8 ms·
Optician Sans – A free font based on historical eye charts and optotypes
- javier2 1y agoSo its also monospace?
- MattSteelblade 1y agoDoesn't look like it. https://github.com/anewtypeofinterference/Optician-Sans/issues/3 https://github.com/anewtypeofinterference/Optician-Sans/issu...
- graypegg 1y agoHuh, so I'm only just learning that the Snellen chart isn't the common one! I wouldn't have known the name of it, but if someone asked me to doodle an eye chart from memory, I would've drawn that blocky E with the serifs! I've most likely been tested with the sans-serif Sloan chart I assume, but the letter forms just aren't distinct enough to stick in my brain I guess. A bit of a shame this font doesn't have a "Optician Serif" variant to look like the Snellen letters.
- cbm-vic-20 1y agoThat main image makes my astigmatic eyes very unhappy. https://optician-sans.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Comp-3.gif https://optician-sans.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Comp-3....
- abtinf 1y agoWhy did they animate it to add a blur?
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoprobably to evoke the feeling of undergoing an eye exam.
- dylan604 1y agoI can hear the tech asking "number 1 or number 2"
- ahazred8ta 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250730205400/https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200308/df20030815.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20250730205400/https://nerocam.c...
- somat 1y agoIt's probably just me being a huge introvert, but I dislike saying "I am not sure do it again" more than twice and am always left a bit discontent wondering if the prescription is as good as it should be. I wish I could book 30 minutes alone with the machine and just dial it in perfectly myself.
- bonoboTP 1y agoOnce I felt like I'll be really attentive and answer confidently, and in the end I got overminused. The hesitation is part of the signal. If it's 1% sharper, even if you can tell which one is 1% sharper, you gotta say hmmm number 1 is a bit better but just a little. Adding -0.5 to the diopter will often make the distance noticeably sharper in appearance while not really giving you more lines you can read, it's a sensation of sharpness but not really more info. And for that you a price because near vision will require straining your eye muscles to accommodate, and that will often cause headaches and tiredness after reading or working at a monitor.
- jrockway 1y agoIt's worth finding an optometrist that you have a good rapport with for that reason. I got lucky and get along really well with the person that I see; the results are worth speaking up for. (I had two somewhat persistent problems before I started seeing her... One was that my prescription was focused a little before infinity because the sign is 20 feet away and not infinity feet away. We tweaked some stuff and fixed that problem. The other was that if I'm tired and it's pretty low contrast outside, I always see double. We added some extra prism for that and it's helped a lot. I've had the same prism prescription for 30 years but adding more was a noticeable improvement.)
- atonse 1y agoOMG I kept thinking my glasses (progressive lenses) were causing that. I didn't realize it was animating.
- darkwater 1y agoCan't you clearly see why?
- pimlottc 1y agoThat's horrible, the full page blur is less bad since it's so obvious. But man, you should never be intentionally gaslighting the user by making them second-guess their own vision.
- Orygin 1y agoThe full page blur is horrendous. Every navigation to the page triggers it, so if you click and link and hit back, here's a blurry page for 2s. It also nearly triggers headaches for me, so clearly the webdesigner should not be hired for anything serious...
- gadders 1y agoNice font. Could have done without the dude's tinder profile pic though.
- edwinjm 1y agoThat’s how Nordic people look like <grin>
- dylan604 1y agoYou know you swiped right. I had the same odd sentiment about the use of the images as well. It does nothing for me about wanting to use the font.
- gadders 1y ago:-) Not my target market, but I'd be interested to hear how it worked out for him.
- m3kw9 1y agoupon entering, it reminds me to go to the Optometrist
- CarVac 1y agoThe round G strongly resembles the Google logo.
- its-summertime 1y agothat C is annoyingly O-ish, and the blurring... feels almost like its made by an anti-optician
- jamesdwilson 1y agoit was derived from eye charts that are explicitly designed to find defects in your eyes - it is not a coincidence the O and C look similar.
- jantissler 1y agoAnd there are also alternative versions of many letters as shown further down on the page.
- artemisart 1y agoYes I don't understand how they can claim it's optimized for legibility when the base font does the inverse.
- Telemakhos 1y agoThere's an alternative, more squarish C; about half the letters have alternative glyphs. If you're using macOS Font Book, scroll down to the bottom of the repertoire to see the alt glyphs.
- sandbach 1y agoAlways amusing to see spelling errors on painstakingly put together design websites. Unless NRK did indeed mean 'Let us all behave like opticians!'
- stevetron 1y agoMy default blank document Font settings in MSWord is Liberation Sans, Bold, 14 px. But my cataract problem is getting worse, and I may have to bump the size up yet again. I have yet to find another font I like as well.
- hayleox 1y agoLiberation Sans is indeed great, but I'm so intrigued: how did you end up preferring a libre font but a proprietary word processor?
- egypturnash 1y agoI like how one of the testimonials is someone at Adobe basically quoting the copy at the top of the page. "OPTICIAN SANS: A free font based on the historical eye charts and optotypes used by opticians world wide." - top copy “A free typeface based on opticians’ eye charts” -Khoi Vinh, Principal designer, Adobe
- arcticfox 1y agoI think all the testimonials are fake, if this wasn't clear to everyone. I thought they might be real at first but none of them exist. I actually thought that was kind of shitty to do, since they use real companies and media outlets. (I don't really follow fonts but I do know there is a subculture crazy about them, so I thought it could be theoretically possible that people would write reviews of them).
- Rendello 1y agoYou can click them, they link to their sources.
- piker 1y ago> "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." - the link under discussion
- GranPC 1y agoLink rot is alive and well... unlike their links. https://web.archive.org/web/20190430201350/https://twitter.com/khoi/status/1069635371829522432 https://web.archive.org/web/20190430201350/https://twitter.c...
- allenu 1y agoIt indeed looks like a real quote then, but not much of a testimonial. It may as well be rephrased, "Optician Sans is a thing that I acknowledge exists." Nowadays I suppose that's good enough reason to put up the logo of a company on the landing page.
- isege 1y agoIs it just me or does it look eerily similar to the font Anthropic uses?
- jy14898 1y agoThe font is around 6 years old and free, so I wouldn't be suprised
- mellonaut 1y agoFor those that now find themselves inspired to type the Snellen E, the internet provides an OFL typeface that scratches your itch here¹ (this unclearly licensed modification² even comes with some cute but barely readable lowercase versions of the letters) 1] https://radagast.ca/snellen/snellen.html https://radagast.ca/snellen/snellen.html 2] https://mk.bcgsc.ca/snellen-optotype-font/ https://mk.bcgsc.ca/snellen-optotype-font/
- jiehong 1y agoThis reminds me of the eye chart used in some countries, because it isn't based on reading letters, but on a direction. For example [0], you should indicate the direction where the E points to. [0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61MRfRwHwWL._SL1235_.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61MRfRwHwWL._SL1235_.jpg
- mongol 1y agoI remember this from when I was a child. Was maybe 4-5 and had not learned the letters yet. But I could turn my hand.
- msikora 1y agoThis is for kids.
- Eduard 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_chart https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_chart
- bobmcnamara 1y agoToo many Red Ramages driving submarines I suppose.
- throwaway290 1y agoFake testimonials.
- srameshc 1y agoI am looking for a very readable font and I like it. I am not in anyway qualified to compare it to Source Sans Pro or Opensans which I believe are considered very read friendly.
- Rendello 1y agoPreviously seen on HN in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665595 They made a Medium post as well: https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typeface-that-was-started-decades-ago-a9c977c9cf08 https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typef...
- voxleone 1y agoReally like this typeface. It hits that rare sweet spot between experimental and functional. Big thanks to the ANTI Hamar team.
- amdivia 1y agoThe loading animation made me feel in need of a visit to my optician
- htk 1y agoNice font, I wish it had lower case letters as well. It looks like it could be a great fixed width font for coding.
- ayaros 1y agoI love this so much! I sent it to my Dad, who's an ophthalmologist. Hopefully he gets a kick out of it.
- dogmatism 1y agoNah Atkinson Hyperlegible from the Braille institute is the way if we're going for fonts from vision experts
- tim-- 1y agoThere's a mono version of the font too! https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Mono https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Mono
- Clamchop 1y agoYou're confusing a font inspired by letter forms intended to test vision with a font designed to be forgiving of vision deficits.
- dogmatism 1y agothat was my point
- tim-- 1y agoFrom the designer's website (https://anti.as/optiker-k https://anti.as/optiker-k) it seems that this was commissioned by ANTI Hamar for the rebranding project for Optiker-K, a Norwegian optician and optometrists store. This is fantastic! More custom fonts like this should be open sourced. To me the font looks pretty legible. Worth noting that the font is from 2018, so it's not really a new font, but it is still one of my favorites.
- lelandfe 1y agoA deeper dive from the agency: https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typeface-that-was-started-decades-ago-a9c977c9cf08 https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typef...
- andrewinardeer 1y agoThe Dropbox link in the footer is dead: ``` This link has been deleted The owner of this link has deleted or disabled this link. You can not access it at this time. ```
- ourmandave 1y agoI didn't notice until my last visit but they also make eye charts for kids who don't know letters yet.