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Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface

public-sans.digital.gov

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Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface

#61

Post by airstrike »

thevinter wrote: post #44
sneela wrote: post #8

As much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves. Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled readin…

I really enjoyed reading through [1] as it gives a lot of insight into what goes into making a font. However I wonder what incentives does IBM have for putting this much work into making it public, accessible and widely used. Wouldn't the ubiquity of the font make it less strong for their brand identity?

It says "IBM" in the name so I'm actually often reminded of the company via seeing the font in the wild.

And somehow they did seem to capture a distinctive IBM vibe when designing it, whilst still making it general enough to be used by everyone else

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface

#62

Post by airstrike »

Muromec wrote: post #56
1f60c wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, looks like it was started late in Obama's second term. As for the current guys, they would probably use Instrument Serif for body text if they could.

I googled Instrument Serif and google fonts page is telling me something with it's choice of lorem ipsum https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Instrument+Serif

Oh it's the "transhumanist serif" every AI startup uses now.

Color me... unperplexed

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface

#65

Post by latchup »

bbx wrote: post #49
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #2

Isn't this from the people who hate Calibri?

Funnily enough, if you Google "Calibri", the page itself is in Calibri. I've never seen that happen for any other font.

It also works for Open Sans, on my Linux system at least. Probably only works for fonts that are installed and/or can be licensed for this.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface

#67

Post by dingaling »

sneela wrote: post #8

As much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves. Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled readin…

Likewise the absence of a stroke through the zero. Without context, for example in a Wifi password, indistinguishable from uppercase letter O.

Re: Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface

#68

Post by Tepix »

cratermoon wrote: post #24
sneela wrote: post #8

As much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves. Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled readin…

My full list of ambiguous letters, from https://gajus.com/blog/avoiding-visually-ambiguous-character... - O / 0 - I / l / 1 / 7 - 5 / S - 2 / Z - 8 / B - 6 / G - 9 / q / g

O / D can also be an issue with some fonts.
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