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Nebula Sans

nebulasans.com

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Re: Nebula Sans

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

In some ways I feel that caring a lot about fonts is on the opposite side of the spectrum to whatever it is making a population feel their lives have more meaning during wartime or crisis.

As a visual designer, sure, it is you job. As a computer user whose ultimate goal of using a computer is something else... I am kind of an old fart, but I often find that the best content is often found in conjunction with "font-family: sans-serif".

Re: Nebula Sans

#152

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

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

So Strangers whos name is just a hex number, the LLM seems to be right. And that is your answer.

Re: Nebula Sans

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

As an example, Tantacrul made a video about developing a sheet music font for Musescore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng)

Re: Nebula Sans

#155
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

> Hacker News gets mad... And then they...

Goomba fallacy strikes again! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

Re: Nebula Sans

#156
post #21

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…

> The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform

A simple fix for YouTube is bookmarking the subscriptions page and making that your entrypoint: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Re: Nebula Sans

#158
post #15

> 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.

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.

Its very boring. This trend started with the Nazis taking away Fraktur. Bland typefaces=nazism (this is what Adorno would say probably).

Re: Nebula Sans

#160
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?

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