Nebula Sans

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.

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.

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")

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.

from 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.

(2025)

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

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".

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

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.

My favorite font of all time is 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.

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

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

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

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

Is it that different from Source Sans?

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

> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif

What is a humanist font?

> 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.

it looks like every other sans serif font

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.

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

I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font

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.

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

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

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

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

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!)