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Reddit Sans

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Re: Reddit Sans

#51

Post by JohnDeHope »

StevePerkins wrote: post #40

What an interesting thread to read. "Typography aficionados" are one of the most ardent and vocal subcultures within the Hacker News community. Any given post may be hijacked at any time, for a meta-discussion about the font choices on that post's linked web page. When a post actually IS about a new font, people dissect that latest microscopic riff on Helvetica like whiskey snobs describing a spirit's nose and mouthf…

It's only when two highly-prized priorities are pitted against each other that you can really determine which is higher up on the priority list. I guess now we know. Hating on the outgroup is a strong trait amongst humans, perhaps even stronger than font snobbery.

Does the world really need yet another font with a purely rectangular lowercase 'l'? There. I guess you can see where my priorities lie.

Re: Reddit Sans

#52

Post by sings »

JohnDeHope wrote: post #51
StevePerkins wrote: post #40

What an interesting thread to read. "Typography aficionados" are one of the most ardent and vocal subcultures within the Hacker News community. Any given post may be hijacked at any time, for a meta-discussion about the font choices on that post's linked web page. When a post actually IS about a new font, people dissect that latest microscopic riff on Helvetica like whiskey snobs describing a spirit's nose and mouthf…

It's only when two highly-prized priorities are pitted against each other that you can really determine which is higher up on the priority list. I guess now we know. Hating on the outgroup is a strong trait amongst humans, perhaps even stronger than font snobbery. Does the world really need yet another font with a purely rectangular lowercase 'l'? There. I guess you can see where my priorities lie.

It's a shame, because I thought font snobbery might encourage some interesting discussion here.

But on your second point -- there are two lowercase "l" glyphs, of which the default option is not purely rectangular. Without any stylistic set activated, "1Iil" are all visually distinct.

Re: Reddit Sans

#54

Post by Eumenes »

gsk22 wrote: post #39
Eumenes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hipster design teams. Typography lets them be "artists", returning to bohemian roots. In reality, they're just designing apps around dark patterns or whatever the product management team thinks is righteous. Companies can't say no, they're in demand, so its really a "20% project".

Is typography not an art? So how then are they not artists?

It is an art. But not every company or brand needs it's own font. I see this as companies letting designers flex and work on a passion project vs work that moves the needle in anyway.

Re: Reddit Sans

#55

Post by barryrandall »

woooooo wrote: post #48
Zandikar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be the life cycle of digital communities. There's a certain threshold of critical-mass popularity where quality of content almost seems to become inversely proportional to quantity of people in the community. That threshold is a moving target, but it certainly seems to manifest around the same time as people start throwing around the letters IPO; or at least, when the community is big enough for some MBA…

HN seems immune to VC pressures specifically because it's owned by a VC. Single core process, single server, single moderator. No react, no chasing growth. It's actually right-sized or even undersized because it's intentionally a loss leader.

It's owned by a capital management company and it will eventually be given the capital treatment and sold to someone else, probably with very different motives.

Re: Reddit Sans

#56

Post by micromacrofoot »

nullindividual wrote: post #26
micromacrofoot wrote: post #6

any explanation of why they embarked on a custom font? it's not such a simple task and most people wouldn't really appreciate the difference if they used arial for everything

To me, it looks like creating a font isn't terribly difficult based on https://kokorobot.ca/site/making_a_font.html . That said, I'm a no-talent hack and I'm sure any font I created would look like I ate and subsequently vomited off-brand crayons onto the screen.

there are degrees to it, a personal handwriting font is easier because you can manually adjust it as needed... you don't really need to worry about the endless number of edge cases produced by other languages and user-input text

Re: Reddit Sans

#57

Post by riidom »

sings wrote: post #50
riidom wrote: post #44

.woff2 file sizes of >50kb each doesn't rock me off my chair though.

The large size is due to the number of glyphs and alternate styles. If you want a smaller footprint, I'd suggest subsetting the font as needed. There are also 6 ready-made subsets[1], each about 15kb, matching these unicode ranges. These are set up to work with the @font-face unicode-range property[2]. A: U+0020-00BF B: U+00C0-00FF C: U+0100-01FF D: U+0200-0FFF E: U+1000-1FFF F: U+2000-FFFF [1]: https://github.com/re…

Ooh nice! Didn't think about checking that. 15kb or maybe 30kb sounds indeed very good.

Re: Reddit Sans

#58

Post by dakial1 »

woooooo wrote: post #48
Zandikar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be the life cycle of digital communities. There's a certain threshold of critical-mass popularity where quality of content almost seems to become inversely proportional to quantity of people in the community. That threshold is a moving target, but it certainly seems to manifest around the same time as people start throwing around the letters IPO; or at least, when the community is big enough for some MBA…

HN seems immune to VC pressures specifically because it's owned by a VC. Single core process, single server, single moderator. No react, no chasing growth. It's actually right-sized or even undersized because it's intentionally a loss leader.

Until someone at YC says: Hmmm we have a lot of traffic on HN, we should monetize it...

Re: Reddit Sans

#59

Post by crazygringo »

caseyohara wrote: post #47
crazygringo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the blog post it's new today: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-m... "We’re introducing new bespoke typefaces, Reddit Display, and Reddit Sans."

First commit was on April 7, 2020 https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/commit/08de53e01be8e8c2...

Was that public or announced or the final typeface though?

Why would Reddit say they're announcing this now, otherwise?

Re: Reddit Sans

#60

Post by sings »

crazygringo wrote: post #59
caseyohara wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First commit was on April 7, 2020 https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/commit/08de53e01be8e8c2...

Was that public or announced or the final typeface though? Why would Reddit say they're announcing this now, otherwise?

Reddit has been using these fonts internally for a few years in their marketing. They were not available to the public. They have been made available this week, hence the announcement. (The Github repo was made public a few weeks ago in preparation for adding them to the Google Fonts service.)
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