I dislike it! Especially how the curved base appears to drop below the flat base!
In my mind this font lacks symmetry and consistency needed to be easily readable. It hurts my eyes.
Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
171–180 of 245 posts
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#172What do “strong” and “neutral” mean in this context?
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#173This is so interesting. These modern sites clash really hard with my mental visual of "Government technology." And it led me to this, which is maybe even more interesting: https://federalist.18f.gov/
Yup. I run Federalist at 18F and absolutely love the work, the challenge and colleagues. We do everything in the open, so feel free to follow our work here: https://github.com/18F/federalist We also implement the USWDS, which you can follow here: https://github.com/18F/federalist-uswds-jekyll Let me know if you have any questions!
Cool I used the USWDS styleguide for a govt site I designed and coded in 2017. The USWDS had just been released.
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#174It is sad that any nice font looks like crap with Windows font rendering.
Windows does not have crap font rendering, Windows has advanced hinting support that varies by typeface and is infinitely customizable. Other operating systems apply a global hinting that typically discards the font designer's own preferences for how the font should look (especially at smaller scales). Fonts without that manual hinting look like crap on Windows because Windows does not force through its own rendering…
windows font rendering is amazing; glad someone who knows what they're talking about here
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Let me know if you have any questions! If this is meant for web sites, I have a question and I ask this on HN a lot. Why does the government need to provide ANY fonts? I have a real problem with websites pushing their own fonts on users. I don't think it's their place. Users should select their preferred font in their own browser. Why would a US government site feel the need to use particular fonts? If this is for…
Because ~no users curate their fonts, and making your site look better for the ~all users who don't curate their own fonts is the better more pragmatic choice by such a large margin that it isn't really worth much thought. Does this negatively affect your experience? Can't you override fonts if you want to? Edit: note, I'm not the person the question was directed at, and have no connection to the federalist project a…
Every time I've visited a site where I thought, oh that's a terrible font, it's been basically one of these reasons:
* Improper selection of default font for constrained display eg tabular
* Or the more popular "Let's create a font because we can. It's branding."
I can't recall any instance of "oh, that website with a great custom font is so appealing I'm going regularly and voraciously consume its content". The opposite of that is true though.
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I run Federalist at 18F and absolutely love the work, the challenge and colleagues. We do everything in the open, so feel free to follow our work here: https://github.com/18F/federalist We also implement the USWDS, which you can follow here: https://github.com/18F/federalist-uswds-jekyll Let me know if you have any questions!
>> Let me know if you have any questions! If this is meant for web sites, I have a question and I ask this on HN a lot. Why does the government need to provide ANY fonts? I have a real problem with websites pushing their own fonts on users. I don't think it's their place. Users should select their preferred font in their own browser. Why would a US government site feel the need to use particular fonts? If this is for…
This is an interesting perspective, and one that could only exist in the past few decades.
For millennia, of course, the written word would appear in the particular style of an individual scribe, and might take on an entirely different look when copied by another. Gutenberg’s movable type introduced the concept of a text appearing exactly the same across multiple copies, something that has persisted for centuries through lead type, phototypesetting, and into PDFs. Only with the advent of information technology in the 20th century did the idea arise of text appearing in formats other than those chosen by its publisher, advanced by technologies such as TeX and HTML.
In the latter’s case, however, the original idea of a platonically structured document to be interpreted per the user’s preferences has long since been superseded by a return to the concept of the publisher defining the presentation. Client CSS never caught on, while server CSS took over.
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#177What do “strong” and “neutral” mean in this context?
Inspired by Helvetica. I'm not being facetious.
For example, this is a "strong" face, but it's not "neutral".
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/this-brutalist-inspired-stencil...
Also strong, and not neutral.
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/use-this-brick-of-a-typeface-wh...
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#178Before I submit a bug report-- is there a good reason that the zero isn't dotted in this font? For example, executive order numbers have both "O" and "0" appearing in them. But I'm sure there are stronger examples in various gov't depts. where those characters can occur in sequence and create errors. Not to mention any code snippets that already appear in government web sites. I suppose the extra ink could be a conce…
Someone (you?) opened an issue: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans/issues/33
Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#179Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display
#180Interesting that this web site uses a Let's Encrypt certificate. I suppose it saves the maintainers from being gouged by a beltway bandit charging thousands to monitor and then update an ordinary CA-issued certificate.
(I work for 18F but don't officially represent it here.) The site is hosted via Federalist ( https://federalist.18f.gov/ ) a SaaS which runs on top of sibling Platform as a Service cloud.gov ( https://cloud.gov ), which is based on Cloud Foundry. (Think of cloud.gov as "government-compliant and -operated Heroku" and you're not too far off.) One of the benefits of using cloud.gov is that it automatically brokers and r…
I'm very curious your thoughts about the NTE clause of employment stating you can only work there a maximum of four years. And you are initially hired for a set two year term.