Nebula Sans

282

GGavinAnderegg about 6 hours ago 113 commentsRead Article on nebulasans.com

FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

78% Positive

Analyzed from 4062 words in the discussion.

Discussion (113 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

OskarS•about 6 hours 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.

ARandumGuy•about 1 hour ago

Seconding this. I've been subscribed to Nebula for a couple years, as I watch a lot of video essayists on Youtube and like half of them are on Nebula. In addition to ad-free viewing, you also get:

* No in-video sponsor segments

* Exclusive videos (including some creators and series that upload primarily to Nebula)

* Early access to some videos

* Uncensored videos, as Nebula does not have the automatic content or copyright enforcement systems that Youtube has

* A decent TV app (at least on Roku), so I can watch ad-free on the TV without paying for Youtube premium

All for a much cheaper price then Youtube Premium ($60 annually vs $160, with frequent promo offers). If you already watch a lot of Youtube channels that are on Nebula, I'd highly recommend it.

WarmWash•about 4 hours ago

The problem is that ad-blocking makes youtube the best value proposition for users. You get almost all the content of nebula, plus tons more, for free, no ads.

Don't get me wrong, Nebula is great (although yt actually has a better profit share believe it or not), but the internet needs to look in the mirror before services like it can actually compete with yt.

samschooler•about 4 hours ago

On Nebula even the built in ads for Squarespace are gone too. Sure you could use sponsorblock, but for me I'm happy to support Nebula as their creator netowrk are people I want to support directly with my dollars.

pbronez•about 2 hours ago

This surprised me, so I looked it up. Basically YouTube pays ~55% and Nebula pays 50%.

This is complicated by Nebula's "creator owned" situation. Which is complicated [0]. It's something like:

  - Nebula's assets live in Watch Nebula LLC

  - Watch Nebula LLC is owned by 83% Standard Broadcast and 16% Curiosity Stream (CURI)

  - Standard Broadcast "is owned by 44 total people, all of whom are creators"

So it's fair to say there are creators with significant equity stakes in Nebula. It's NOT fair to assume that the 50% of revenue left after share is distributed evenly among all creators on the platform via an equity mechanism.

Of course then there's Floatplane, which is entirely owned by LMG. At least a couple years ago they targeted "a 70/30 split" but arrive there via "a fixed cost menu for features [...] based on bandwidth/maintenance costs' [1]

I'm glad YT is still sharing a meaningful amount of money with creators.

[0] https://medium.com/@cameron-paul/who-actually-owns-nebula-95...

[1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1335443-floatplane-creator-s...

Computer0•about 1 hour ago

percentages are meaningless in the ad space and I think topic specific CPM would be a more meaningful comparison. Even on youtube itself things like kids toy videos can make 4x or more per 1M views when compared to a Political show or something technical.

bonoboTP•about 5 hours 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.

malnourish•8 minutes ago

I suggest just turning off watch history/suggestions.

I only use YouTube when I want to watch something specific. If I find something I want to return to, I like it or bookmark it or add it to a playlist.

I feel like the only thing I'm missing is a home page which doesn't tell me I have watch history disabled.

OskarS•about 5 hours 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.

jonas21•about 1 hour ago

You can also just turn off your watch history completely and use the subscriptions page as your starting point. I did that for a while, but turned it back on when I realized that the algorithm was actually quite good at surfacing content that I learned a lot from -- most of it was stuff that I would never search for on my own (or even know to search for).

bonoboTP•about 1 hour ago

To me it doesnt feel limiting. I curate it to get good recommendations. I also switch between accounts. One for trash binges, and one for everyday stuff, one for serious technical content etc.

I use "do not recommend this channel" a lot, and click "not interested" a lot. Open the YouTube front page, remove stuff you would prefer not to have there, refresh, repeat, the algo will adapt.

Same hygiene on social media. Add muted phrases, mute people, click "not interested". It improves the experience a lot.

zeristor•about 3 hours ago

I signed up for Nebula, it is a lot more for HD quality, which I though was sneeky.

In the end I never got in the habit of opening Nebula to watch the content.

I pay for Premium YouTube and have noticed when there's an in video ad you can skip through to the end of the ad, YouTube have set that up.

I tend to watch 2 minute of several videos on rotation, I guess I should just put the Apple TV out of reach and I can't keep channel twitching

ChickeNES•18 minutes ago

Yeah I...just never end up opening the Nebula app, which I honestly find harder to use than the Youtube app.

MattGrommes•about 3 hours ago

I would absolutely love to subscribe to Nebula but they don't have an Xbox app which is where I watch almost all my TV/Youtube/streaming. I hope they have the resources to do it at some point.

xd1936•about 5 hours 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•about 5 hours 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.

bearjaws•about 5 hours 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.

OtherShrezzing•about 3 hours ago

Not sure this counts for Nebula. Font licenses (even very liberal ones) are a massive pain and expense for content creators who publish to multiple platforms in a variety of different mediums.

Collectively their creator/owners will be paying thousands of dollars/month for their fonts. Something you’ve correctly assessed that a very low number of their viewers will notice or care about.

Nebula can make one upfront payment (likely less than a single months font foundry payments for their owners), and give the creators absolute certainty that the created font is free forever, no matter the viewing platform or medium.

Seems like a decent place to allocate some idle cash.

notahacker•about 2 hours ago

Plenty of fonts with the same SIL open font license around already, especially if what you're after is a nice but generic modern sans serif font which 99% of users can't distinguish between.

Can't think of any reason why Nebula creators would go for this one other than to blend in with the platform's corporate house style for the 1% of users pedantic enough to notice and... well they could have picked an existing SIL open font for that if it had been about simply minimising creators' costs

I'd understand it way more if they were a big corporate creating something very distinctive and very closed source for their marketing material...

pibaker•27 minutes ago

Judging from the kind of content creators nebula hosts I'd imagine they do in fact have the kind of nerdy audience that notices miniature font differences.

lirolero•about 2 hours ago

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.

Destiner•about 4 hours ago

oh no, an indie company is having fun instead of increasing the shareholder’s value!

mbo•about 2 hours ago

you should have seen the reaction when Are.na collaborated with Dinamo on a new version of Arial (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012995) - like, are we not allowed to make art for arts' sake?

pibaker•25 minutes ago

Hacker News gets mad if you deviate a little from the usual profit maximizing routine to do something a little humanistic. And then they keep upvoting articles on how corpo streamlining sucks all life out and how the modern society lost its humanistic spirit. You can't win. May very well just play you own game and enjoy it.

dumpHero2•about 2 hours ago

Or passing the income to it's creators

xyzzy_plugh•about 4 hours ago

So, funnily enough in my own career I've experienced The Headquarters event several times, and each time, after the lavish new headquarters is built, I think to myself, "this is it, we've peaked!" and each time it was an inflection point followed by even more growth and success.

I think I'm at 5 now.

Also three of those companies designed their own font too, though none of them still use it.

muglug•about 1 hour ago

I think it's important to point out how much easier it is to create a new typeface based on an existing one and using the metrics of another one, than to create one from scratch.

For example, I've built metrics-compatible versions of Aptos and Verdana in the last few days based on other open-source fonts that matched the shapes closely.

For Verdana I just told an LLM to add bars to DejaVu Sans and extend some shapes. For Aptos I had to get a bit more creative, designing a new double-storey g, but it was otherwise fine.

brokencode•about 5 hours 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•about 4 hours 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.

tishomingo•about 1 hour ago

I understand your point, but it does send a message that the company values design and art. It can be a great signal to attract talent. I know I would be!

0xffff2•about 3 hours ago

10% seems incredibly generous. I'd be shocked if it's 1%.

runarberg•about 5 hours ago

They could have, but they didn’t. Another way to look at this is they could design their own font, and they did.

Companies are allowed to make fun things.

waldothedog•about 4 hours ago

It also seems like they are trying to put this out as a creative endeavor that gives access to a really nice set of fonts without a fee associated (they link directly to Hoefler saying this is an open license replacement)

Feel like these things happen all the time in software as creative projects? Could be a tool for attracting design talent / interest?

shrug. It’s a nice typeface, cool project.

nullfern•about 4 hours ago

Oh my gosh! I have always felt and talked about The Headquarters Curse but never had a 'word' for it. Today I am one of the 10,000 [0].

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Arodex•about 3 hours ago

You should read Parkinson's research, or his book "Parkinson’s Law And Other Studies In Administration".

Analemma_•about 3 hours ago

A lot of font foundries are switching from one-time payments to pay-per-use licensing schemes, to try and get huge payouts from e.g. companies which serve web pages trillions of times, and those companies are mostly responding by just commissioning their own fonts instead.

Gualdrapo•about 6 hours 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")

bonoboTP•about 5 hours 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•about 4 hours 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

elinfame•about 2 hours ago

para la plata baila el mono -- Wilfrido Vargas 1994

kissgyorgy•about 5 hours 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.

mock-possum•about 6 hours ago

“For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda

mwkaufma•14 minutes ago

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

Aurornis•about 5 hours 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.

zerocrates•about 1 hour 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.

CharlesW•about 5 hours ago

I don't believe they had a choice, since it's a derivative of Adobe's OTF-licensed Source Sans.

t098i3•about 6 hours ago

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.

kwanbix•about 5 hours ago

Which they license for 30 per year?

EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.

dramm•about 2 hours 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.

bbx•about 2 hours 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/

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

urbnspacecowboy•about 6 hours ago

(2025)

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

doginasuit•about 4 hours ago

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.

yoz-y•about 2 hours 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.

gralab•about 6 hours 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•about 6 hours 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•about 5 hours 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.

t098i3•12 minutes 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.

cleech•about 4 hours 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.

petesergeant•about 5 hours ago

I just bought a Nebula subscription, and hadn't heard of it before, so there's some value there

gralab•24 minutes ago

Then this PR stunt worked I suppose. I still see no need to create yet another derivative sans-serif typeface. Especially for an online streaming service of all things.

etchalon•about 5 hours ago

"Why bother doing something original when there's something generic that's good enough" is certainly one way to approach things.

gralab•about 3 hours ago

No. You know that's not what I'm saying. There are many other very respectable typefaces available that they could have used. This one, while it may be custom made, *looks* generic. If I never saw this post, I would have zero clue they made it in-house. This is a PR stunt to get attention on sites like this.

etchalon•about 2 hours ago

There are so very, very many things you're missing here.

lirolero•about 2 hours ago

ok boomer

hakfoo•about 5 hours 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".

pjerem•about 6 hours ago

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

meerita•about 4 hours 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•about 3 hours ago

How did you do that? I noticed the spacing was very wide between leters,it bothered me.

meerita•about 2 hours ago

Opened the inspector, add letter-spacing to a general rule they have for all text elements.

abcd_f•about 3 hours ago

F12

frantzmiccoli•about 5 hours ago

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

fredley•about 6 hours 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.

duderific•about 4 hours 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.

kixiQu•about 5 hours 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

nnevatie•about 4 hours ago

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

dmackerman•about 5 hours ago

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

elAhmo•about 5 hours ago

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

astrolx•about 4 hours ago

Is it that different from Source Sans?

mono442•about 3 hours ago

it looks like every other sans serif font

oinoom•about 3 hours ago

> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif

What is a humanist font?

Pinus•about 3 hours 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_t... .

mryingster•about 3 hours 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.

Daiz•about 5 hours 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.

delta_p_delta_x•about 5 hours 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

thinkingtoilet•about 4 hours 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•42 minutes 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?

furyofantares•about 5 hours ago

I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font

reaperducer•about 5 hours ago

I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font

I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.

varispeed•about 6 hours ago

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

dguest•about 5 hours ago

There are people who don't want a perfect font, they want a new one every few years.

The rest of us just don't want it to be distracting.

mihaelm•about 6 hours ago

We did that with Comic Sans MS

limaoscarjuliet•about 6 hours ago

Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.

dkdbejwi383•about 6 hours ago

And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.

swiftcoder•about 5 hours ago

I've been making the Basque burnt cheesecake every year lately, it really is a delight

EstanislaoStan•about 6 hours ago

I submit to you that I designed •the• perfect font while making one for my microgame recently: https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry

swiftcoder•about 5 hours ago

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

"Perfect font" can only happen when we stop developing new display technologies, and print dies out completely. If "perfect" is not subjective in the first place, it is definitely context-dependent. Fonts designed to work on budget smartphone displays don't necessarily look good on 6K desktop displays, and so on...

crazygringo•about 5 hours ago

That's like reaching the state of having a perfect button-down shirt.

Styles change (like collar size, slim vs roomy), and what looks good on one torso doesn't look best on another. What fits well for one company/product/book doesn't fit well for another company/product/book.

zem•about 3 hours ago

that reminds me of the time there was one particular combination of my laptop dpi, screen resolution, and windows 2000 font renderer that made lucida sans typewriter look perfect, but when I switched to linux the same font seemed less crisp and clean, and I ended up using bitstream vera instead. I still try lucida sans typewriter out every now and then but whatever sweet spot it hit on that machine never happened again.

hoofedear•about 6 hours ago

It'll be the same day we reach the state of having the perfect programming language

futuraperdita•about 6 hours ago

That happened in 1957, but we can’t leave well enough alone.

azatom•about 5 hours ago

define perfect!

- read? mostly coders

- sell? mostly marketing

- fraud? rn.com vs m.com mostly designers

petesergeant•about 5 hours ago

https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code

dbbk•about 6 hours ago

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

azatom•about 5 hours 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

1attice•about 6 hours ago

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

1attice•about 6 hours 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? :)

etdznots•about 6 hours 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•about 4 hours ago

Gave me a laugh, but comment was also originally dead'd because I assume sounds too much like AI. (For obvious reasons)

1attice•about 3 hours ago

The horrible thing is I wrote that all by hand

fishgoesblub•about 5 hours 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•about 4 hours 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