Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

public-sans.digital.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 245 posts

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#191

Post by eitland »

Someone1234 wrote: post #130
saagarjha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pages don't need a fallback to non-Javascript in 2019. Strongly disagree. Having your page completely break instead of degrading gracefully puts up a barrier to those who cannot run JavaScript (for example, users with older, weaker computers).

People on "older, weaker computers" are likely running a browser we also don't support ( It is unlikely that there exists a subset of users with a modern enough computer to even hit our web servers that is under-powered to the point of not handling JavaScript. Our analytics definitely don't show this.

> It is unlikely that there exists a subset of users with a modern enough computer to even hit our web servers that is under-powered to the point of not handling JavaScript. Our analytics definitely don't show this.

Does your analytics correctly register hits from clients that doesn't support Javascript (I'm thinking about survivorship bias).

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#192

Post by Noumenon72 »

pgtan wrote: post #83
ComputerGuru wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Microsoft is really big on typography, you mean that big: http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/quotation-marks.ht... not even able to provide correct quotation marks!

What's wrong with the red squares?

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#194

Post by antpls »

eddietejeda wrote: post #41
2bitencryption wrote: post #3

This 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!

Hello, are your web analytics also publicly available ?

Th EU has http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/services/analytics/ but I recently discovered that I cannot access any data as a citizen. Legally, I'm convinced this data should be public domain.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#195

Post by User23 »

freehunter wrote: post #147
bredren wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you comment on what organizations are your biggest customers? Are you concerned about austerity measures / cutbacks affecting customer budgets?

>Are you concerned about austerity measures / cutbacks affecting customer budgets? Isn't every business or organization concerned about various economic forces affecting their customer budgets?

The ones that have congressional appropriations funding them aren’t.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#196

Post by User23 »

bredren wrote: post #165
freehunter wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you concerned about austerity measures / cutbacks affecting customer budgets? Isn't every business or organization concerned about various economic forces affecting their customer budgets?

Yes, I meant to imply but I meant specifically in light of the current presidential administration and its posture toward government spending.

The current administration is running a trillion dollar annual deficit. How much more should the public sector be spending?

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#197

Post by [deleted] »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #114
vesinisa wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must applaud your legislators for their foresight when they wrote the federal copyright charter. All works by. U.S. federal employees are in public domain, forming one of the planet's largest bodies of free online resources. The cultural impact of this collection is considerable also globally. In my country, all tax-funded government works are copyrighted. It's an ongoing battle to make each department release thei…

Applaud us when getting FOIA requests responded to doesn’t require retaining lawyers.

[deleted]

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#198

Post by sambaldwin »

DanBC wrote: post #141
marsRoverDev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing about the UK government's equivalent, which I would argue is somewhat of an influence on 18F (though I'm not an insider). They actively open source their work, this being a great example of it: https://github.com/alphagov I don't think that 18F and US taxpayers lose out on anything by open sourcing this. It builds a lot of good will and they are probably using systems that have been contr…

I like some of the NHS Digital work too. They have some interesting blogs, eg this: https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/icons-a...

Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about this.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#199

Post by marksomnian »

antpls wrote: post #194
eddietejeda wrote: post #41

Earlier 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!

Hello, are your web analytics also publicly available ? Th EU has http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/services/analytics/ but I recently discovered that I cannot access any data as a citizen. Legally, I'm convinced this data should be public domain.

https://analytics.usa.gov

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

#200

Post by iSnow »

GalacticDomin8r wrote: post #175
sanderjd wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." There are of course other considerations involved like the increasing diversity of rendering devices, but that doesn't make the fact that any web site font…

I know there have been a couple of occurrences where I dropped into the web dev tools to see which font a site was using because they used beautifully, fitting fonts.
Post reply on HN