22 ms·
Clear Sans
- splitbrain 13y agolooks nice, but no info which scripts it covers?
- thristian 13y agoThe Linux tool "fc-scan" claims that it covers the following languages: "aa af av ay be bg bi bin br bs ca ce ch co cs cy da de el en eo es et eu fi fj fo fr fur fy gd gl gn gv ho hr hu ia ig id ie ik io is it ki kl kum la lb lez lt lv mg mh mk mo mt nb nds nl nn no nr nso ny oc om os pl pt rm ro ru se sel sk sl sma smj smn so sq sr ss st sv sw tk tl tn tr ts uk uz vo vot wa wen wo xh yap zu an crh csb fil hsb ht jv kj ku-tr kwm lg li ms na ng pap-an pap-aw rn rw sc sg sn su za"
- cmiller1 13y agoIt doesn't say this on the website, but they are releasing this under the Apache license. I wish they made this more clear from the get go because with all of the formats they are releasing it in as well as the release note on browser compatibility, they are clearly targeting this towards web development.
- clarle 13y agoFor anyone like me that was wondering about the open source license they were using, it's licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (so it's GPL-compatible).
- pseut 13y agoWas that anywhere on the website? I had to download the font to figure out its license.
- orand 13y agoIt also specifies the license in their blog post announcing the font. https://01.org/clear-sans/blogs/gailfrederick/2013/clear-sans-new-font-optimized-small-screen-readability https://01.org/clear-sans/blogs/gailfrederick/2013/clear-san...
- Mithaldu 13y agoThe font doesn't have hinting and ends up looking not very good at small sizes.
- pg_is_a_butt 13y ago2013 called and wants its stupid press release about a stupid font back. PG IS A BUTT
- leobelle 13y agoI'm not a font specialists, but those I's seem to have serifs [1], and mixing serif with non-serif kind of irks me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I#Forms_and_variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I#Forms_and_variants
- aidos 13y agoGenuine question, does it matter? I, for one, am enjoying being able to distinguish a capital I from a lowercase l :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- taylorbuley 13y agoAn answer this very smart person drew was that there's not sufficient data to back statements about legibility http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-sans-serif-typefaces/ http://alexpoole.info/blog/which-are-more-legible-serif-or-s... That said, I as a news designer I believe there to be conventional reasons for using, for example, sans serifs for headlines and serifs for large blocks of body text.
- pseut 13y agoDid you look at the typeface? Sure, regarding serif vs sans serif in general, but the "I" and "l" in this case are pretty damn different.
- tripzilch 13y agoGreat article, thanks for the link. I like how the conclusion is that it basically doesn't matter, but by all means use what seems to be the preferred choice for the target audience and/or aesthetic considerations. By the way, what is it with all these people (in the comments) misspelling "Arial" as "Ariel"? They don't misspell any of the other fonts (ok I saw one person write "Veranda"), is it some kind of in-joke? Or is it people that don't have Arial installed and never see the word in their font listings? (in which case I'm not too sure on their opinions about it, particularly since it requires quite the expert eye to distinguish it from the beloved Helvetica)
- marban 13y agoOn a related note, FontPrep is now free & open source http://fontprep.com http://fontprep.com (Generate Webfonts from OTF/TTF)
- th3byrdm4n 13y agoI find it difficult to read @ size 14. My eyes don't like how thin/compressed the letters are, but maybe it's just too early on Oahu.
- telvda 13y agoI was hopping this would be a new monospace font considering it's on the front page. It's okay, but there are much better open source fonts out there.
- telvda 13y agoAlso, for something that's emphasizing thin weight only the bold weight has italics? What's with that?
- ambiguator 13y agoIt has a regular weight italic in addition to the bold italic.
- betadreamer 13y agodo you have any examples? i'm curious
- vertex-four 13y agoI have no idea whether this is just my problem or something that more people will notice, but I actually have trouble reading that. The letters seem to blur together more than most common fonts, and seem "fuzzy" in general.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gamegoblin 13y agoSeems like they just forgot a zero at the end...?
- drcoopster 13y agoI think that they forgot a digit, and you commented on the wrong article.
- ambiguator 13y agoThis is basically a less humanistic version of Frutiger. As a designer I find the entire face irksome. The legibility doesn't come close to Adrian Frutiger's namesake.
- pekk 13y agoIs a designer's taste more important than someone else's?
- robot_ 13y agoNo, its simply more informed.
- ambiguator 13y agoNot at all. I just wanted to point out that it looks like one of the best typefaces of all time except without it's best features. Did not mean to come across as arrogant. I understand it will be useful to some people who don't care or who are unable to pay $30 for Frutiger.
- cjensen 13y agoI'd pay $30 in a heartbeat if I could ship Frutiger with my applications. The Intel font can be used for that. Web guys have it easy when it comes to fonts.
- ambiguator 13y agoAhh yes, you'd owe Linotype a few hundred bucks if you want to do that. I'd love to see Adrian Frutiger release an open source font before he goes... Imagine if Univers was free!
- cjensen 13y agoI'd be okay with a few hundred too. The issue for me is that for web use prices are easily available. For programatic use, it suddenly becomes a conversation about licensing with a salesman, and I don't have time for a long conversation.
- devindotcom 13y agoI'm a bit put off by the "bent-iron" quality of how the curves and straights meet, like this is a type designed to mimic neon signs. There are some nice touches, though. It looks great bold. That said, having that image with the type super small and basically at the extreme limit of legibility (I can barely read it) I don't think does you a service. Do a nice big species with lots of common use cases! This one looks like mush.
- CamperBob2 13y agoAgreed on both counts. The 'a' looks particularly awkward. It's 95% of a really nice font, but that last 5% makes all the difference.
- Blahah 13y agoInteresting, the 'a' also caught my attention straight away, but I think it's particularly beautiful.
- jdbevan 13y agoI've started noticing different a's recently in typography since it was pointed out to me that people with dyslexia and people with lower literacy skills struggle with the "upright" style lowercase A (as show in this font and a lot of other popular fonts) as opposed to the "italic" style lowercase A that most people hand write.
- mzs 13y agoWhy is the italic lower case A so different from bold and regular lower case A for Clear Sans? The italic version matches better the @ used as well.
- theon144 13y agoYou're right, the italic a is like from a completely different typeface, wow. I kind of like it better, and since it's under an open-source license, I might make a version with this version as the general one.
- slowernet 13y agoNote that the included webfont variants have fairly enormous filesizes (WOFFs: 120K+, SVG: 1.2M+). Quickly running the .ttf through FontSquirrel at default settings produced versions several times smaller (caveat lector, not sure what glyphs are being stripped out, etc.)
- degenerate 13y agoCan you elaborate on this? (do you know why running it through FontSquirrel results in smaller sizes?)
- fadeyev 13y agoFontSquirrel's generator will strip out a lot of unneeded characters. By default this means including just the basic Latin subset with the main punctuation glyphs. If you look at the character set for Clear Sans (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/clear-sans http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/clear-sans) you will see that it includes Cyrillic and Greek letters, among other things like musical notes and smilie faces, so those can be removed if you don't want them (or included if you do).
- ryanwhitney 13y agoUnfortunate, but not surprising, to see it incorrectly implemented across the entire site: http://cl.ly/image/260h1Z302T24 http://cl.ly/image/260h1Z302T24 If you want to use multiple font weights, you have to load and reference each weight in your stylesheet. Otherwise, you end up with a browser-added faux-bolding instead of the actual bold font.
- ambiguator 13y agoGood eye.
- hndl 13y agoCan you elaborate what you mean by "load and reference each weight in your stylesheet" for us who aren't CSS savvy?
- 8ig8 13y agoChris Coyier explains it here: http://css-tricks.com/watch-your-font-weight/ http://css-tricks.com/watch-your-font-weight/ Edit: Another explanation: http://alistapart.com/article/say-no-to-faux-bold http://alistapart.com/article/say-no-to-faux-bold
- elwell 13y agothe way most people do it is to use font-family: blah; on every class that needs it. this is because @font-face isn't supported completely when using simply font-weight: blah; to differentiate between different @font-face family groups.
- calinet6 13y agoIf you define your weights correctly when loading your @font-faces, then weight works as expected: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201012/font-face_tip_define_font-weight_and_font-style_to_keep_your_css_simple/ http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201012/font-face_tip_d...
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- hiphopyo 13y agoFurther proof that the world doesn't need any more fonts.
- noir_lord 13y agoIt's brilliant that you polled all 7 billion people, did I miss my survey in the post?.
- pyrocat 13y agoI like Open Sans http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoI love Open Sans and use it as my default font for everything, but... I may soon be trying out this Clear Sans.
- bbx 13y agoDesigning a font is one of the few things on my "bucket list" (designing a Linux desktop environment being another one). But it being quite the undertaking, I end up relying upon fonts I find while browsing the web (I keep a list of the best-looking/most useful ones). Typekit and Google Web Fonts really changed the state of font usage in web design. We're not restricted anymore by a fixed amount of fonts, nor have to rely upon images or weird technologies (remember Cufon?) to display custom fonts. It has its drawbacks (loading time, unreadable thin characters...), but it's overall a great step forward in software-less web design and graphical variety (which in turn improves visual identity).
- hiphopyo 13y agoThat made absolutely no sense.
- untog 13y agoIt made perfect sense. I think the reader might be the problem.
- Kiro 13y agoIs your list available somewhere?
- bbx 13y agoActually no. It's only available in some corner of my brain for now... But I recently redesigned by blog [1] and have been considering adding a "Bucket list" section, which would only include design-related challenges, both digital (like a complete phone OS) and physical (a car dashboard without touch controls, a kitchen layout...). Obviously, most of these problems would be hard to tackle, considering they're usually out of my skills scope. It's just that I often think to myself "This could be improved". [1]: http://jgthms.com/ http://jgthms.com/
- angry-hacker 13y agoIf you get far with Linux desktop evrioment, let us know. I still haven't found anything decent that doesn't scream it was designed by the same guy whi is also responsible for kernel dev. Above all i think Linux world needs mire unified ux experience, how its possible with sone many desktop environments out there, I don't know.
- satellitecat 13y agoI was expecting a transparent/invisible font.. Disappointed.
- mortenjorck 13y agoThe quality of open-source typography has massively increased in just the past few years, and it's great to see Intel making its own contribution. The number of free options we have today for well-balanced, full, multi-weight type families (not just "fonts") would have seemed impossible just four years ago. Intel's entry nicely fills a void left between more humanist types like Ascender's Open Sans and more geometric families like Natanel Gama's redrawn Exo family. It has a nice DIN-esque rigidity to the strokes that the other big DIN descendent, Roboto, doesn't fully embrace.
- _greim_ 13y agoThis needs to sink into the collective brains of the world's brand designers, many of whom still standardize upon proprietary fonts. My company creates sites for a variety of brands, and we run into the same problem over and over again. No, we can't hotlink your copy of Frutiger. No, we can't host our own copy. No, we won't accept an email stating "we give you permission to use this font" in lieu of a license from the actual foundry. No, we're not going to embed typography in images or flash. People are often clueless about the technical and legal difficulties of proprietary fonts on the web.
- Silhouette 13y agoPeople are often clueless about the technical and legal difficulties of proprietary fonts on the web. A cynic might suggest that this is because of greedy foundries insisting on a rental model for web fonts, sometimes one so complicated that you need lawyers to figure out what you're actually paying for if you sign up. If they'd tried that with print fonts, most of those foundries would never have made it this far. What really surprises me is how readily the web design industry caved and paid up, particularly given the relatively poor quality of most early web fonts even from the commercial services, and how many of them remain poor even today. I'm hoping that sooner rather than later, the prevalence of good quality and fully specified free-to-use font families will force a change in the industry. Personally, I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount for some good professional fonts. In fact, I have, from my own pocket and not any business's, on several occasions. However, I have no interest in locking myself, my businesses or my clients into ongoing payments for fonts when essentially no other stock resources work that way, and even less interest in hiring a lawyer to figure out whether someone's web font licence covers a particular not-entirely-standard use case.
- lifeformed 13y agoWhy can't I click on the specimen and view it in full size? :(
- nilsbunger 13y agoNo @2x image? Seems like it would be helpful if you're trying to highlight a clear, readable typeface. Looks kinda blurry on my retina MBP.
- javindo 13y agoWas going to say similar; it's quite ironic how a site advertising a "clear font" has a very blurry graphic right in the middle of the page demonstrating said clear font...
- espadrine 13y agoIt's even stranger considering that they bundle the corresponding SVG font (great and uncommon choice!) – they could have made an SVG image.
- IE5point5 13y agoOh no! All those 0.001% of computer users!
- blt 13y agoPoor hinting on Windows 7 / Chrome. The lowercase L is an especially noticeable 2px middle-grey line.
- Geee 13y agoThe 'Nokia Pure' is one of the best (if not the best, IMO) of the modern sans types. Pretty unique but very clean. It's used on their website (as Windows Phones use Segoe UI), and apparently on the new Android phone too (notice the 'g'), for example: http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/nokia-xl/ http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/nokia-xl/ I'm just hoping that someone would make a similar but open-source version of it. :)
- abrowne 13y agoI love Nokia Pure too. It looks great on their website and on the Asha phone I've used. The 4 is great. For personal use, Nokia did post a version with Klingon character support (in addition to Latin) on their design blog for April Fools last year: https://assetportal.nokia.com/blog/view/item24419/ https://assetportal.nokia.com/blog/view/item24419/
- izietto 13y agoI love Ubuntu fonts http://font.ubuntu.com/ http://font.ubuntu.com/
- scott_karana 13y agoHmm, this has been out since November. Wish I'd seen it then. :-) Mods, worth updating the title?
- omegote 13y agoThis looks like the next Proxima Nova. God please do something to stop every single website from using Proxima Nova...
- gulbrandr 13y agoWhat is wrong with it?
- jheriko 13y agowait.... really? am i the only one who sees this? http://imgur.com/apYhmRw http://imgur.com/apYhmRw glancability? that l is an embarassment. sorry, but the idea that this a well designed font is to me - a joke. and i am not particularly an expert. this is much less readable than comic sans or courier new imo at least with my config on windows 8 with cleartype and chrome!
- celebril 13y agoDo we honestly need Yet Another Humanist Sans Serif?
- benched 13y agoEither there is a piece missing from my brain that prevents me telling the difference between fonts in the same general category, or some of y'all are discussing the stitching on the emperor's new shirt.