14 ms·
Goldman Sans
- themark 6y agoAh The Goldman Sack. Reminded me of this for whatever reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bingdig 6y agoMost detailed font description I've ever seen
- apetresc 6y agoIn that case, you may enjoy: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
- TechBro8615 6y agoJetBrains makes an IDE and that is the default font in the IDE. So to be fair to them, at least theirs is a case where investing in a font has a direct effect on the product and business.
- apetresc 6y agoI don't think we meant it as a criticism of either Goldman Sachs or JetBrains...
- na85 6y agoUgh, the font itself seems okay I guess, but I don't understand why, in a font ostensibly designed for legibility, you would choose an open zero in lieu of a slashed or dotted zero.
- ebg13 6y agoMy first thought after reading through to the end was also "After making such a deal about number legibility, that O looks a lot like that 0."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoMonospace capital letters would also be better for displaying tickers, CUSIPs, expiry dates, etc in columns.
- luigibosco 6y agoIf i were the designer, for absolute clarity i would change any character you type to display as a dollar sign.
- ng12 6y agoI don't really understand this trend. They're not the only firm I'm aware of that's invented their own font and/or standardized on some obscure one. I'm sure there's an already popular font that has these attributes.
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoIt's a prestige project architected to give someone in the Technology Division the feels of working for a big tech company. It's the same reason they have "Fellow" positions. This culture drove me up the wall when I worked there. "How does this make money?" was sure to get dirty looks from these types of people.
- tobr 6y agoWhy would it matter if it’s obscure or popular? You could say the same about any aspect of design - logos, outfits, UI styles, color palettes, you name it. These things can bring subtle character and recognition to a brand, and it’s not really a smart thing to be skimping on.
- lokedhs 6y agoI like it, but I can't find a license anywhere. What am I allowed to use it for? Am I allowed to redistribute it?
- ebg13 6y agohttps://design.gs.com/d/legal/goldman-sans-license https://design.gs.com/d/legal/goldman-sans-license To find it you have to click through to the download page, which isn't yet the download. https://design.gs.com/d/design-system/foundation/typography/ https://design.gs.com/d/design-system/foundation/typography/
- bbeekley 6y agoThe license is here [1]. It looks like you can redistribute with attribution and alike license. [1] https://design.gs.com/d/legal/goldman-sans-license/ https://design.gs.com/d/legal/goldman-sans-license/
- lokedhs 6y agoThank you (and the others who answered). This answers my question.
- SloopJon 6y agoYou can distribute unmodified copies; just don't use it to disparage Goldman Sachs.
- 9OzUIvDwF4LvfUM 6y agoYou also can not "sell (by itself or with any other item or software), sublicense, bundle, or embed copies"
- pickledish 6y agoI mean, I'm not sure the world needs more font faces when the existing set of many many options seems to do a pretty good job for all purposes (who ever thinks, "boy this job would be much easier with a font more appropriately suited to the task, but alas, no such font exists"?) However, I did really enjoy the introduction slides, some great design work there for sure.
- tobr 6y agoFrom what I’ve heard (sorry, no good references, so please correct me if this is wrong), it’s often cheaper for a big corporation to commission a custom typeface than to license an existing one. Plus it’s an opportunity for branding and some good PR.
- SamWhited 6y agoThis comment didn't make sense to me, it seems like this is like saying there are enough paintings or sculptures in the world for people to see whatever kind of art they want and have whatever emotional reactions they're going to get from the existing art. This isn't like open source license proliferation or something, having more fonts is just more room for experimentation and creativity, more choice for designers, etc. you don't have to keep up with every single one, and it doesn't make things harder like eg. open source license proliferation where the more of them you have the more you need a lawyer to review every dependency. But maybe I'm misunderstanding and there's some harm here?
- pickledish 6y agoAh, yeah I do see where you're coming from. I guess I just haven't been looking at font faces so much as "art" (mostly because it seems like there isn't a lot of room for variation or creativity; most of these "new" font faces look more or less the same to me, but that could also just be my untrained eye). You're totally right that there's no harm, and I also wasn't trying to belittle the effort of making new fonts! I was more wondering why a _company_ would want to expend the probably quite significant resources to create a whole new font (as opposed to a solo artist doing it for fun, which I'd understand) -- but the other response to my top-level comment gives some good reasoning to that question :)
- systemvoltage 6y agoWhat is the reason for extremely large font size trends, especially ticking up after 2015? Huge typography is obnoxious, from marketing philosophy standpoint - it screams insecurity. From a technical standpoint, it is inappropriate for the screen size. Yet designers today love choosing HUGE typography to be bold and daring. From Dropbox to IBM, from GS to Apple - this whole trendy huge font thing bothers me. I understand that they're using huge font sizes to show off to the world their new typeface. Make no mistake, it will be used in huge sizes as it is the current trend - a cool thing to do as a designer is to employ massive bold typography today.
- rememberlenny 6y agoFont licenses are expensive. It's far cheaper to take something like Helvetica, and make slight changes to each of the glyphs, and rebrand it. For context, I used to work on Google Fonts.
- systemvoltage 6y agoWhat's that have to do with Font licenses? I am talking about the size of the font taking up almost half of my screen. > It's far cheaper to take something like Helvetica Helvetica costs $$$ if you want to use it for commercial use. No more than any other font. Also, you cannot modify Helvetica, especially if you get it from Monotype (previously Linotype): https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/helvetica/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/helvetica/
- rwc 6y agoNobody’s suggesting modifying. It’s accomplished through R&D... ripoff and duplicate.
- systemvoltage 6y agoEven ripping off requires time/money. Font design isn't a trivial activity that most people deem it to be. I suggest downloading FontForge and try to make your own ripoff. You'll be amazed at the complexity and the skill required to design a typeface. Adjusting kerning pairs alone will take weeks of meticulous work.
- tobr 6y agoYou could be forgiven for mistaking this for just about anything Erik Spiekermann has designed. I find this style of squashed humanist sans-serif to be so uninteresting. You’d think there would be more variation in character to be found in that space, but something about making a condensed sans-serif in this style makes everything look... cautious and indistinguishable. Fitting for an organization like Goldman Sachs, I suppose.
- quicklime 6y ago> You're using an incompatible browser. > We've engineered Marquee to leverage the latest technologies. Please upgrade to one of the following browsers: Reading through the other comments, I’m shocked that this is simply a page describing a font, and yet it somehow needs “the latest technologies”. (I’m currently using Firefox on iOS)
- speedgoose 6y agoWorks well on Firefox on Android.
- Semaphor 6y agoThat’s because FF on Android is FF and not re-skinned Internet Ex… I mean Safari.
- kroltan 6y agoFirefox on iOS is just Safari with different chrome (oh how ironic a word, but I mean the browser UI) since Apple doesn't allow third parties to JIT (which is essentially required for JS, so everyone uses iOS' builtin webview)
- stingraycharles 6y agoWhat is this jit requirement? I always thought it was about executing custom code that cannot be vetted during the app review process.
- hellodanylo 6y agoI think JIT and custom code is the same requirement in this discussion. In Chrome's case, the V8 engine is a JIT compiler from JS to ARM instructions. The code of V8 can be vetted during the review process, but the ARM instructions that it will generate (just in time) can not. > 3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple's built-in WebKit framework.
- paxys 6y agoWeird that they highlight its numerical use but there's no effort to disambiguate 0 from O.
- pedrogpimenta 6y agoOh no.
- AznHisoka 6y ago0h yes.
- tln 6y agoNot a good choice for a programming or console font, then... A slash or dot for disambiguating zeroes would add a lot of noise visually especially in dense displays. Perhaps that's why.
- logicallee 6y agoI read the comments here first and expected the O and 0 to be indistinguishable, but for me it's prety easy to tell. See for yourself - I flipped a 0 and an O on this image, can you tell where? https://imgur.com/a/3hcg3zH https://imgur.com/a/3hcg3zH
- agustif 6y agoC0H .OO
- logicallee 6y agoyeah. pretty easy, right?
- stickfigure 6y agoDamn you Poe's Law
- underdeserver 6y agoThat's quite a high priced dad joke.
- kleer001 6y agoUgh, all that clicking for the next page. Why not put it all on one page or a pdf for that matter? Reminds me of click bait factory design: Take up the whole page, each nugget of meaning is a separate page, draw it out as long as possible for the clicks.
- systemvoltage 6y agoThe entire field of design (not just web-design) has regressed after the golden era of design IMO - 1965-1990.
- kleer001 6y agoThat's a pretty broad brush stroke there. Without more qualifications I'm having a hard time taking it seriously with respect to Sturgeon's law.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoOn my pretty standard-resolution 1920x1080 screen, the "next" arrow requires scrolling to see. ...So they made it so you can't scroll through, but have to scroll a bit on each panel to get to the next one. It's inherently horrifying that this site exists. I get why companies want in-house fonts that define their brand and avoid licensing fees, but I always find designers' blog posts about how they designed a font to be insanely and incredibly self-congratulatory while focusing on things that almost no human on earth will ever notice.
- mattlondon 6y agoSame here. Also I got an extra horizontal scroll bar that had no room left to scroll (...if that makes sense the the scrollbar was visible but you could not scroll left or right) on Firefox. Kinda disappointing for a "design-ery" focused thing to have some really bad design requiring scrolling, as well as screwed up sizing that triggers pointless scrollbars.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lowdose 6y agoCompanies do a font fork to stop paying for the royalties for the most famous ones. Millions of pages for an unlimited amount of time adds up to more than the cost to create a shiny new font i.e. $50k. This is probably one of the first cost hacks technology companies figured out before big finance. Who wants to bet Barclay, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank do not have their own font by 2030?
- MrAlex94 6y agoDon't Barclays have their own already, called "Expert Sans"? Looks like it was designed in 2004 by Monotype.[1] 1: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20040803005135/en/Agfa-Monotype-Designs-New-Barclays-Fonts-Brand https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20040803005135/en/Agf...
- visualword 6y agoYep, CS also already has their own font.
- finkin1 6y agoI would be willing to bet Goldman spent way more than $50k creating this font. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if just the website showcasing the font cost more than that.
- pixxel 6y ago“You're using an incompatible browser.“ Don’t put this on users. I’m using latest iOS Firefox, not Netscape 4.0
- pc86 6y ago> iOS Firefox Short of using Opera this might be the worst browser to use, so they're not wrong.
- TheArcane 6y agoNight mode, in-built tracking prevention, Firefox sync - which makes it my go-to to transfer links from my linux desktop to iphone Why do you say it's the worst browser after Opera?
- dheera 6y agoDoes it have all that? I thought iOS Chrome and iOS Firefox is just the Safari engine with a different app UI thanks to Apple's horribleness. Apple could theoretically violate your privacy all they want through their rendering engine.
- haecceity 6y agoThose features exist outside of the rendering engine.
- FabHK 6y agoMaybe they should read their own guidelines: DO NOT > Blame the user ("You entered an invalid character") https://design.gs.com/d/design-system/foundation/writing#error-messages-and-alerts https://design.gs.com/d/design-system/foundation/writing#err...
- ajani 6y agoSans Goldman would've been more apt!
- zitterbewegung 6y agoI think they probably get this font in addition to all of the rebranding. Assuming that they could license Helvetica and that they have one app (Marcus) and putting in 33 thousand users (employee count) you can get to around ~$50k. Used the calculator here: https://www.myfonts.com/licenses?type=sku&id=631501&cl=false https://www.myfonts.com/licenses?type=sku&id=631501&cl=false
- hadrien01 6y agoMy first reaction: looks like a Dalton Maag font. At the end: Creative Direction + Design: Dalton Maag
- s1mon 6y agoInteresting. They've done the same for a number of companies including Nokia, Ducati, Lush, Intel, etc... https://www.daltonmaag.com/work https://www.daltonmaag.com/work
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoI installed the font and it immediately tried signing me up for a bottom tranche investment opportunity from one of the bank's sales desks.
- wegs 6y agoThe license was written by idiots. E.g.: b. The User may not use the Licensed Font Software in any “open source” or other code that would create any obligation for Goldman Sachs to: (i) grant to any third party any intellectual property or other proprietary rights; (ii) disclose or make any source code or any part or derivative work thereof available to third parties under any circumstances; or (iii) otherwise subject Goldman Sachs to any obligations not expressly set forth in this License. Ambiguous legal language grounded in a likely misunderstanding of what "open source" means. And of course, you have to flip through a dozen screens to make it to the download page to find the license. This is a project to make a positive impression which fails to do that. So close -- we need more good open types -- and yet clueless.
- nojito 6y agoWhat’s idiotic about it? It’s to protect against copy left obligations.
- lewiscollard 6y ago> What’s idiotic about it? It imagines a model of open source wherein I can take some Goldman Sachs code (the font), use it in my project, then start making legal demands of Goldman Sachs because I used their code. I would be quite surprised if such a license existed, because it would be a legal absurdity.
- wegs 6y agoAbsolutely correct. And that's just the tip of the iceberg... "grant to any third party any intellectual property or other proprietary rights;" If I've used this on a web page, a third-party has the rights to view and make local cached copies of the web page. "disclose or make any source code or any part or derivative work thereof available to third parties under any circumstances;" If I put this into a document, printed it, and handed it to my mom, I've just made a derivative work available to third-parties (and yes, the compiled font is a derivative of the source code, if you parse the 'therefore' that way). ... and so on. I'm giving intentionally absurd examples, but legal language like this is just absurdly poorly-written and stupid. Whatever you want legal language to say, you want it to be clear and unambiguous. That protects everyone involved; there are clear limits, and nothing for courts to argue about. In this case, even the basic grammar is ambiguous (pronouns pointing into voids, chains of ambiguous and/or clauses, etc.) Here's another gem: "each copy shall bear an appropriate copyright notice in substantially the form of '© 2020 Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC. All rights reserved.' and a copy of this License" -- well which is it: Are all rights reserved, or do I have additional rights as defined by this license? Virtually /any/ use of this font falls into a legal gray zone, and so creates a massive liability for everyone involved in using this, ironically including Goldman Sachs itself. Many clauses are bad enough a judge would just toss them out, and that leaves a legal document that looks a lot like Swiss cheese. Most first-year law students would be embarrassed to draft legal text like this, and most lawyers would be concerned about legal malpractice if they let a document like this slip out. That's just in the legal language is written. One level up, we run into fundamental misconceptions of how open source works, of how copyright works, as well as a slew of missing standard license boilerplate. And on top of that, we have the basic strategic issue: Except for exceptional cases, it makes sense to use an existing, vetted license; it's usually stupid to draft your own unless there's a darned good reason (and in that case, you'd better find a qualified lawyer). Even if you do draft your own, you should start with an existing, vetted license, and modify the parts which don't fit, and find a competent lawyer to do it. I've met elementary school students who wrote better legal language than this. This makes Goldman look incompetent. It's not a good look for an investment bank.
- batmansmk 6y agoI'm interested in the Typeface itself. - The diagonal/emphasis on "5" is a great improvement to differentiate it from "S". Roboto tried something similar, but execution is better here imo. - Reducing the standard width deviation between letters will also be of great help for mobile, number driven usage - without going full monospace. - The "u" simply being an inverted "n", the "m" using the same shoulders and stems as the "n are things that go against the premise of a fully legible font. I would revise this. What do you think?
- renewiltord 6y agoDoes the S feel like it's going to fall over to anyone else?
- mikece 6y agoPerhaps the font designer took inspiration from the state of the economy?
- mv4 6y agoNice. Let's see Paul Allen's card. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISYzA36-ZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISYzA36-ZY
- snowoutside 6y agoInteresting font. The presentation of this page looks pretty bad on a window that is ~1000px wide. Not sure why it was designed in a way that forced a single ratio.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- asutekku 6y agoKinda ironic that they talk about the legibility of the numbers but the page they are presented in is quite hard to read: https://i.imgur.com/DItuHiL.png https://i.imgur.com/DItuHiL.png
- make3 6y agoI thought that the point was to show that even in a challenging setup like that one you can still read ok
- MarkyC4 6y agoLikely a bug (that they may have already fixed). Here's what I get in MacOS Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/3SFp2KU.png https://i.imgur.com/3SFp2KU.png
- systemvoltage 6y agoMay be they should just stick a static HTML page? No javascript should be necessary for displaying type, am I wrong? Why do we need animations? Why do we need this presentation hoohaa?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hnarn 6y agoWhy anyone who isn't employed at Goldman Sachs would ever use this is beyond me, and yet they offer it up for public download. The license forbids creating or even modifying derivative works with it, or bundling/embedding it. There are so many good, free typefaces out there. I really can't be bothered with yet another license-crippled vanity project from another huge corporation that had a marketing budget left to spend. IBM did the same thing with "Plex", which is arguably even worse quality-wise, but at least has an open license (SIL).
- tootie 6y agoMy best guess is that this is a recruitment tool. GS has historically relied on a roster of digital agencies to do any sort of consumer-facing design. They've been trying to grow their in-house practice with mixed results. It's the same trend as the last recession. They can lure talent by offering a lot of money, but no with a creative itch is going to spend their career at a bank.
- jdhn 6y agoYup, they're basically screaming to UX and visual designers "Hey, we're not your stale old bank! We have a design system and a Sketch library, come work for us!" You can also tell that this is career focused as the third link in the header is "Careers". Interestingly enough, I knew someone who worked in their design team. Lasted 2 years I think before heading back to the West Coast.
- mratsim 6y agoBanks are very creative in their OTC derivatives.
- Areading314 6y agoI frequently build/work on apps that need to show numerical outputs in a clean, easy-to read way, and many "consumer" fonts ignore or underweight the legibility of numeric data, especially at small sizes. So I would absolutely consider using this font, which I think also looks very nice, in apps I build.
- cosmotic 6y agoWhy do big companies insist on making their own font and then putting on a parade to celebrate its debut? Arial, Helvetica, and countless other fonts are a better option since I already have them installed, don't need a special license, and are battle tested and highly refined. If they felt strongly in paying a typographer, they should have contracted one to fix the hinting in macos so type wasn't a blurry mess.
- leokennis 6y agoWhy they put on the parade and release them publicly I do not know. But having “your own font” (that is of course part of the company wise OS image) has advantages. The main one, you can instantly recognize a company internal document. The second one: it sets a baseline. All internal documents will be in that font. Otherwise one department will use Arial, the other one Times etc.
- haecceity 6y agoI can barely tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica how is anyone gonna tell their derivatives apart.
- cityzen 6y agoShould call it Criminal Sans
- st-isidore 6y agoThanks to Mr. Tonsky's post mandating me to upgrade to a 4K monitor for sharply rendered fonts, this is awesome. The text is bleeding-edge sharp. I got the least expensive 27" 4K@60Hz monitor I could (Sceptre U279W-4000R, $200), and it arrived with no dead pixels. I had to find a color calibration profile, but now it's a beaut. Thanks to Mr. Tonsky.
- heymartinadams 6y agoUgly as hell. (Just my opinion :)
- crazygringo 6y agoIt looks really good, but also reminds me a lot of IBM's similar new typeface Plex [1, 2] from a year and a half ago. They have their differences of course, but they're both very modern sans-serifs with a tall x-height and a slight bit of squarishness to their round parts. Seeing as they're both trying to project the image "we have history and trustworthiness, but we're also modern and hip", it makes sense they'd end up with such similar results. (I'm not saying those descriptions are true, just that they want to project that!) [1] https://www.ibm.com/plex/ https://www.ibm.com/plex/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Plex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Plex
- jpeg_hero 6y agoAs someone who used to make pitch books in investment banking (not GS), I'll tell you some of the awesome things I saw from a user perspective. -- Funny when they mentioned fitting in a lot of text in a small space. I've never used so much 8-pt font in my life before or since. A lot of the time you are very space constrained in things like detailed footnotes, so you are almost tweet speaking to fit it all in there -- The number section blew me away, the fact that you are getting fixed width number performance (and capital letter tickers too) in a "normal" font is incredible. There is a lot of focus on perfect number alignment (the dreaded #,##0_);(#,##0) number format in Excel). Also to address some of the comments why they didn't put a slash through the 0. The audience is financial professionals and the slashed 0 is not used, and would be very distracting and especially so for large round numbers ie 1,000,000
- marajit 6y agodidn't slash/dot the zero???