> We believe in facts, science, and human rights
The font looks ok. This is an off putting sample sentence though. It sounds like a secular, pseudo-liturgical version of the Nicene creed.
Nebula Sans
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: Nebula Sans
#22All 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 p…
I also spent some time evaluating a lot of open fonts and I agree that most of them have flaws, especially when it comes to kerning. The exceptions are fonts that have been developed for and are used by very large organizations, such as Public Sans (US government), IBM Plex Sans, Source Sans (Abobe), etc. Then the quality is equivalent (or even better) than what you get from proprietary fonts.
Re: Nebula Sans
#23All 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 p…
I agree and I'd like to know what's your take on the Fira font family? I've configured my desktop and browser to use this font and now I can't go back. Subjectively I kind of developed a little crush on that font and I'm interested if it also has technical merit or if I'm just making things up in my mind.
I do like Fira, and definitely one of the few exceptions. Although I wish the lowercase 'y' were a bit less busy, with the left stroke completely joining into the right descender rather than how it is now, with a little bit sticking out. Additionally I must point out that Fira itself is a derivative (I'd say 'clone') of FF Meta, which was originally commissioned by Deutsche Bundespost.
Another commenter pointed out IBM Plex which I also like, but I have a bit of an issue with the lowercase Roman 'a' glyph, where the bottom curve into the vertical is a tad bit too thin for my liking.
As a rule of thumb, if a company has paid a foundry a handsome sum of money for its corporate branding and wants to use the resultant typeface everywhere, the result is usually quite decent, and has what I call 'character without being excessively fancy'.
Re: Nebula Sans
#24All 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 p…
I agree the keming is off in places, like the alternates.
Re: Nebula Sans
#25All 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 p…
I agree the keming is off in places, like the alternates.
Touché.
Re: Nebula Sans
#26Ok, it is a font alright. To me, it looks exactly as all the other fonts I have on my OS already, but I guess that's just how it is if you are not in the font bubble.
Re: Nebula Sans
#27I can't believe I am learning of tabular options for fonts from this post... I have always just used a different monospace font for the numbers, didn't realize it was an option that some fonts supported. {font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums}
Not only that, some fonts have a vast number of tweaks available: https://rsms.me/inter/#features
Re: Nebula Sans
#28All 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 p…
My test is simple: does it have a monospace variant and does it support Japanese? If not, then it's worse than IBM Plex.
Oh, non-Latin type faces are an entirely different ball-game, don't even get me started. I have massive respect for CJK type designers; there are thousands of glyphs! Designing a good new typeface must take years, if not decades.
Re: Nebula Sans
#29All 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 p…
Every time I thought about buying a font, I've been put off by the terms.
A few tens of euro for desktop use? Sure. But when that font's supposed to be part of an organisation's identity, I'll need it for web use as well, which can be 10x as expensive. And when I want to e.g. generate invoices, that's even more money again, yearly.
I only work with small clients on things like this, but I've never had anyone willing to pay the money. Free fonts might not be as good, but that's not relevant for me, because paid fonts just aren't an option.
Re: Nebula Sans
#30Little PSA:
a) This is a clone of Whitney, an incredibly beautiful and unique typeface from 2004
b) Whitney was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones
c) He was an equal co-founder of the H&fJ foundry
d) He designed the vast majority of their most famous fonts, including Gotham, Archer and Armada
e) Somehow, for years, Hoefler never did the paperwork to confirm FJ's co-ownership
f) When pressed, he instead kicked FJ out, kept all the fonts and renamed the shop "Hoefler"
Hoefler is an asshole. A free clone of Whitney is the least of what he deserves.