I don't understand why they invest(or buy?) fonts?
To save money on licensing existing fonts. Own the font, do what you want with it, independent of whatever license changes a third-party might impose years down the line.
GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps I'm misreading your question, are you asking why they invest in fonts? If so, the answer is that fonts are a major underpinning of how an organization or a product is presented to the world. To make an analogy that the hn crowd might understand, the value of a typeface for a design system is like the value a cryptographic primitive or a library like openssl to a functioning security system. Nobody (aside from…
Fine, but are there any good reasons to spend resources on fonts? Maybe if they spent less resources on achievements, fonts, etc. and more on reliability they could improve their downtime, which seems to be happening more and more often.
Does money/time spent by designers/front end take away from that towards back end?
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#23Wow, two brand new fonts in 2022 and they still make lowercase "l" look exactly like uppercase "i", I thought we were past that by now :(
Worse than look exactly alike, they are exactly the same. Pixel for pixel when I compare the examples on the site. Sigh.
There's an issue with the editable / interactive section on Firefox, might be what you're seeing. Otherwise mono is slightly rounder than hubot (look at the "t")
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#24Just a quick note - the "body" text on the page uses Alliance, also designed by the same studio I think ( https://degarism.com/Alliance ). The two fonts themselves are catered more towards headers / titles.
Might be wrong, but looks like the body text is just using the mono font. They've named the fonts Alliance1 (mono) and Alliance2 (hubot) in the stylesheet.
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#25I don't understand why they invest(or buy?) fonts?
Perhaps I'm misreading your question, are you asking why they invest in fonts? If so, the answer is that fonts are a major underpinning of how an organization or a product is presented to the world. To make an analogy that the hn crowd might understand, the value of a typeface for a design system is like the value a cryptographic primitive or a library like openssl to a functioning security system. Nobody (aside from…
In other words, marketing budget big and needed to be used up or else shrunk next fiscal cycle.
/s
Realistically, this is probably very cost efficient as it’s a relatively low effort project compared to a fully fledged feature, and something that can make someone say “hey, that y reminds me of GitHub”.
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#26I wonder if we could train a "Font Copilot" on a bunch of fonts and then claim the output is license free
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#27Wow, two brand new fonts in 2022 and they still make lowercase "l" look exactly like uppercase "i", I thought we were past that by now :(
Here's the text
Ill Ill Ill Ill Ill
https://i.ibb.co/3mv1Myx/Ill.png
What a pleasing symmetry.
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#28The font matrix is actually interactive. Now about UX: I had a brain-something when I first scrolled past it... it seemed some fonts changed weight... but I couldn't understand - is it my eyes going wonkey when some char is closer to monitor upper edge rather than lower or what? I scrolled again and again and again, trying to parse whether my eyes are OK or my eyes don't like that font and kind of didn't notice anything... then few more times, by spending at least half a minute trying to figure it out. I figured: they are being changed automatically! I thought: It would have been better to design some kind of carousel, so I can switch between modes.
I revisited that page after reading HN comments and then noticed that mouse pointer is actually changing weight and width... doh.
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse than look exactly alike, they are exactly the same. Pixel for pixel when I compare the examples on the site. Sigh.
At least they both don't look like the 1. Someone's gonna lose a LOT of crypto over this.
Unlikely given that's precisely why Base58 was invented.
Re: GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
#30Wow, two brand new fonts in 2022 and they still make lowercase "l" look exactly like uppercase "i", I thought we were past that by now :(
Many sans fonts including Helvetica, Inter, Franklin Gothic, etc., do not properly distinguish I and l.