8 ms·
Making Google Sans Flex
- planb 10mo agoA bit OT: What's up with the mouse pointer on that page? Why on earth would a site that has "design" in it's domain name change my mouse pointer to a finger-sized circle blob on my 4K desktop screen?
- agos 10mo agoit's part of the Material Design 3 branding, for some reason. The original thread for the launch of the design system [1] is full of people baffled by Google making a cursor that lags [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352
- GaryBluto 10mo agoLook at all the rubes who can't understand that a lagging mouse cursor is an integral part of Google's Molasses-Forward Design Language Initiative.
- qingcharles 10mo agoI just checked Material Design 3, as I use a lot of it in projects, and it still uses Roboto font for everything, so they're not even dogfooding the Sans font there yet, but they'll make us suffer their cursor :)
- vbezhenar 10mo agoCursor feels terrible. Native cursor moves very fast. This cursor does not feel native and moves very slow and sluggish. Do they paint it with Canvas or something like that?
- blululu 10mo agoI recall that it is a Div that uses the css invert property, but this can be cpu intensive depending on how it is moved (transform uses gpu I think but position is cpu)
- reddalo 10mo agoYeah I wish there was a way to disable such a useless gimmick.
- NotMichaelBay 10mo agoThis may be an unpopular opinion but I like the effect where the cursor turns into the button hover state when you hover over them, like the pause icon button on the video.
- syldarion 10mo agoLike the other commenter, my mind also fixated on the mouse cursor. Great post on the fonts, but I spent most of my time seeing how the strange cursor behaved. I don't like it much, especially because there's some inconsistency once you're down hovering over the related posts. However, there was one spot where I had to give it to them: when I hovered over the content about Google Sans Code, it expanded horizontally. For a second, I wondered what was going on, then it clicked that the content must be horizontally scrollable, which it was! Of course, that could be shown with a much more obvious horizontal scroll bar...
- lnx01 10mo agoIt should not be possible for a webpage to change my mouse cursor.
- GaggiX 10mo agoI never saw the cursor changing size to fit the button you are hovering on, it's pretty cool, I don't know if it's better but it's cool.
- Rakshath_1 10mo ago[flagged]
- torben-friis 10mo agoThere is something about the page that makes me dizzy on mobile. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle animation but I get the feeling of things moving/deforming while I read.
- Computer0 10mo agoIt is present on desktop but it's much worse on mobile. I had the same experience
- duskdozer 10mo agoI have the same thing reading this page. It feels really similar to the overscroll stretch animation in Android (12?+) which makes me feel ill and unfortunately often doesn't respect animation settings.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- albert_e 10mo ago>> Product lockups didn’t match the new Google logo >> The 2015 logo redesign was a smashing success. Watch the distance between these two lines. It changes to more compact - subtly- as we scroll it into view (am on mobile- chrome on android). Feels like the page is trying to do too much fancy stuff. I cant take their blog seriously if this is their idea of good design and user experience.
- torben-friis 10mo agoUgh, you’re right. It’s like a parallax for the titles. Not really a good impression.
- andrewinardeer 10mo agoWhere is this page's RSS feed?
- mikae1 10mo agoGoogle broke up with RSS in 2013[1]. :D To be fair, they re-implemented feeds for YouTube and added feed support in Google Workspace the other day[2]. So perhaps there's hope. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader [2] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/12/introducing-feeds-app-google-chat.html https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/12/introducing-...
- TekMol 10mo agoSince even after 2 hours nobody is discussing the actual font, let me tell you what comes to my mind when I read anything about Google and design: They got phone design right. I just can't get my head around it that even Apple, which is supposed to be THE design company, is making phones that can't lay on a table without wobbling like a barstool on a crooked floor. It just feels so broken to me. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics. Google phones tackled it with an elegant solution. Thanks for that. I wouldn't know what phone to use if Pixels didn't exist.
- the_gipsy 10mo agoThe irony is that you're still not discussing the font
- lesuorac 10mo agoThat's his point. Since nobody else is, he's not going to either.
- bpev 10mo agoWhat bugs me most is that Apple DID do this (I still hold that iPhone SE 1 is the goat) and then decided to drop it because it wasn't as profitable.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- soanvig 10mo agoToo bad Pixel support for factory-broken screens sucks so my "well designed" Pixel has green vertical line in the middle of the screen. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.
- vbezhenar 10mo agoOriginal iPhone got design right. I don't think there's a single modern smartphone that I like. My latest favourite smartphone was iPhone 4S. No camera bump. Perfect size, fits well in my hand, operable with one thumb. Perfect display size, enough to present all information I need. Perfectly usable without ugly case.
- deafpolygon 10mo ago> The majority of how people experience the Google brand is through typography Ok, who wants to tell them?
- lesuorac 10mo agoUnless you experience Google through the assistant you experience through the typography. You read search results that are rendered via typography.
- qbane 10mo agoTo declare "open source", you have to provide a way for the public to get access to the source code. But there seems to be none at least for the time being.
- the_gipsy 10mo agoCool work on a font, but this page is proof that google is turning the web into some kind of JSON for their app, Chrome. Extremely sluggish on non-Chrome. Starts with a black blank empty page. Fans spinning. Takes way too long to load for just some text and some videos. Clicking a link does some SPA magic that takes me to another black blank page, and takes ages to load. Clicking back doesn't work anymore. I need to reload the entire page, again blank and waiting. Once done loading, scrolling is extremely sluggish. Yes, there are probably some interactive widgets in there, but all that and much more has been done without bogging down the browser like you're running a 3D game on WebGL. Oh, and of course reader mode doesn't work.
- grougnax 10mo agoJust use Chrome on a MacBook Pro M4 like everyone else
- makeitdouble 10mo agoThis flashed back so many of these comments, I unconsciously reached for the downvote button. Well done sir.
- chippiewill 10mo agoUse it on an Air and there aren't even fans to be spun up
- otabdeveloper4 10mo agoNo thanks, I'm good.
- quentindanjou 10mo agoIt's not up to me to use Google's browser. It's up to them to make webpages that work for all.
- FireInsight 10mo agoHuh. Firefox on a mid-range android phone had no issues.
- philipwhiuk 10mo ago> It’s one of the most-served fonts on the internet, clocking in at some 120 billion font requests a month. Isn't this an incredible waste of bandwidth? Surely people only need the font once.
- chippiewill 10mo agoBrowsers made a fundamental change a while back to not share caches between origins because caching it became a side-channel to detecting if someone had visited it before. So now if two different websites embed the same remote font then visitors will have to download it separately for both sites. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning
- lesuorac 10mo agoSurely one of the most popular browsers in the world could ship with some commonly requested fonts and all you'd learn is that they were using chrome which the user-agent said anyways.
- jlengrand 10mo agoI never come to complain about websites, but clicking on this thing made my chrome freeze for a whole second on my MBP. What has Google become xD
- guessmyname 10mo agoIs there a monospaced version of this font? Pretty much every font I try has one or two things that bug me. I’ve spent the last ten years making my own, first in FontForge, now in Glyphs.app, but it’s incredibly time-consuming. I’ll work on it for a while, then give up for months, delete everything, switch to a different font, use it for a few days, start hating it… and end up back at making my own font again. This cycle repeats pretty much every year. You’ll probably want to recommend your favourite font, but trust me, I’ve tried all the well-known ones, and they all have their quirks. Edit: I’m going to try Guguru (“Google” pronounced with a Japanese accent) Sans Code for a few days → https://github.com/yuru7/guguru-sans-code https://github.com/yuru7/guguru-sans-code , created by https://x.com/tawara_san https://x.com/tawara_san
- pityJuke 10mo agoFrom TFA: > Google Sans Mono was created in 2020 to support contexts that needed fixed-width characters for editorial design, at medium and large text sizes. Despite this, it soon got its first big product integration, replacing Roboto Mono in Google Chat. The only problem? Developers hated it. [...] > Recognizing this critical need, a dedicated effort was launched to craft Google Sans Code, a monospaced typeface specifically designed to make code more readable. This involved thorough research into the 20 most common programming languages and how developers interact with code, aiming to make the new coding typeface more visually appealing while reducing the ambiguity of similar-looking letterforms. Based on these insights, Google tasked the Universal Thirst foundry to meticulously focus on specific letters, numbers, and operators to meet these requirements. The result is an eminently readable and surprisingly playful typeface. > Google Sans Code launched as an open-source font in 2025, and is the typeface used to display code in Gemini.
- jorvi 10mo agoWhat is that abomination of a curly brace. It looks like a squiggle that someone had to jot down in a rush. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans+Code https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans+Code
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- elAhmo 10mo agoI wish I had the luxury of spending probably dozens of millions on a meaningless effort like this. Any similar font like this one would do the trick, without the need to have a fancy series of blog posts trying to convince users this font is awesome.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- clircle 10mo agoI find the whole “corporate blogging about fonts” subculture really funny
- browningstreet 10mo agoGo to a type conference someday...
- bsimpson 10mo agoThey've served 113 trillion: https://fonts.google.com/analytics https://fonts.google.com/analytics They're entitled to take fonts seriously.
- grumbel 10mo agoWhy do new fonts still make "l" and "I" indistinguishable?
- bluecalm 10mo agoUtility is no longer a core design principle in Silicon Valley these days.
- Ferret7446 10mo agoIt's hard to make them distinguishable for a sans serif font, I think it's acceptable to give up for a sans font
- eviks 10mo agoHow is it hard to add curved base to l?
- bluecalm 10mo agoOther than changing my mouse cursor to a circle that just makes it unintuitive to use can someone explain the point of a circle in the right upper corner that expands automatically into two icons: search and a hamburger menu? The "saved" space is not used for anything anyway. Isn't it just a bad design that makes navigation harder for no reason? Clickable elements seem to be underlined with the exception of one: the Google Design logo in the left upper corner. It seems inconsistent and confusing. Are those new principles of designing things - making it more confusing and more difficult to find (and then click) for 0 gain? EDIT: also scrolling all the way down is difficult because random stuff block the page, gets loaded. There is "Privacy & Terms" link at the bottom that is impossible to reach because of it. The design is just terrible, wtf Google?
- stevage 10mo agoTook me so long to realise that "Google Sans Flex" is the name of the font. I read the title as "creating Google without using Flex [whatever that is]"
- pimlottc 10mo agoYes! I had a similar confusion. I thought perhaps it mean “how we made Google Sans impressive” or something like that. It’s not until halfway into the article that “Google Sans Flex” is mentioned specifically as a different font from “Google Sans”. “Google Sans” vs “Google Sans Text” is confusing as well…
- bsimpson 10mo agoFlex is the brand they use for their variable fonts. Roboto has Roboto Flex. Google Sans has Google Sans Flex.
- _fzslm 10mo agoIt's a really pretty, humanist font, and those tend to be my favourite fonts. I was never the biggest fan of the grotesk-style Roboto/Inter/Univers, especially in the context of a user interface, which should feel a little bit friendlier imo. I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive. This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.
- numpad0 10mo ago> Product teams eagerly adopted Google Sans and Google Sans Text but soon highlighted a new issue: Billions of people around the globe use non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese, ... The effort was monumental. It meant meticulously crafting hundreds of thousands of new ... from the flowing curves of Arabic to the complex strokes of Japanese and the distinct ... What I know about CJK font is that one does not simply make a CJK font: they're nearly always made by modifying something existing. Even Google's previous attempt at it was made by a joint multi-year project with Adobe and bunch of experts from various companies tasked to fix what are locally sticks out for each relevant regions without breaking overall theme to make a total of 4-5 language specific fonts with major bugfixes happening for few times over couple years. That above quoted part reads to me like "oh and there's of course the fusion version of this micro nuclear because that's important", which makes little sense, so I searched around a bit just in case, and there doesn't seem to be non-Latin versions of Google Sans. The credit section does not mention obvious source of easily licensable CJK font other than "U+ Type", either. My assumption would be that either they made an assumption that a font in CJK can't take that long relative to font in Latin, or they couldn't get one in favorable terms and the full version is proprietary. Or is it really coming later? That would be interesting if that's the case.
- sorcercode 10mo agohaving spent a lot of time on finding the right monospace fonts, one of the things i've noticed, that's particularly important in the context of coding is a visual symmetry. some fonts individually have beautiful glyps or characters but when you preview them with blocks and blocks of code, there's a quirkiness that throws of that symmetry. I'll give a few examples: - Mono Lisa font https://www.monolisa.dev/ https://www.monolisa.dev/ (truly gorgeous font) - Recursive https://www.recursive.design/ https://www.recursive.design/ (particularly note the casual axis) I bring this up because Google Sans Code, is super quirky; preview a few characters individually and they look good; put it all together in real code, and it's just not as smooth visually.