Nebula Sans

All true, except it’s not really a Whitney clone. It’s Source Sans very lightly adjusted to match Whitney’s metrics. It looks and feels exactly like Source Sans to me. It’s a little strange to present it as a prestigious project with a minisite like this.

Source Sans is nice and easy to read, but so overused it’s rarely a good starting point for a visual identity.

While I’d truly love an open source Whitney alternative (and have looked for years for one), this isn’t it.

Nebula has flat terminals, Whitney has angled terminals.

(There’s a lot of other differences but that one effects most letter shapes).

This is not a clone. They just matched the *outer dimensions* of Whitney, so that they could swap out their old font and not have to remake all their typography.

It looks like every "designer's font" introduced since the designers went insane over the iPhone.

Anyway, I'd like sans serif fonts more if they were readable, including being able to distinguish Weird Al from Weird AI.

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They forgot to add "...in the US". Some jurisdictions have more protection [1]. In practice though, it works as it always does: do what you want, you probably won't get sued, but if you do, it totally sucks - even if you do have the law on your side.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

Wonderful video, thank you! The one on the linked Nebula page is also great.

It’s funny - I subscribe to Nebula (a “boutique” video platform) and subconsciously have felt these things that are talked about in both videos, but I needed someone to point them out to me for me to consciously notice.

Look for opentype features in https://practicaltypography.com/. There is more fun stuff, right next to tabular numbers.

And if you want more, there is also https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844....

You’re not the only one to be fair. I had to point this out to GitHub just last November: https://github.com/primer/css/pull/2680

Not only that, some fonts have a vast number of tweaks available: https://rsms.me/inter/#features

After the Handgloves specimen, the next part of the page is black with tiny writing. My awful eyesight and mobile scrolling priors caused my brain to assume I had reached the bottom of the page and stop scrolling.

Thanks for pointing out, indirectly, that there’s a lot more content than I had assumed!

Tabular numerics are great! Of course not all fonts implement them.

If only Apple could figure this out and use it for the iOS clock app.

This is neat, thanks.

Reminds me of how fira code (my favourite font for code) can be adjusted to match the preferences.

I am not in *the font bubble*, but can immediately recognise, say, the Guardian by its typography alone.

It can absolutely be a part of a texts character and reducing this entire field to a *bubble* is a feeble attempt at spinning ignorance as a virtue.

On the screen, in small print, you may not notice the difference between this and, say, Franklin Gothic. But in print the difference is more noticeable, even if not immediately visible without taking a closer look. If you encounter a booklet purported to be form Bank of America set in this typeface instead of Franklin Gothic, it will look very similar but you'll feel that something is slightly off.

Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer who gave a talk called (something to the effect of) “why do we need so many typefaces”. At one point, Erik simply shows a slide with “this is why”, in what is clearly the Marlboro font.

Fonts have different metrics which affect recognisability, legibility, and understanding. There are fonts which evoke a feeling (think heavy metal band), others which are practical (exaggerated letter forms to help dyslexia), and many many many bad fonts too, such as ones with bad kerning which make words like “therapists” read “the rapists” or “morn” read “mom”.

The fonts you have on your computer are all different and have their own strengths and weaknesses which affect you and your perception of what you read, even if you’re unaware of it.

I'm not into fonts at all either, but this looks like more crispier and more readable that I anything saw before. I don't know exactly why.

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.

https://youtu.be/J06tluN7rtE

It's a super interesting video on the history of fonts and how digitizing it works.

The moment you let the low contrast gremlins out of the cage they start their mischief!

Flat design is the more sucky partner to neutral palettes in current design trends, IMO. I want color too but it's not a clear step towards usability. I think the return of gentle skeumorphism would be a good step for general usability.

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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.

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.

My test is simple: does it have a monospace variant and does it support Japanese? If not, then it's worse than IBM Plex.

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 agree the keming is off in places, like the alternates.

It seems that you have included mostly old fonts as examples. And what is your opinion about free fonts like Roboto, Open Sans or Noto?

You seem to know a thing or two about typeface design. What do you think about Alegreya, Playfair, and Ubuntu fonts?

One of the things that made me interested in fonts was many years ago when I looked up the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and ever since I did that I react every time I see Arial used in print or signage because some of the letters are really awful in comparison. The most obvious difference is probably the capital R which to me looks terrible in Arial.

Here's an image showing some overlay examples: https://i.imgur.com/1sdXiNY.jpeg

In what way are you finding it better than Source Sans?