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

public-sans.digital.gov

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

#81

Post by eddietejeda »

siavosh wrote: post #66
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!

Curious to hear if your group is still well supported budget wise?

Although we are part of the government, we operate as a business unit that must pay for itself to exist. To do this, we have to charge other agencies for our services. My group is "cost-recoverable," meaning, that we are longer losing money and can reinvest back into the product. You will notice our Github activity picked up recently and even more significant changes are coming soon. So, I'd say we are in the best shape we've ever been.

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

#83

Post by pgtan »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #44
boterock wrote: post #20

It is sad that any nice font looks like crap with Windows font rendering.

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!

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

#86

Post by dpcx »

Someone1234 wrote: post #79
dpcx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://openforest.fs.usda.gov/christmas-trees/forests has a pretty heavy dependency on Javascript (read: there's no fallback to anything non-javascript, so I get a white page). It feels like that goes against some of the things that 18F is about.

Pages don't need a fallback to non-Javascript in 2019. Accessibility technologies now fully support a JS enabled web, with accessibility standards following suit. That leaves only those who have voluntarily disabled JavaScript ( I've worked on public facing government websites (not 18F). We simply don't support this edge case, and our legal department supports our legal right to do so (in particular in relation to AD…

Thank you for the response. I wasn't trying to suggest that it was a requirement, simply that it seemed odd that there would be no fallback whatsoever. I guess I'm behind the times.

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

#87

Post by jancsika »

Before I submit a bug report-- is there a good reason that the zero isn't dotted in this font?

For example, executive order numbers have both "O" and "0" appearing in them. But I'm sure there are stronger examples in various gov't depts. where those characters can occur in sequence and create errors. Not to mention any code snippets that already appear in government web sites.

I suppose the extra ink could be a concern, but we should be moving away from paper printouts anyway. And as we do that, extinguishing a small dot in this great nation's zeros would be an important symbolic first step in combating climate change.

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

#88

Post by frogpelt »

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!

Do you (18f) have any success with redesigning internal government sites, those that require smart cards to access?

Some of those are the worst.

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

#89

Post by airstrike »

snide wrote: post #45
beefhash wrote: post #9

I've been wondering why all these new fonts tend to have a strong focus on sans serif font (Fira has no serif variant, Source Serif Pro came later than the other Source fonts). Aren't there a lot of situations (namely, lengthy legal documents) where you'd prefer a serif font before you want a sans serif?

Primarily because they focus on interfaces, not publishing. Serif is traditionally used for legibility of long text. Sans always wins for actual interface design (at least those with some manner of complexity) because it's much less visually distracting when used in a variety of weights and sizes. Interfaces tend to have much more mixed usage so we usually go with sans. Generally just using the system font is fine fo…

Thanks for the link! I've been looking for a free-as-in-beer, good-looking font family with tabular numbers and had pretty much given up on hope. Inter UI is fantastic!

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

#90

Post by vesinisa »

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!

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 their works under a free license, and massive bodies of government-owned digitized cultural works sadly remain accessible only to those who pay for them.

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