different uses! For instance, mono-spaced fonts with "slab" serifs are popular with computer code since column alignment (mono-spaced) and ambiguity (slab serifs and other visual traits like slashed zero) are used. However, for most people it's easier to read a variable-width font with regular serifs for longer text, like what you'd find in a book. Similarly, for user-interface labels, dialogs, buttons, etc it's often better to use a font without serifs and with a little more tracking/letter-spacing than what you'd use for large bodies of text (e.g. in a book.) Interface is designed for the latter use-case; user interfaces on computer screens.
- jack_jennings 9y agoThis is based on Roboto (reusing some outlines directly; not initially acknowledged by the designer on the marketing site), and arguably doesn't tread much new ground either in character or use-case or license. Not convinced there is anything this adds to an already crowded space.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rasmusfabbe 9y agoHello Jack. I'm the creator of Interface. Indeed many glyphs's outlines comes from Roboto (though fitted into different glyph boxes.) The "playground" feature of the website even has a feature for comparing Interface with Roboto. When you do, and you look at the details, you'll find that Interface is actually quite different from Roboto, at least as far as "different" goes with utilitarian UI fonts. https://rsms.me/interface/lab/?size=22&compare=roboto https://rsms.me/interface/lab/?size=22&compare=roboto
- fastball 9y agoYou should probably be loading the Roboto font via Google Fonts or similar, because my system does not have Roboto installed by default, so it is defaulting to serif in your comparison. At least I think that's the issue.
- gjm11 9y ago> Since this font is very similar to Roboto, glyph outlines from Roboto are indeed being used, mainly as "placeholders" while the glyph set is expanded. The Roboto license can be found in the source directory. Mainly? If this is a deliberate near-clone of Roboto, then at the very least there should be some explanation of how it differs and why.
- thinbeige 9y agoBut this is a good idea. Clone Roboto, change few beziers and you can put your own font on your portofolio/resume.
- AceJohnny2 9y agoLooking at Interface's glyph map, I see that letter-O (O) is slightly wider than number-zero (0). Capital-eye (I) is indistinguishable from small-ell (l), though number-one (1) is distinguishable from both. What other glyph ambiguities do you look out for on new fonts?
- andrewguenther 9y agoI noticed that as well. Difficult to claim "highly legible" with an oversight like that.
- jack_jennings 9y agoSlashed 0 and Ø in nordic countries. Though not abiguous in sharing the exact same shapes, many characters can share similar structures that (arguably; citation needed) can cause visual confusion. For example; 3 and 8 in a typeface like Helvetica are very similar. Opening the aperture of the 3 or using a form with a corner in the upper right can be observed in some UI typefaces. The "single story a" can be an issue in typefaces that ise it, adding to the plethora of round forms (eopdqbc etc.). Breaking up the monotony of those shapes is also frequently advised. "Tail-less" t and r in sans type can be problematic at small sizes.
- wodenokoto 9y agoWhat is a tail-less t? Google didn't help me at all on this one.
- jack_jennings 9y agoCompare Futura's "tail-less t": http://www.identifont.com/show?M2 http://www.identifont.com/show?M2 to Source Sans with a hooked tail: http://www.identifont.com/find?font=Source+Sans&q=Go http://www.identifont.com/find?font=Source+Sans&q=Go
- majewsky 9y agoLooking at the Futura specimen left me with a distinct taste of Swedish meatballs in my mouth.
- fairpx 9y agoNice font. Would there be a way for you guys to incorporate the font on a platform like Google's webfonts? For our business (http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro) we are constantly looking for great fonts to use in the UI work we do for software teams. Having a scattered landscape doesn't help.
- rasmusfabbe 9y agoGlad you like it. Once Interface reaches a more stable state (i.e. more glyphs and kerning have been added), the intention is to submit it for inclusion on Google fonts. In the meantime, you can use https://rsms.me/interface/interface.css https://rsms.me/interface/interface.css which always points to the latest release of the font, and is hosted on a CDN (by Cloudflare, backed by GitHub.)
- harrygeez 9y agoI've been waiting for a font like this for forever! Finally a good alternative to Apple's San Francisco font. Amazing job to the author!
- tudorw 9y agosystem font for the win...
- ojosilva 9y agoFor application UI, definitely. For website design... I think it may be a little overused these days.
- tudorw 9y agoyes, I'm not adverse to a spot of nice typography, aesthetics and presentation are key to getting a message across, for productivity UI in particular I like at least the choice to have a system font, it's usually the nicest rendering font and things like multi language support mostly just work.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fredsted 9y agoThis font is really pretty, and the text very readable. Great job.
- DiabloD3 9y agoDear font authors: Please screenshot renderings via multiple important renderer, important ex: Apple Safari on a Retina box (highlights weird over-bolding due to their hinting prefs), Chrome and Firefox on Windows (both use Freetype, but custom builds and don't quite match stock), and anything normal on a Linux that doesn't use a hacked up Freetype (ergo Ubuntu is out, so is RHEL/Centos and Fedora). Also, in both white on black and black on white, because font rendering is non-linear in respect to the 2.2 gamma curve (fun fact: everybody still uses 1.8 gamma for font rendering).
- FireBeyond 9y ago> anything normal on a Linux that doesn't use a hacked up Freetype (ergo Ubuntu is out, so is RHEL/Centos and Fedora). Your definition of "normal", "important" Linux _excludes_ Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, and Fedora? I get your point about hacked up FreeType, but given that the three largest distributions on the planet are excluded from your list doesn't really gel.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- beefsack 9y agoAren't the FreeType patches less relevant now since the new v40 interpreter[1] was released? [1]: https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.html https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-hinting.htm...
- noir_lord 9y agoUbuntu is still much better out the box than Fedora (though it's a simple fix with freetype-freeworld) on none-HiDPI screens - though it's subjective obviously.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoScreen shot renderings? How about just dogfooding the font so one can see how it actually performs.
- cratermoon 9y agoUpper case I and lower case l look too much alike. Letter O and number 0 need to be more distinguishable.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 9y agoSadly, digits have a different width, so if you have e.g. a right-aligned, increasing numerical value in your UI, the left digit of it will "wiggle around" if the last digit iterates through 0-9, and if you have numerical values, they won't align. This may be OK for text, but specifically for user interfaces, this is the very first thing I check when considering whether a font is usable. With a good font, it will be immediately obvious which of these amounts is more, while this font would likely mislead you: $ 100000 $ 111111 Ironically, Roboto seems to get it right.
- rvern 9y agoThis has nothing to do with "good" or "usable" fonts. Whether digits align is controlled with the pnum and tnum OpenType features.
- rasmusfabbe 9y agoNormally this is done with "tabular numbers", an alternate set of glyphs in the font where all digit glyphs is equally wide. However, another feature a font can provide is "proportional numbers"—the inverse of tabular numbers. Most fonts usually provide one or the other. Roboto for instance provides "proportional numbers" as an option, and uses tabular numbers by default. Interface by contrast uses proportional numbers by default, and the plan is to add tabular numbers as a feature that you opt in to for the scenarios you point out (e.g. tables.) In CSS you'd opt-in to tabular numbers with: `font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums`
- rasmusfabbe 9y agoTabular numbers added and will be included in the next release (1.2) https://github.com/rsms/interface/issues/10#issuecomment-324559439 https://github.com/rsms/interface/issues/10#issuecomment-324...
- majewsky 9y agoWhat is the rationale for defaulting to proportional numbers? I always assumed that "tabular numbers" are just "numbers", and deviating from that standard sounds like a recipe for needless confusion. Sure, you can flip a CSS switch, but how many webdesigners know that these switches even exist? And what about native UI frameworks where these switches don't even exist?
- nkkollaw 9y agoLooks really good. We really need good open source fonts.
- BafS 9y agoThanks for this font, I really appreciate the mix between Roboto and Helvetica or San Francisco. The cuts of Interface are more horizontals than Roboto (look the S for example) and I find it more readable, rational and beautiful. Good job !
- j_s 9y agoI was interested to discover fonts with programming-specific ligatures when they were discussed last month. I haven't experimented enough yet to know how well they work out in the long term. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MonospacedProgrammingFontsWithLigatures.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MonospacedProgrammingFontsWit...
- mcguire 9y agoThis is a good idea. Why hasn't someone thought of it before? Why didn't I think of it? I've been using Frama-C recently, with the option of \forall or ∀, for example. The latter is more readable, but a pain to type. I'll have to try some of these.
- chrissnell 9y agoI created an AUR package for this if any Arch users want to install the font: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-interface/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-interface/ This package only installs the OTF version currently. Let me know if you have any problems installing.
- richev 9y ago> Interface started out in late 2016 as an experiment to build a perfectly pixel–fitting font at a specific small size (11px.) Didn't Tahoma[1] achieve this back in 1995? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoma_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoma_(typeface)
- duncanmeech 9y agoThe interweb works better when you use things like <P> not <IMG>
- SquareBalls 9y agoBeautiful, will definitely consider this on our new web site.
- floatboth 9y agoNice. Honestly, it reminded me of Apple's San Francisco more than Roboto o_0