6 ms·
Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface
- OhMeadhbh 10mo agoIsn't this from the people who hate Calibri?
- GaryBluto 10mo agoThis predates the Calibri-Times debacle by quite a few years.
- hlieberman 10mo agoNo, this was a project by 18F and the U.S. Web Design group that debued several years back.
- 1f60c 10mo agoNo, looks like it was started late in Obama's second term. As for the current guys, they would probably use Instrument Serif for body text if they could.
- drivers99 10mo agoWent down a short rabbit hole from this comment and they actually are using a condensed serif font like that on www.whitehouse.gov titles at the moment.
- Muromec 10mo agoI googled Instrument Serif and google fonts page is telling me something with it's choice of lorem ipsum https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Instrument+Serif https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Instrument+Serif
- Mountain_Skies 10mo agoThat's just the State Department. The federal government is a huge amalgamation of agencies, each with its own set of goals, responsibilities, and quirks. Even down at the local level, I've had a hard time getting the county and the city to agree on who owns the storm drain where the neighborhood connects to the highway.
- PTOB 10mo agoAs a utility designer in my day job who frequents HN for real fun, this comment hits hard.
- bbx 10mo agoFunnily enough, if you Google "Calibri", the page itself is in Calibri. I've never seen that happen for any other font.
- latchup 10mo agoIt also works for Open Sans, on my Linux system at least. Probably only works for fonts that are installed and/or can be licensed for this.
- RobotToaster 10mo agoWorks for comic sans.
- sollewitt 10mo agoIt’s an Easter egg, also for Times New Roman and a few others.
- Ethan_Barry 10mo agoTry Garamond!
- GaryBluto 10mo agoI must say it's very pleasant. Much better than a lot of the fonts I see on the web these days.
- joallard 10mo agoWeirdly, it reminds me of Aptos, the new default font in Microsoft products.
- maxloh 10mo agoTo clarify, it is the default font for office documents, not the default UI font.
- sneela 10mo agoAs much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves. Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled reading them -- once in front of a class :) This is why my favorite sans-serif typeface has been (and will always be) IBM Plex Sans [1]. It's an open font [2]. I have all my laptops and desktops set to using the IBM Plex typefaces, including browser overrides. If only there were a way to do it system-wide on my Android phone... [1]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/ https://www.ibm.com/plex/ [2]: https://github.com/IBM/plex/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/IBM/plex/blob/master/LICENSE.txt Preview: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text=IIIIII%20LLLLLL%20111111 https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text...
- dingaling 10mo agoLikewise the absence of a stroke through the zero. Without context, for example in a Wifi password, indistinguishable from uppercase letter O.
- smarx007 10mo agoIBM Plex is very good. Recently, I have been enjoying https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/ for interfaces a bit more (with ss02 for body and ss02+tnum for tables activated).
- ramoz 10mo agoInter has also become my default.
- sneela 10mo agoAh, it initially appeared that the capital I and the lowercase L have identical-looking glyphs. But scrolling down, I see the ss02 and tnum features add noticeable glyphs. Looks like a nice typeface.
- homebrewer 10mo ago
- skibidithink 10mo agoAre there any designers here who can explain when the differences between Public Sans and Roboto Sans and when to use one or the other?
- danvayn 10mo agoI don’t think it’s that straightforward to answer that. They’re both body fonts. Public Sans is a bit wider (as it isn’t geometric) and roboto seems a bit thicker. Besides these bits which can be worked around, they’re functionally too similar. Maybe you’d prefer to use Public Sans because it’s less condensed which works well for readability of smaller fonts that would be in a body of text. But you can just adjust a number of things to get what you’re looking for here. A more vague answer I can think of is that it’s preferential and doesn’t matter to most — with designers just being highly particular about preferences, in a way that isn’t really open to objective choice. One font may display slightly better but the other font pairs better with the title font. Or we’ll look for specific issues that I don’t really see in either fonts.
- tracker1 10mo agoI'd say Public Sans is definitely a bit more readable for me (some vision impairment). Was kind of hard to tell why I liked it so much first looking at it today.. I saw a comparison of it with a few other Serif fonts and it's definitely the one I like the most visually myself. Will probably switch to using it moving forward over Roboto Sans, which has been my go to for nearly a decade.
- amelius 10mo agoI must say I like Libre Franklin (which they compare it to in the github repo) better, especially the rounded vertices.
- gorfian_robot 10mo ago[flagged]
- treetalker 10mo agoIt was Marco Rubio, and his ukase was limited to Department of State documents. We can, at least, thank our stars that Rubio doesn't presume to lord over the entire government as his master presumes to lord over everything else.
- HelloUsername 10mo agoPrevious discussion 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607371
- dang 10mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607371 - April 2019 (237 comments)
- tolerance 10mo agoI want to like it but I feel like it neuters everything I like about Franklin Gothic/Libre Franklin. For some reason I always thought that Plus Jakarta Sans was forked from on Public Sans. <https://tokotype.github.io/plusjakarta-sans/ https://tokotype.github.io/plusjakarta-sans/> Which for some other reason always makes me think of the book The Jakarta Method: <https://www.librarything.com/work/24301785/t/The-Jakarta-Method-Washingtons-Anticommunist-Crusade-and-the-Mass-Murder-Program-that-Shaped-Our-World https://www.librarything.com/work/24301785/t/The-Jakarta-Met...>
- ronbenton 10mo agoanything on digital.gov is at best on life support given 18F was disbanded and much of the government digital service efforts have been neglected
- tootie 10mo agoThe Secretary of State recently decreed that sans serif fonts were woke and mandated all communications use Times New Roman.
- stephenhuey 10mo agoI doubt they got the memo.
- faefox 10mo agoGod, I was so hopeful that you were joking but I guess I should know better by now.
- nicbou 10mo agoI thought it was a joke, then I checked. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/trump-times-new-roman-font-return-state-department https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/trump-times-... The quote is milder and the "woke" bit was added by others, but the context is essentially correct. In an interview, the font's creator took it as a compliment and was a good sport about it.
- rpastuszak 10mo agoI'd say “wasteful” diversity move == woke in this context, not sure if that's milder. Just another distraction thrown at us to keep us at each other's throats. (+ keeping better alignment with the carrot man's branding) Psychoanalysing politicians aside, serif fonts used to be considered more legible, but that doesn't hold any more that much (e.g. much of research shows that people tend to underestimate familiarity when assessing legibility).
- dheera 10mo ago
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 10mo agoWhat does "strong" mean here? Doesn't it contradict "neutral"? Anyway, the "c" and "e" are closing in too much.
- stephenhuey 10mo agoSwitzerland is strong and neutral. Pardon my little joke, as I have lots of Swiss friends. I hear ya.
- Muromec 10mo agoMasculine, not-woke (asleep), but not like a sleepy Joe, like a toddler who takes a nap.
- ZoomZoomZoom 10mo agoAnother generic limited font that isn't solving anything. No Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, not even Greek letters (poor frats and physicists). I understand it's a product of the US government, but don't they have international relations requiring using characters other than Latin? It's not even a recent font, so you'd think inclusivity was important. So much for the cultural pluralism. And a site without a character table, which means I had to download the font to check if it's of any use. Not a great job.
- jeffpersonified 10mo agoLooking forward to the National Design Studio getting it's arms around this
- paulvnickerson 10mo agowhy is the federal government using tax dollars to develop fonts?
- recursive 10mo agoThat's where most of their budget comes from I think.
- e2le 10mo agoIs this a problem?
- 6SixTy 10mo ago$1M to the US Government is like dropping pennies, less than that actually. By the READMEs, this font is actually a modification to another font and more sleuthing revealed that the author actually worked on this in his spare time.
- paulvnickerson 10mo agodrop enough pennies here and there and it adds up
- 6SixTy 10mo agoThat's a comical amount of pennies
- dmschulman 10mo agoThey didn't develop a new font, they improved an existing font that's packaged inside a larger design library used for building government websites. Creating a standard that states, cities, municipalities, townships, etc can utilize for digital services improves access for all.
- qoez 10mo agoNo way fonts isn't a solved problem by now.
- pclark 10mo agoThis is like saying design is a solved problem.
- tracker1 10mo agoThere are a lot of very strong opinions on relatively minor variances. I really like this font, but apparently it isn't nearly as complete as some alternatives. I've tended towards fonts that I just find readable at the relatively small sizes most sites tend to use. I like Roboto a lot, I like this slightly more... I'm not as big on the Libre Franklin it's also being compared to. It's really personal and some people care more or less than others depending on their needs, and even visibility concerns.
- tracker1 10mo agoNifty... looks pretty nice. related: USWDS React Component Library https://github.com/trussworks/react-uswds https://github.com/trussworks/react-uswds
- abdisalan 10mo agoLooks nearly identical to Helvetica when I switch back and forth with inspector tool. Some letters are different and there’s some kerning changes but large parts look the same. at least to my untrained eye
- joduplessis 10mo agoPhew, that is very close to Plex.
- bobdvb 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiresias_%28typeface%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiresias_%28typeface%29
- notepad0x90 10mo agoDidn't they throw a fit over Calibri being "woke" or something recently? I hope this department got a clearance from the whitehouse on how woke it feels. Apparently, the previous admin worded it using terms like "inclusive" (of the visually impaired, adhd,etc..) and that was somehow "woke". I wonder if this font is a direct consequence of that.
- mattnewton 10mo agoThis font was created as part of the US digital service during the second Obama administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Web_Design_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Web_Design_System
- JensRantil 10mo agoThe "Accessibility support" link gives me a 404 Not Found. I guess that's too close to any kind of DEI the US government would allow these days...
- TedHerman 10mo agoLooking at yet another new sans typeface reminds me of looking through all the shades of white at a paint store. After a while, I just can't tell the differences or why they matter. Other people seem to have a talent for paint colors. Maybe same with fonts?