Nebula Sans
nebulasans.com
Nebula Sans
1–10 of 107 posts
Re: Nebula Sans
#2So this is a free Whitney with some tweaks?
> Source Sans was the perfect foundation for Nebula Sans because it shares many primary characteristics with Whitney SSm, our previous brand typeface
One differing characteristic presumably being requiring payment to Hoefler & Co.
Re: Nebula Sans
#3I’m not a huge font nerd but this looks really swanky. Gonna use it as my DE default font for sure.
I appreciate the site’s overview and comparisons and such too
Re: Nebula Sans
#4Looks great!
My first impression is the spacing is a bit wide, but that can be adjusted.
Re: Nebula Sans
#5So this is a free Whitney with some tweaks? > Source Sans was the perfect foundation for Nebula Sans because it shares many primary characteristics with Whitney SSm, our previous brand typeface One differing characteristic presumably being requiring payment to Hoefler & Co.
It looks more like a derivative then a copy/clone.
Their video explains it way further and is worth a watch.suprisingly captivating. (You can select no and view it without paying)
https://nebula.tv/videos/nebula-sans?ref=nebulasans
It's also worth watching this video if you are interested in how this works.
It's a super interesting video on the history of fonts and how digitizing it works.
Re: Nebula Sans
#6I can't recommend this video enough about how digitizing fonts work and how copyright works for fonts. It's short (5 mins) but is so wonderful.
Re: Nebula Sans
#7Why do the increasing weights also look larger? Also, since they've shown it white on black a few times, aren't fonts supposed to have different weights for black on white vs white on black to compensate for different perceived weight?
Re: Nebula Sans
#8All 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 pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.
Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.
The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.
I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.
Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.
Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.
Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.
Re: Nebula Sans
#9Looks great! My first impression is the spacing is a bit wide, but that can be adjusted.
Same, the spacing is a bit odd. I am curious about the rationale, as I think this is not great for longer forms of text.
Of course you can adjust char spacing, but normally font designers will make a condensed variant to make that work for corner cases.
Re: Nebula Sans
#10I 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}