5 ms·

Nebula Sans

473 points by GavinAnderegg 1mo ago

1attice 1mo ago
A handsome font and a worthwhile contribution. Satisfying. Nebula notches yet another mark.
- etdznots 1mo ago
  Great! Sounds like you might need some assistance, just let me know if you want to tackle that weekend project you’ve been thinking shoot, practice a new skill, or just chat, I’m right here and happy to help.
  - cobertos 1mo ago
    Gave me a laugh, but comment was also originally dead'd because I assume sounds too much like AI. (For obvious reasons)
  - 1attice 1mo ago
    The horrible thing is I wrote that all by hand
- 1attice 1mo ago
  ..downvoted. OK. Perhaps I didn't say enough: - I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts - The use of Whitney as a target font is also interesting. I like this font a lot but a lot of nice fonts have annoying properties for web dev (looking at you Frutiger) esp around numbers. I have wasted life years fiddling with tabular number presentation. There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)
pjerem 1mo ago
You cannot be a fancy startup if you don't have your own font I guess.
varispeed 1mo ago
I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.
- limaoscarjuliet 1mo ago
  Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.
  - dkdbejwi383 1mo ago
    And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.
    - swiftcoder 1mo ago
      I've been making the Basque burnt cheesecake every year lately, it really is a delight
- hoofedear 1mo ago
  It'll be the same day we reach the state of having the perfect programming language
- futuraperdita 1mo ago
  That happened in 1957, but we can’t leave well enough alone.
- EstanislaoStan 1mo ago
  I submit to you that I designed •the• perfect font while making one for my microgame recently: https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- mihaelm 1mo ago
gralab 1mo ago
Waste of time and money on their part. There are more than enough typefaces in this world that look just like this one.
- t098i3 1mo ago
  According to their website this saved them a lot of money, plus they also made a documentary about making the font which is content for Nebula.
  - celsoazevedo 1mo ago
    Where did the savings come from? Maybe they were licensing a paid font? I doubt saved them more money than using a free font.
    - cleech 1mo ago
      They were licensing Whitney SSm, they switched to a Source Sans derived typeface to save those costs but forked and adjusted it to more closely match Whitney SSm to minimize brand disruption.
    - t098i3 1mo ago
      In the documentary video, their CCO explained if they used a different existing font they would have had to rework a lot of their media for the different font metrics, while making their own allowed them to have a drop-in replacement.
  - ChrisRR 1mo ago
    Saved them money on licensing their existing font, so why didn't they just move to another cheaper or free font?
    - t098i3 1mo ago
      Because those fonts have different metrics, so they wouldn't have been drop-in replacements, they would have had to re-do all of their branded media. Loose programming analogy: The free replacements had a slightly different "API" (metrics) that would have required adjusting hundreds or thousands of "call sites" (media using the font), so instead they made their own "API-compatible" (metrically compatible) replacement that dropped straight in. This is all covered in the documentary short about the font.
urbnspacecowboy 1mo ago
(2025) Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591225
Gualdrapo 1mo ago
The differences are really, really subtle, I'd bet most people (including me) would have a really hard time telling them apart. I agree with that one person (I can't recall when or where I read this) who said modern typography is getting so frivolous about doing personalised typographic families for startups instead of extending the existing ones to cover more languages and scripts than latin. But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")
- mock-possum 1mo ago
  “For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda
- kissgyorgy 1mo ago
  I'm not sure we are looking at the same font, this one looks way crispier and more readable than any other font I have ever seen before.
- bonoboTP 1mo ago
  Typography is just a nice geeky topic. Happy for the people who could make Nebula pay them for fussing around with a font. It's clearly bikeshedding and irrelevant though. If their previous font was too expensive, they should have switched to an existing free font. Their priority should be the streaming offerings. When the business isn't working, it's not the furniture that you have to replace. I one subscribed to CuriosityStream and Nebula in a combo deal, but didn't end up watching it much. I find them to be overproduced edutainment that's often too plastic for my taste. A kind of Netflix but for IFL science redditor types. I rather prefer low production quality YouTube videos from oddball makers who just show something cool, explain something obscure with a simple slideshow etc.
- tobr 1mo ago
  The differences are even subtler if you compare it to Source Sans (which it is derived from) rather than Whitney (which it is replacing). I posted this comparison last time Nebula Sans were on the HN front page: https://imgur.com/JPwgYkj https://imgur.com/JPwgYkj
- 1mo ago
fredley 1mo ago
> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic Good God I am sick to the back teeth of the neutral aesthetic. If you're going to spend all that money, can we have some _opinionated_ typefaces please? Especially against the backdrop of AI making everything look and feel exactly the same everywhere, the last thing anybody needs is another neutral, characterless, soulless typeface.
- kixiQu 1mo ago
  I definitely agree with your sentiment in general. However, I'll note that I find this sans serif to have a nicer feel than many I see these days (even among humanist ones) and it's cool that they've managed to achieve that while being acceptably inoffensive for mainstream use
- duderific 1mo ago
  There's something so ... bland about this typeface. I get no feeling from it whatsoever. It's like the textual embodiment of the AI conversational style.
  - DiscourseFan 1mo ago
    Its very boring. This trend started with the Nazis taking away Fraktur. Bland typefaces=nazism (this is what Adorno would say probably).
t098i3 1mo ago
from https://nebula.tv/nebulasans https://nebula.tv/nebulasans: > When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.
- kwanbix 1mo ago
  Which they license for 30 per year? EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.
dbbk 1mo ago
Is it just me or does this look really... cheap?
OskarS 1mo ago
It's a little beside the point of the post, but I just want to fly a flag for Nebula: I subscribed solely to get early versions of Jet Lag: The Game, but I'm finding myself watching it more and more! It has many of the channels I would go to YouTube for, but I've also discovered several really good ones that I had never heard of. And it has a similar feel to Kagi, in the sense of "freeing" yourself from the algorithm. It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month? What does this tell Google about me?". Same thing with all the big streaming services. With Nebula, no such worry. The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform, it's just a bunch of high-quality videos and channels that I can watch with no fuss. It's remarkable how nice that feels in 2026. Really highly recommended.
- xd1936 1mo ago
  Seconded. My only complaint is the bad buffering on the TV versions of the Nebula app. It starts out so low quality and takes forever to snap to 1080p, with no option to override quality, on symmetrical 2.5GBe.
  - OskarS 1mo ago
    Obviously YMMV, but I haven't had any issues like that, the quality of the videos is the same I get in the YouTube app. They take a few seconds longer to start though.
- bonoboTP 1mo ago
  > It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month? You can remove videos from your watch history. Or you can open the link in a private/incognito window. Google may still be able to connect it but I don't think it will impact your recommendations that way.
  - OskarS 1mo ago
    Yes, of course you can, but this sense of always having to curate your watch history and hide from the algorithm is just not there for Nebula. I guess it's different from person to person, but it's remarkable how freeing it feels to me to use a service where that isn't a concern. I'm watching what I want to watch, not what the algorithm is manipulating me to click on. Maybe it will enshittify like most everything else, but it hasn't so far, and for now I'm a very happy customer.
azatom 1mo ago
Pipe, capital i, small l are just line Edit: WOW I did not know if that I write WHAT I don't like, then I will get downwoted here, like on other sites for pure hatred, ynews really goes down
furyofantares 1mo ago
I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font
- reaperducer 1mo ago
  I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.
dmackerman 1mo ago
Looks nice. I've personally been obsessed with Atkinson Hyperlegible. Not sure what it is about it but it's just so pleasing.
- strenholme 1mo ago
  Atkinson Hyperlegible, like Nebula Sans (or, if you will, Source Sans) is an open source font available under the OFL license.
delta_p_delta_x 1mo ago
I posted this comment[1] in the previous discussion. Reposting here, because I don't like slightly-derivative typefaces that are just FontForge tweaks of a typeface that was designed from the ground up, even less if they have given it an entirely new name. All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans. Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop. At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs. I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode. Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs. The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too. I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands. Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow. Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI. Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591662
- xigoi 1mo ago
Daiz 1mo ago
Having your own font is nice and all, but I wish Nebula would spend at least as much time on their subtitle rendering as they've spent on this marketing site... The subtitle rendering on Nebula is worse than what Youtube offers, and Youtube isn't exactly some pinnacle of subtitle rendering either. I'd really expect better from a premium service.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
fishgoesblub 1mo ago
It's always interesting to see companies spend time, money, and make a big deal (websites even, apparently) solely for a Sans Serif font. One that, at least on my system, is blocked by uBlock Origin and gets converted into Noto Sans (which should be default, screw your fonts, respect my browser's font please!)
- cassepipe 1mo ago
  I don't have the same animosity against web fonts but yes I realized I could just do that on Firefox and I appreciate relying on the same font across web pages. I don't feel like I am missing out on much and aesthetically I like the idea of reusing what I already have instead of downloading a new font on every page
- isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago
  I’ll never understand why you lot pretend like graphic design doesn’t matter. Thats so childish and narrow minded it borders on pathetic. C’mon now. Let’s act like the grown ups we all (hopefully) are.
frantzmiccoli 1mo ago
Really enjoyed the video! That kind of thing is a great way to build branding!
hakfoo 1mo ago
It's interesting to see their intent to make an explicit drop-in replacement. I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".
Aurornis 1mo ago
I like this font and the license it comes with: > The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works. Very nice. I’ve paid for fonts for personal use in the past but I was always nervous about accidentally putting a screenshot or other incidental capture somewhere that might get distributed and violate the license.
- CharlesW 1mo ago
  I don't believe they had a choice, since it's a derivative of Adobe's OTF-licensed Source Sans.
- zerocrates 1mo ago
  The SIL Open Font License is pretty much the standard for freely releasing fonts. Poke around on Google Fonts or other places that have freely-licensed fonts and you'll find the vast majority use OFL. Adobe's Source (the basis for this one), Google's Roboto and Google Sans, the very common Inter, Lato and Open Sans, coding/monospace fonts like Iosevka, JetBrains Mono... chances are that a free font you're aware of uses the OFL, particularly if it's even vaguely recent.
elAhmo 1mo ago
Oh man, I wish I had free time and money to spend designing and releasing a new font.
- isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago
  Maybe if you spent less time being snarky on topics you clearly have no understanding of you’d get your wish. The implication that this is an effort entirely devoid of value is so ridiculous it borders on stupidity.
bearjaws 1mo ago
Swear whenever your company decides to invent its own font its like a version of "The Headquarters Curse". You had nothing else better to spend your teams time on so might as well make a new font that 10% of your customers will notice if you are lucky. They could have just picked any other font and used it. It's a video streaming website, how much text content is there vs video content? Headquarter Curse: A theory suggesting that companies often experience setbacks or decline after constructing a lavish new headquarters.
- brokencode 1mo ago
  Idk, how much could it cost to design a new font like this? Probably like tens of thousands of dollars? This doesn’t seem like an extravagant expense to me. And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
  - nullfern 1mo ago
    For me personally, I feel like a lot of tech companies are bloated and a lot of people are justifying their salary by doing unnecessary projects. In many cases, it's all internal and no skin off noses such as this font project. In other cases, it means the UI changes every 4 to 6 months or even worse, the software becomes so bloated with "features" it becomes unusable so a clean replacement comes on the scene then the cycle repeats. Sometimes, I feel, it would be better for companies to clap their hands and go "We did it, we solved the problem" then just stop. Keep the infrastructure running, do bug fixes, listen to customers on new features or changes but otherwise not do product churn for the sake of justifying salaries. To expand on my view in an abstract way, when constructing a building construction workers, architects, project managers, and the whole cadre are hired then the building is built then all those people move onto new projects. Continual development of software is like if construction never stopped so that the construction crew still had jobs. A construction site should strive to transition from architects, cranes, and concrete trucks to maintenance staff, mop buckets, and screw drivers.
  - georgemcbay 1mo ago
    > And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing. Nebula Sans is a derivative of Adobe's Source Sans which is available to use for free for any purpose include commercial under the SIL Open Font License (the same license Nebula Sans has to use as a derivative of Source Sans). So they could have just used Source Sans for free and virtually nobody but the most dedicated font nerds would have known the difference between that font and Nebula's tweak of it if not for the PR announcement. All that said, I don't care what Nebula spends their money or time on, so I'm not saying they shouldn't have had this font made... but doing it wasn't a money-saving move.
meerita 1mo ago
I went to the website and the letter-spacing is something they maybe forgot to add to everything. I just tried letter-spacing: -0.05rem; and everything looks more readeable and the font shines even better.
- SubiculumCode 1mo ago
  How did you do that? I noticed the spacing was very wide between leters,it bothered me.
  - abcd_f 1mo ago
    F12
  - meerita 1mo ago
    Opened the inspector, add letter-spacing to a general rule they have for all text elements.
- t098i3 1mo ago
  I think that was intentional so the font would fit into all the places they were previously using the paid font without reflowing all the content.
thinkingtoilet 1mo ago
The font looks great. However, I get the same sense reading bios of Grateful Dead cover bands all pretending what their doing is different when I read descriptions of fonts. You're not "forging a new legacy with a fresh take on the Dead", you're just another cover band. And this is just another font.
- leokennis 1mo ago
  If you’re a startup but you don’t have a blog post with some wishy washy doodah showcasing your own personal font, its cute glyphs, its heritage in 1800’s Europe and some translucent overlays showing how it’s definitely different but not really compared to your initial bog standard font, are you really a startup?
doginasuit 1mo ago
My favorite font of all time is Fira Sans. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Sans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Sans Understated yet elegant, you wouldn't immediately notice it is different from your default sans-serif. But it has a soothing regularity that makes it easy to absorb in large quantities and the lowercase g is a quiet encouragement to drink your tea with your pinky raised.
- ashton314 1mo ago
  Erik Spiekermann is a genius. He made Fira Sans to be a total antithesis to Helvetica. Now, I like Helvetica, but I also love the pure character of Fira Sans and it’s my go-to sans serif. Here’s a better link for Fira Sans: https://carrois.com/fira/ https://carrois.com/fira/ Also, if you have Fira Sans installed on your computer, you can use it in Slack with `/slackfont Fira Sans’
  - bugsmith 1mo ago
    I was excited about trying that in slack but got: > /slackfont is not a valid command. In Slack, messages that start with “/” are interpreted as commands.
    - ashton314 1mo ago
      Only works on desktop regrettably
nnevatie 1mo ago
I swear, whenever there is a new font, there’s a documentary of its making.
- isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago
  For good reason. Typefaces often have fascinating beginnings and design processes.
astrolx 1mo ago
Is it that different from Source Sans?
oinoom 1mo ago
> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif What is a humanist font?
- Pinus 1mo ago
  A font that takes some characteristics from certain kinds of renaissance-era handwriting. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_t... .
- mryingster 1mo ago
  Not an expert, but I believe humanist would be somewhat antithetical to brutalist. Where brutalism has hard edges/corners and are "cold" humanist designs have fewer right angles and are more warm/inviting.
mono442 1mo ago
it looks like every other sans serif font
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
yoz-y 1mo ago
I subscribe to nebula. However what i would really like to have is to automatically mark any videos watched on nebula as watched on YouTube.
- Dormeno 1mo ago
  Same, and I'd like a browser extension to tell me automatically if the same or a better version of the video on YT is on Nebula.
dramm 1mo ago
In what Universe does worrying about the typeface of your startup effort matter? Google for one has some just lovely free to use high quality typefaces. Do I care about design, hell yes, for one I worked for Adobe helping introduce InDesign, etc. but this makes no sense.
- iuvyfthknjv 1mo ago
  Ah, so you are one of the many to blame for InDesign’s many, and I mean MANY, annoyances, weirdness, quirkiness, failures to follow other Adobe app standards and general fuck ups? Good to know.
bbx 1mo ago
Feels like a mix of Open Sans and Source Sans Pro. These were all over the web about 12 years ago. They got well with Montserrat in all caps and Merriweather: https://www.fubiz.net/ https://www.fubiz.net/ Whitney was the main font of Stripe when Benjamin De Cock initially redesigned the brand. It was one of the most beautiful websites I'd ever seen (and still is): https://dribbble.com/shots/2974913-Home https://dribbble.com/shots/2974913-Home
mwkaufma 1mo ago
I know it's not just for the branded inverted asterisk, but is it just for the branded inverted asterisk?
- cocodill 1mo ago
  it's inverted asterisk. https://jmgbb.com/i/i4kTG25WrF https://jmgbb.com/i/i4kTG25WrF
m3kw9 1mo ago
subscription for a font is some crazy work
- nozzlegear 1mo ago
  What?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
JackOneSG 1mo ago
I'd like to have a single continuous stroke dollar sign and variable font.
y1n0 1mo ago
I must be the only person in the world that thinks so many of these fonts are casually indistinguishable. I feel like I’m reading reviews of wines. This font has chocolatey overtones that bring the reader to a meditative state of hyperflow.
bjourne 1mo ago
Very nice font! However, I wish the default line height would have been a little bigger. It's a bit too dense for long paragraphs.
sgc 1mo ago
Rather late to comment here, but are there plans to support Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and other scripts? I love the readability and elegance of this font in English and Greek, and would like to use it at CatholicLibrary.org.
lovegrenoble 1mo ago
Nice font, I like it
dmitrygr 1mo ago
Am I just an uncultured heathen if all of these fonts i see posted here once every few weeks all look precisely the same to me, without a side-by-side? And even with one, they look minutely, irrelevantly different. I do not get eye fatigue nor any other effects people name when looking at ... any of them. Do I just need to absorb more culture and take an art class or five? Am I missing something obvious? Genuinely, can someone please clue me in?
amanfromsolan 1mo ago
pretty close to how Source Sans looks like
FlameWolf 1mo ago
Looks like a variant of Trebuchet MS.
kuuuzya 1mo ago
Would it be in Google fonts?
3eb7988a1663 1mo ago
I am not a font person, but is the "book" weight a standard thing? I have never seen this before.
- burnoutdv 1mo ago
  I was wondering the same..and got no answer. I _could_ ask an LLM but I prefer no to. On the other hand..this is the kind of question that is really hard to google..even if one got 2016 google. The word "book" and "font" in one query will yield stupid results that are not what i asked for. So I went the way of lowest resistance, and to paraphrase, the LLM said, and it might be entirely wrong that Book is something between Light and Medium, a text weight that is supposed to be better readable for longer texts. So Something around 350/400 weight. Some fonts just use "Regular" With my new "knowledge" I went about and googled and found this: https://gist.github.com/lukaszgrolik/5849599 https://gist.github.com/lukaszgrolik/5849599 So Strangers whos name is just a hex number, the LLM seems to be right. And that is your answer.
impure 1mo ago
What is going on with the kerning in ‘print’? Yuck.
- ilumanty 1mo ago
  Free fonts always do free advertising for paid fonts made by actual professionals
andai 1mo ago
Well they definitely nailed "neutral" — I kept scrolling, waiting for the font to show up!
xg15 1mo ago
It's kind of funny how there is all that talk on the page about a new "humanist" font and important typographic and aesthetical considerations - and in the end, the entire reason for this were licensing fees... But on that note, can you really call it your "own" font if the differences to your "inspiration" are so tiny you literally need to overlay the texts to even see them? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but wouldn't this be a textbook example of a "derived work"? The page also explicitly mentions the relationship to the base fonts several times, so it's not even hidden. Did the owners of Whitney SSm demand outrageous license fees, but also permitted unrestricted creation of derived works in their license? That would seem like a massive oversight on their part. Also, not a typography nerd, but what is the wider utility of now having three fonts that are barely distinguishable from each other and only exist to evade each other's licensing restrictions?
pmkary 1mo ago
I for one love this website. Reminds me of ~2010ish designs. I miss those days. And who cares how much they spent on the typeface, was their money; I'm glad to have a new beautiful typeface for free.
ChrisRR 1mo ago
Did it need a new font? Would none of the thousands of fonts already available have done the job?
- phartenfeller 1mo ago
  You can apply that argument to almost everything in capitalism. But in this case here: who gets hurt and maybe they enjoyed creating it.
msla 1mo ago
Ah, sans-serif, where you can't tell the difference between "Weird Al" and "Weird AI" because who needs letters that don't collide, right?
- aidenn0 1mo ago
  There are many sans-serif fonts that distinguish the lower-l and upper-i. For some reason they aren't as popular as the ones that do not. Perhaps the popularity of Helvetica (and other neo-grotesque typefaces) caused this.
codeflo 1mo ago
They say it's a modified version Source Sans, but then don't compare it with Source Sans to show the differences. The only comparison is with their previous, unrelated font (Whitney SSm). Why?
katspaugh 1mo ago
Cute font! Round, like we’re trending towards Comic Sans but still professional.
iuvyfthknjv 1mo ago
It’s a good font. Nothing special about it. Not remarkable in any way, but not bad either. Just a perfectly OK font. Not sure why this is on HN but here we are.
isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago
Why is everyone here acting like they shut down operations on all divisions and teams JUST to design and build this one font? I’m willing to bet that the design team that worked on this font was not in charge of coding, business, finances, deals or anything else besides design. Is it a revolutionary font? Not in the slightest. It’s just a “fine” font for all intents and purposes. But let’s not play this childish game of “they shouldn’t have wasted time with this and should have done that instead!”. We’re all grown ups here (hopefully), we ought to know better.
zestyping 1mo ago
It's a crime in this day and age to make a new font with an uppercase I and lowercase L that look the same. It's hard to believe people are still designing new fonts with this glaring error. In 2026!

Nebula Sans

473 points by GavinAnderegg 1mo ago

1attice 1mo ago

A handsome font and a worthwhile contribution. Satisfying. Nebula notches yet another mark.

etdznots 1mo ago
Great! Sounds like you might need some assistance, just let me know if you want to tackle that weekend project you’ve been thinking shoot, practice a new skill, or just chat, I’m right here and happy to help.
- cobertos 1mo ago
  Gave me a laugh, but comment was also originally dead'd because I assume sounds too much like AI. (For obvious reasons)
- 1attice 1mo ago
  The horrible thing is I wrote that all by hand
1attice 1mo ago
..downvoted. OK. Perhaps I didn't say enough: - I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts - The use of Whitney as a target font is also interesting. I like this font a lot but a lot of nice fonts have annoying properties for web dev (looking at you Frutiger) esp around numbers. I have wasted life years fiddling with tabular number presentation. There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)

pjerem 1mo ago

You cannot be a fancy startup if you don't have your own font I guess.

varispeed 1mo ago

I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.

limaoscarjuliet 1mo ago
Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.
- dkdbejwi383 1mo ago
  And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.
  - swiftcoder 1mo ago
    I've been making the Basque burnt cheesecake every year lately, it really is a delight
hoofedear 1mo ago
It'll be the same day we reach the state of having the perfect programming language
futuraperdita 1mo ago
That happened in 1957, but we can’t leave well enough alone.
EstanislaoStan 1mo ago
I submit to you that I designed •the• perfect font while making one for my microgame recently: https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
mihaelm 1mo ago

gralab 1mo ago

Waste of time and money on their part. There are more than enough typefaces in this world that look just like this one.

t098i3 1mo ago
According to their website this saved them a lot of money, plus they also made a documentary about making the font which is content for Nebula.
- celsoazevedo 1mo ago
  Where did the savings come from? Maybe they were licensing a paid font? I doubt saved them more money than using a free font.
  - cleech 1mo ago
    They were licensing Whitney SSm, they switched to a Source Sans derived typeface to save those costs but forked and adjusted it to more closely match Whitney SSm to minimize brand disruption.
  - t098i3 1mo ago
    In the documentary video, their CCO explained if they used a different existing font they would have had to rework a lot of their media for the different font metrics, while making their own allowed them to have a drop-in replacement.
- ChrisRR 1mo ago
  Saved them money on licensing their existing font, so why didn't they just move to another cheaper or free font?
  - t098i3 1mo ago
    Because those fonts have different metrics, so they wouldn't have been drop-in replacements, they would have had to re-do all of their branded media. Loose programming analogy: The free replacements had a slightly different "API" (metrics) that would have required adjusting hundreds or thousands of "call sites" (media using the font), so instead they made their own "API-compatible" (metrically compatible) replacement that dropped straight in. This is all covered in the documentary short about the font.

urbnspacecowboy 1mo ago

(2025) Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591225

Gualdrapo 1mo ago

The differences are really, really subtle, I'd bet most people (including me) would have a really hard time telling them apart. I agree with that one person (I can't recall when or where I read this) who said modern typography is getting so frivolous about doing personalised typographic families for startups instead of extending the existing ones to cover more languages and scripts than latin. But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")

mock-possum 1mo ago
“For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda
kissgyorgy 1mo ago
I'm not sure we are looking at the same font, this one looks way crispier and more readable than any other font I have ever seen before.
bonoboTP 1mo ago
Typography is just a nice geeky topic. Happy for the people who could make Nebula pay them for fussing around with a font. It's clearly bikeshedding and irrelevant though. If their previous font was too expensive, they should have switched to an existing free font. Their priority should be the streaming offerings. When the business isn't working, it's not the furniture that you have to replace. I one subscribed to CuriosityStream and Nebula in a combo deal, but didn't end up watching it much. I find them to be overproduced edutainment that's often too plastic for my taste. A kind of Netflix but for IFL science redditor types. I rather prefer low production quality YouTube videos from oddball makers who just show something cool, explain something obscure with a simple slideshow etc.
tobr 1mo ago
The differences are even subtler if you compare it to Source Sans (which it is derived from) rather than Whitney (which it is replacing). I posted this comparison last time Nebula Sans were on the HN front page: https://imgur.com/JPwgYkj https://imgur.com/JPwgYkj
1mo ago

fredley 1mo ago

> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic Good God I am sick to the back teeth of the neutral aesthetic. If you're going to spend all that money, can we have some _opinionated_ typefaces please? Especially against the backdrop of AI making everything look and feel exactly the same everywhere, the last thing anybody needs is another neutral, characterless, soulless typeface.

kixiQu 1mo ago
I definitely agree with your sentiment in general. However, I'll note that I find this sans serif to have a nicer feel than many I see these days (even among humanist ones) and it's cool that they've managed to achieve that while being acceptably inoffensive for mainstream use
duderific 1mo ago
There's something so ... bland about this typeface. I get no feeling from it whatsoever. It's like the textual embodiment of the AI conversational style.
- DiscourseFan 1mo ago
  Its very boring. This trend started with the Nazis taking away Fraktur. Bland typefaces=nazism (this is what Adorno would say probably).

t098i3 1mo ago

from https://nebula.tv/nebulasans https://nebula.tv/nebulasans: > When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.

kwanbix 1mo ago
Which they license for 30 per year? EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.

dbbk 1mo ago

Is it just me or does this look really... cheap?

OskarS 1mo ago

It's a little beside the point of the post, but I just want to fly a flag for Nebula: I subscribed solely to get early versions of Jet Lag: The Game, but I'm finding myself watching it more and more! It has many of the channels I would go to YouTube for, but I've also discovered several really good ones that I had never heard of. And it has a similar feel to Kagi, in the sense of "freeing" yourself from the algorithm. It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month? What does this tell Google about me?". Same thing with all the big streaming services. With Nebula, no such worry. The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform, it's just a bunch of high-quality videos and channels that I can watch with no fuss. It's remarkable how nice that feels in 2026. Really highly recommended.

xd1936 1mo ago
Seconded. My only complaint is the bad buffering on the TV versions of the Nebula app. It starts out so low quality and takes forever to snap to 1080p, with no option to override quality, on symmetrical 2.5GBe.
- OskarS 1mo ago
  Obviously YMMV, but I haven't had any issues like that, the quality of the videos is the same I get in the YouTube app. They take a few seconds longer to start though.
bonoboTP 1mo ago
> It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month? You can remove videos from your watch history. Or you can open the link in a private/incognito window. Google may still be able to connect it but I don't think it will impact your recommendations that way.
- OskarS 1mo ago
  Yes, of course you can, but this sense of always having to curate your watch history and hide from the algorithm is just not there for Nebula. I guess it's different from person to person, but it's remarkable how freeing it feels to me to use a service where that isn't a concern. I'm watching what I want to watch, not what the algorithm is manipulating me to click on. Maybe it will enshittify like most everything else, but it hasn't so far, and for now I'm a very happy customer.

azatom 1mo ago

Pipe, capital i, small l are just line Edit: WOW I did not know if that I write WHAT I don't like, then I will get downwoted here, like on other sites for pure hatred, ynews really goes down

furyofantares 1mo ago

I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font

reaperducer 1mo ago
I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.

dmackerman 1mo ago

Looks nice. I've personally been obsessed with Atkinson Hyperlegible. Not sure what it is about it but it's just so pleasing.

strenholme 1mo ago
Atkinson Hyperlegible, like Nebula Sans (or, if you will, Source Sans) is an open source font available under the OFL license.

delta_p_delta_x 1mo ago

I posted this comment[1] in the previous discussion. Reposting here, because I don't like slightly-derivative typefaces that are just FontForge tweaks of a typeface that was designed from the ground up, even less if they have given it an entirely new name. All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans. Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop. At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs. I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode. Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs. The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too. I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands. Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow. Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI. Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591662

xigoi 1mo ago

Daiz 1mo ago

Having your own font is nice and all, but I wish Nebula would spend at least as much time on their subtitle rendering as they've spent on this marketing site... The subtitle rendering on Nebula is worse than what Youtube offers, and Youtube isn't exactly some pinnacle of subtitle rendering either. I'd really expect better from a premium service.

deleted 1mo ago

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fishgoesblub 1mo ago

It's always interesting to see companies spend time, money, and make a big deal (websites even, apparently) solely for a Sans Serif font. One that, at least on my system, is blocked by uBlock Origin and gets converted into Noto Sans (which should be default, screw your fonts, respect my browser's font please!)

cassepipe 1mo ago
I don't have the same animosity against web fonts but yes I realized I could just do that on Firefox and I appreciate relying on the same font across web pages. I don't feel like I am missing out on much and aesthetically I like the idea of reusing what I already have instead of downloading a new font on every page
isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago
I’ll never understand why you lot pretend like graphic design doesn’t matter. Thats so childish and narrow minded it borders on pathetic. C’mon now. Let’s act like the grown ups we all (hopefully) are.

frantzmiccoli 1mo ago

Really enjoyed the video! That kind of thing is a great way to build branding!

hakfoo 1mo ago

It's interesting to see their intent to make an explicit drop-in replacement. I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".

Aurornis 1mo ago

I like this font and the license it comes with: > The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works. Very nice. I’ve paid for fonts for personal use in the past but I was always nervous about accidentally putting a screenshot or other incidental capture somewhere that might get distributed and violate the license.

CharlesW 1mo ago
I don't believe they had a choice, since it's a derivative of Adobe's OTF-licensed Source Sans.
zerocrates 1mo ago
The SIL Open Font License is pretty much the standard for freely releasing fonts. Poke around on Google Fonts or other places that have freely-licensed fonts and you'll find the vast majority use OFL. Adobe's Source (the basis for this one), Google's Roboto and Google Sans, the very common Inter, Lato and Open Sans, coding/monospace fonts like Iosevka, JetBrains Mono... chances are that a free font you're aware of uses the OFL, particularly if it's even vaguely recent.

elAhmo 1mo ago

Oh man, I wish I had free time and money to spend designing and releasing a new font.

isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago
Maybe if you spent less time being snarky on topics you clearly have no understanding of you’d get your wish. The implication that this is an effort entirely devoid of value is so ridiculous it borders on stupidity.

bearjaws 1mo ago

Swear whenever your company decides to invent its own font its like a version of "The Headquarters Curse". You had nothing else better to spend your teams time on so might as well make a new font that 10% of your customers will notice if you are lucky. They could have just picked any other font and used it. It's a video streaming website, how much text content is there vs video content? Headquarter Curse: A theory suggesting that companies often experience setbacks or decline after constructing a lavish new headquarters.

brokencode 1mo ago
Idk, how much could it cost to design a new font like this? Probably like tens of thousands of dollars? This doesn’t seem like an extravagant expense to me. And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
- nullfern 1mo ago
  For me personally, I feel like a lot of tech companies are bloated and a lot of people are justifying their salary by doing unnecessary projects. In many cases, it's all internal and no skin off noses such as this font project. In other cases, it means the UI changes every 4 to 6 months or even worse, the software becomes so bloated with "features" it becomes unusable so a clean replacement comes on the scene then the cycle repeats. Sometimes, I feel, it would be better for companies to clap their hands and go "We did it, we solved the problem" then just stop. Keep the infrastructure running, do bug fixes, listen to customers on new features or changes but otherwise not do product churn for the sake of justifying salaries. To expand on my view in an abstract way, when constructing a building construction workers, architects, project managers, and the whole cadre are hired then the building is built then all those people move onto new projects. Continual development of software is like if construction never stopped so that the construction crew still had jobs. A construction site should strive to transition from architects, cranes, and concrete trucks to maintenance staff, mop buckets, and screw drivers.
- georgemcbay 1mo ago
  > And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing. Nebula Sans is a derivative of Adobe's Source Sans which is available to use for free for any purpose include commercial under the SIL Open Font License (the same license Nebula Sans has to use as a derivative of Source Sans). So they could have just used Source Sans for free and virtually nobody but the most dedicated font nerds would have known the difference between that font and Nebula's tweak of it if not for the PR announcement. All that said, I don't care what Nebula spends their money or time on, so I'm not saying they shouldn't have had this font made... but doing it wasn't a money-saving move.

meerita 1mo ago

I went to the website and the letter-spacing is something they maybe forgot to add to everything. I just tried letter-spacing: -0.05rem; and everything looks more readeable and the font shines even better.

SubiculumCode 1mo ago
How did you do that? I noticed the spacing was very wide between leters,it bothered me.
- abcd_f 1mo ago
  F12
- meerita 1mo ago
  Opened the inspector, add letter-spacing to a general rule they have for all text elements.
t098i3 1mo ago
I think that was intentional so the font would fit into all the places they were previously using the paid font without reflowing all the content.

thinkingtoilet 1mo ago

The font looks great. However, I get the same sense reading bios of Grateful Dead cover bands all pretending what their doing is different when I read descriptions of fonts. You're not "forging a new legacy with a fresh take on the Dead", you're just another cover band. And this is just another font.

leokennis 1mo ago
If you’re a startup but you don’t have a blog post with some wishy washy doodah showcasing your own personal font, its cute glyphs, its heritage in 1800’s Europe and some translucent overlays showing how it’s definitely different but not really compared to your initial bog standard font, are you really a startup?

doginasuit 1mo ago

My favorite font of all time is Fira Sans. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Sans https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Sans Understated yet elegant, you wouldn't immediately notice it is different from your default sans-serif. But it has a soothing regularity that makes it easy to absorb in large quantities and the lowercase g is a quiet encouragement to drink your tea with your pinky raised.

ashton314 1mo ago
Erik Spiekermann is a genius. He made Fira Sans to be a total antithesis to Helvetica. Now, I like Helvetica, but I also love the pure character of Fira Sans and it’s my go-to sans serif. Here’s a better link for Fira Sans: https://carrois.com/fira/ https://carrois.com/fira/ Also, if you have Fira Sans installed on your computer, you can use it in Slack with `/slackfont Fira Sans’
- bugsmith 1mo ago
  I was excited about trying that in slack but got: > /slackfont is not a valid command. In Slack, messages that start with “/” are interpreted as commands.
  - ashton314 1mo ago
    Only works on desktop regrettably

nnevatie 1mo ago

I swear, whenever there is a new font, there’s a documentary of its making.

isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago
For good reason. Typefaces often have fascinating beginnings and design processes.

astrolx 1mo ago

Is it that different from Source Sans?

oinoom 1mo ago

> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif What is a humanist font?

Pinus 1mo ago
A font that takes some characteristics from certain kinds of renaissance-era handwriting. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_t... .
mryingster 1mo ago
Not an expert, but I believe humanist would be somewhat antithetical to brutalist. Where brutalism has hard edges/corners and are "cold" humanist designs have fewer right angles and are more warm/inviting.

mono442 1mo ago

it looks like every other sans serif font

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

yoz-y 1mo ago

I subscribe to nebula. However what i would really like to have is to automatically mark any videos watched on nebula as watched on YouTube.

Dormeno 1mo ago
Same, and I'd like a browser extension to tell me automatically if the same or a better version of the video on YT is on Nebula.

dramm 1mo ago

In what Universe does worrying about the typeface of your startup effort matter? Google for one has some just lovely free to use high quality typefaces. Do I care about design, hell yes, for one I worked for Adobe helping introduce InDesign, etc. but this makes no sense.

iuvyfthknjv 1mo ago
Ah, so you are one of the many to blame for InDesign’s many, and I mean MANY, annoyances, weirdness, quirkiness, failures to follow other Adobe app standards and general fuck ups? Good to know.

bbx 1mo ago

Feels like a mix of Open Sans and Source Sans Pro. These were all over the web about 12 years ago. They got well with Montserrat in all caps and Merriweather: https://www.fubiz.net/ https://www.fubiz.net/ Whitney was the main font of Stripe when Benjamin De Cock initially redesigned the brand. It was one of the most beautiful websites I'd ever seen (and still is): https://dribbble.com/shots/2974913-Home https://dribbble.com/shots/2974913-Home

mwkaufma 1mo ago

I know it's not just for the branded inverted asterisk, but is it just for the branded inverted asterisk?

cocodill 1mo ago
it's inverted asterisk. https://jmgbb.com/i/i4kTG25WrF https://jmgbb.com/i/i4kTG25WrF

m3kw9 1mo ago

subscription for a font is some crazy work

nozzlegear 1mo ago
What?
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

JackOneSG 1mo ago

I'd like to have a single continuous stroke dollar sign and variable font.

y1n0 1mo ago

I must be the only person in the world that thinks so many of these fonts are casually indistinguishable. I feel like I’m reading reviews of wines. This font has chocolatey overtones that bring the reader to a meditative state of hyperflow.

bjourne 1mo ago

Very nice font! However, I wish the default line height would have been a little bigger. It's a bit too dense for long paragraphs.

sgc 1mo ago

Rather late to comment here, but are there plans to support Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and other scripts? I love the readability and elegance of this font in English and Greek, and would like to use it at CatholicLibrary.org.

lovegrenoble 1mo ago

Nice font, I like it

dmitrygr 1mo ago

Am I just an uncultured heathen if all of these fonts i see posted here once every few weeks all look precisely the same to me, without a side-by-side? And even with one, they look minutely, irrelevantly different. I do not get eye fatigue nor any other effects people name when looking at ... any of them. Do I just need to absorb more culture and take an art class or five? Am I missing something obvious? Genuinely, can someone please clue me in?

amanfromsolan 1mo ago

pretty close to how Source Sans looks like

FlameWolf 1mo ago

Looks like a variant of Trebuchet MS.

kuuuzya 1mo ago

Would it be in Google fonts?

3eb7988a1663 1mo ago

I am not a font person, but is the "book" weight a standard thing? I have never seen this before.

burnoutdv 1mo ago
I was wondering the same..and got no answer. I _could_ ask an LLM but I prefer no to. On the other hand..this is the kind of question that is really hard to google..even if one got 2016 google. The word "book" and "font" in one query will yield stupid results that are not what i asked for. So I went the way of lowest resistance, and to paraphrase, the LLM said, and it might be entirely wrong that Book is something between Light and Medium, a text weight that is supposed to be better readable for longer texts. So Something around 350/400 weight. Some fonts just use "Regular" With my new "knowledge" I went about and googled and found this: https://gist.github.com/lukaszgrolik/5849599 https://gist.github.com/lukaszgrolik/5849599 So Strangers whos name is just a hex number, the LLM seems to be right. And that is your answer.

impure 1mo ago

What is going on with the kerning in ‘print’? Yuck.

ilumanty 1mo ago
Free fonts always do free advertising for paid fonts made by actual professionals

andai 1mo ago

Well they definitely nailed "neutral" — I kept scrolling, waiting for the font to show up!

xg15 1mo ago

It's kind of funny how there is all that talk on the page about a new "humanist" font and important typographic and aesthetical considerations - and in the end, the entire reason for this were licensing fees... But on that note, can you really call it your "own" font if the differences to your "inspiration" are so tiny you literally need to overlay the texts to even see them? I'm not a copyright lawyer, but wouldn't this be a textbook example of a "derived work"? The page also explicitly mentions the relationship to the base fonts several times, so it's not even hidden. Did the owners of Whitney SSm demand outrageous license fees, but also permitted unrestricted creation of derived works in their license? That would seem like a massive oversight on their part. Also, not a typography nerd, but what is the wider utility of now having three fonts that are barely distinguishable from each other and only exist to evade each other's licensing restrictions?

pmkary 1mo ago

I for one love this website. Reminds me of ~2010ish designs. I miss those days. And who cares how much they spent on the typeface, was their money; I'm glad to have a new beautiful typeface for free.

ChrisRR 1mo ago

Did it need a new font? Would none of the thousands of fonts already available have done the job?

phartenfeller 1mo ago
You can apply that argument to almost everything in capitalism. But in this case here: who gets hurt and maybe they enjoyed creating it.

msla 1mo ago

Ah, sans-serif, where you can't tell the difference between "Weird Al" and "Weird AI" because who needs letters that don't collide, right?

aidenn0 1mo ago
There are many sans-serif fonts that distinguish the lower-l and upper-i. For some reason they aren't as popular as the ones that do not. Perhaps the popularity of Helvetica (and other neo-grotesque typefaces) caused this.

codeflo 1mo ago

They say it's a modified version Source Sans, but then don't compare it with Source Sans to show the differences. The only comparison is with their previous, unrelated font (Whitney SSm). Why?

katspaugh 1mo ago

Cute font! Round, like we’re trending towards Comic Sans but still professional.

iuvyfthknjv 1mo ago

It’s a good font. Nothing special about it. Not remarkable in any way, but not bad either. Just a perfectly OK font. Not sure why this is on HN but here we are.

isidjwjdjefj 1mo ago

Why is everyone here acting like they shut down operations on all divisions and teams JUST to design and build this one font? I’m willing to bet that the design team that worked on this font was not in charge of coding, business, finances, deals or anything else besides design. Is it a revolutionary font? Not in the slightest. It’s just a “fine” font for all intents and purposes. But let’s not play this childish game of “they shouldn’t have wasted time with this and should have done that instead!”. We’re all grown ups here (hopefully), we ought to know better.

zestyping 1mo ago

It's a crime in this day and age to make a new font with an uppercase I and lowercase L that look the same. It's hard to believe people are still designing new fonts with this glaring error. In 2026!