5 ms·
Reddit Sans
- MR4D 3y agoThis is a really clean font. Nice work!
- Wistar 3y agoIt is a handsome typeface.
- nullindividual 3y agoIt's terrible. L != I
- headwayoldest 3y agoI guess with less users and moderators they have more time to explore their hobbies over at reddit now.
- mjr00 3y agoReddit has always had a ton of stupid irrelevant side projects. Remember "creddits"/ReddCoin, the "social cryptocurrency" they were developing? Hard to believe that was a decade ago. Harder to believe that in retrospect, they should have just done it, been ready when the crypto hype wave came and exited/IPO'd as billionaires.
- nicbou 3y agoOn the other hand, that big pixel board thing they do once a year is a great idea. Some of these other things also led to fun community behaviours.
- MrMorden 3y agoFewer. </davos>
- swader999 3y agoI've been sans Reddit for a couple of years now and it's been very low stress.
- dingnuts 3y agoHN is just a glorified subreddit run under a different domain name lol
- dakial1 3y agoI fear that with popularity HN will become the horrible place that reddit is today....
- Zandikar 3y agoIt seems to be the life cycle of digital communities. There's a certain threshold of critical-mass popularity where quality of content almost seems to become inversely proportional to quantity of people in the community. That threshold is a moving target, but it certainly seems to manifest around the same time as people start throwing around the letters IPO; or at least, when the community is big enough for some MBA to come in and try and squeeze them for profit. I admit I'm unclear on the exact nature of HN and YC, but with YC being a VC, and my assumption that HN is a property of YC, I think two big things HN has going for it is that it's probably not going to IPO as a result of that situation and dang does a fantastic job moderating (there's something to be said for a well moderated community, most don't appreciate that). Never know when company will decide it's time for a pivot and shake things up though.
- woooooo 3y agoHN seems immune to VC pressures specifically because it's owned by a VC. Single core process, single server, single moderator. No react, no chasing growth. It's actually right-sized or even undersized because it's intentionally a loss leader.
- 3y ago
- p1mrx 3y agoMore like Sans Reddit, har har am I right? Discompliments to /u/spez.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoany explanation of why they embarked on a custom font? it's not such a simple task and most people wouldn't really appreciate the difference if they used arial for everything
- supperrtadderr 3y agoSomeone wanted to make work for themself. Or justify themself being present at their "job". :)
- nullindividual 3y agoTo me, it looks like creating a font isn't terribly difficult based on https://kokorobot.ca/site/making_a_font.html https://kokorobot.ca/site/making_a_font.html. That said, I'm a no-talent hack and I'm sure any font I created would look like I ate and subsequently vomited off-brand crayons onto the screen.
- micromacrofoot 3y agothere are degrees to it, a personal handwriting font is easier because you can manually adjust it as needed... you don't really need to worry about the endless number of edge cases produced by other languages and user-input text
- agluszak 3y agoI don't really understand why every brand nowadays wants to have a custom font
- Eumenes 3y agoHipster design teams. Typography lets them be "artists", returning to bohemian roots. In reality, they're just designing apps around dark patterns or whatever the product management team thinks is righteous. Companies can't say no, they're in demand, so its really a "20% project".
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI'm curious about it too, I'd love to read something by someone with more specific insight than I have. I know that people love to make fonts: it's a really common hobby activity and people make incredible fonts all the time just for the hell of it. I don't really know how that translates so commonly into the institutional will to do it that every company seems to have. I can kinda guess but it's just conjecture.
- patternMachine 3y agoIt's cheaper. Many fonts require ongoing licensing fees based on views or some other metric. Creating your own font means you own it — no more fees.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoBlog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38465233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38465233 Specimen site: https://redditsans.s-ings.com/ https://redditsans.s-ings.com/
- wffurr 3y ago>> Yes, Snoo (and our brand colors and typography) is getting a makeover to help better reflect how our growing user base uses Reddit. These changes will help redditors worldwide continue engaging in conversations with each other. And yet they're not addressing how non-redditors engage with content on their site. Any day you want to stop nagging about the app or just show me all the dang comments would be great. In the meantime, there's always teddit.
- nailer 3y agoSnoo looks like he has a beard now: https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/_1440xAUTO_crop_center-center_none/reddit_logo_before_after-2_2023-11-28-223727_cypp.png https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/_1440xAUTO_crop...
- nullindividual 3y agoLooks like snoo is working through the night but hasn't stopped hitting the whisky bottle prepping for that IPO.
- quitit 3y agoThey've lost track of why the old logo resonated.
- meepmorp 3y agoI'm not sure management ever understood what resonated about any part of reddit.
- munchler 3y agoI see Reddit has entered its “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” phase.
- firebot 3y agoIt's a sinking shit show.
- BigFnTelly 3y ago[flagged]
- bsimpson 3y agoI'm surprised to see a new brand font in nearly-2024 that doesn't have variable axes.* * https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introducing_variable_fonts https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introduc...
- mike_d 3y agoThe font is almost 4 years old at this point.
- crazygringo 3y agoAccording to the blog post it's new today: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-more-accessible-bespoke-typography-new-conversation-bubbles-and-colors-and-a-new-snoo-logo-now-with-opposable-thumbs https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-m... "We’re introducing new bespoke typefaces, Reddit Display, and Reddit Sans."
- caseyohara 3y agoFirst commit was on April 7, 2020 https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/commit/08de53e01be8e8c21b066724d82ca5ccb4fc04b7 https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/commit/08de53e01be8e8c2...
- crazygringo 3y agoWas that public or announced or the final typeface though? Why would Reddit say they're announcing this now, otherwise?
- sings 3y agoReddit has been using these fonts internally for a few years in their marketing. They were not available to the public. They have been made available this week, hence the announcement. (The Github repo was made public a few weeks ago in preparation for adding them to the Google Fonts service.)
- firebot 3y agoThose are such beautiful glyphs.
- StevePerkins 3y agoWhat an interesting thread to read. "Typography aficionados" are one of the most ardent and vocal subcultures within the Hacker News community. Any given post may be hijacked at any time, for a meta-discussion about the font choices on that post's linked web page. When a post actually IS about a new font, people dissect that latest microscopic riff on Helvetica like whiskey snobs describing a spirit's nose and mouthfeel. However, a strong cross-cutting theme on HN is "hating Reddit even though you obviously spend a lot of time there". It's a clash of the titans, and a real role-reversal... this may be the first time I've ever seen a post about fonts mostly hijacked by something else instead.
- JohnDeHope 3y agoIt's only when two highly-prized priorities are pitted against each other that you can really determine which is higher up on the priority list. I guess now we know. Hating on the outgroup is a strong trait amongst humans, perhaps even stronger than font snobbery. Does the world really need yet another font with a purely rectangular lowercase 'l'? There. I guess you can see where my priorities lie.
- sings 3y agoIt's a shame, because I thought font snobbery might encourage some interesting discussion here. But on your second point -- there are two lowercase "l" glyphs, of which the default option is not purely rectangular. Without any stylistic set activated, "1Iil" are all visually distinct.
- crazygringo 3y agoFirst of all, this is a surprisingly nice font. Modern, clean, it has personality but it's legibile. Well done! It has some similarities to Product Sans that Google has been rolling out in its interfaces [1] -- suggesting Futura [2], but Google's version is clunky and backwards-looking, while Reddit Sans is far more elegant and up-to-date. I do wonder if they're going to use it for the body text of conversation threads though? Because it still feels more like a display typeface than body text, with its highly geometric styling. It looks great in the tag bubbles they show, and it'll be superb for headlines and things, but I'm not sure I'd want to read comments in it -- but their blog post suggests that's what it's for. Using this geometric styling is what Google's done with all of its Workspace interface now (Gmail, Docs, etc.) and I think it's been a big mistake. Futura has always been best as a display font, not for body text, and I don't understand why Google has moved from Roboto to Product Sans for things like menus or e-mail subject lines. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Sans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Sans [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)
- riidom 3y ago.woff2 file sizes of >50kb each doesn't rock me off my chair though.
- sings 3y agoThe large size is due to the number of glyphs and alternate styles. If you want a smaller footprint, I'd suggest subsetting the font as needed. There are also 6 ready-made subsets[1], each about 15kb, matching these unicode ranges. These are set up to work with the @font-face unicode-range property[2]. A: U+0020-00BF B: U+00C0-00FF C: U+0100-01FF D: U+0200-0FFF E: U+1000-1FFF F: U+2000-FFFF [1]: https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/tree/main/fonts/Reddit%20Sans/subsets https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/tree/main/fonts/Reddit%... [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/unicode-range https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...
- riidom 3y agoOoh nice! Didn't think about checking that. 15kb or maybe 30kb sounds indeed very good.
- Sunspark 3y agoIn my lay opinion, this font needs a 500 Medium weight. Also needs more spacing between the glyphs as the weight increases.
- deafpolygon 3y agoWhat font filetype should I be using on Windows? TTF? WOFF? WOFF2? OTF?
- Sunspark 3y agoWOFF is just for the web. For desktop, if hinting is desired and if it is present within the font, then TTF. If no hinting, then OTF.