It's a little beside the point of the post, but I just want to fly a flag for Nebula: I subscribed solely to get early versions of Jet Lag: The Game, but I'm finding myself watching it more and more! It has many of the channels I would go to YouTube for, but I've also discovered several really good ones that I had never heard of. And it has a similar feel to Kagi, in the sense of "freeing" yourself from the algorithm. It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month? What does this tell Google about me?". Same thing with all the big streaming services.
With Nebula, no such worry. The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform, it's just a bunch of high-quality videos and channels that I can watch with no fuss. It's remarkable how nice that feels in 2026. Really highly recommended.
WarmWash
The problem is that ad-blocking makes youtube the best value proposition for users. You get almost all the content of nebula, plus tons more, for free, no ads.
Don't get me wrong, Nebula is great (although yt actually has a better profit share believe it or not), but the internet needs to look in the mirror before services like it can actually compete with yt.
pbronez
This surprised me, so I looked it up. Basically YouTube pays ~55% and Nebula pays 50%.
This is complicated by Nebula's "creator owned" situation. Which is complicated [0]. It's something like:
- Nebula's assets live in Watch Nebula LLC
- Watch Nebula LLC is owned by 83% Standard Broadcast and 16% Curiosity Stream (CURI)
- Standard Broadcast "is owned by 44 total people, all of whom are creators"
So it's fair to say there are creators with significant equity stakes in Nebula. It's NOT fair to assume that the 50% of revenue left after share is distributed evenly among all creators on the platform via an equity mechanism.
Of course then there's Floatplane, which is entirely owned by LMG. At least a couple years ago they targeted "a 70/30 split" but arrive there via "a fixed cost menu for features [...] based on bandwidth/maintenance costs' [1]
I'm glad YT is still sharing a meaningful amount of money with creators.
Of cause, I assume it's difficult to compare 50% of paid subscriptions to 55% of ad revenue. I have heard that YouTubers earn per view from premium subscribers than from ad supported views.
vanderZwan
I suspect that 50% at no risk of demonetization is quite a bit more than 55% with it for quite a significant chunk of those content creators.
RobotToaster
> I'm glad YT is still sharing a meaningful amount of money with creators.
They're doing their best to stop sharing anything with all but the largest creators, since they keep increasing the monetisation requirements.
Computer0
percentages are meaningless in the ad space and I think topic specific CPM would be a more meaningful comparison. Even on youtube itself things like kids toy videos can make 4x or more per 1M views when compared to a Political show or something technical.
samschooler
On Nebula even the built in ads for Squarespace are gone too. Sure you could use sponsorblock, but for me I'm happy to support Nebula as their creator netowrk are people I want to support directly with my dollars.
f4stjack
The problem is, google is an advertising company now the "ad-blocking makes all content free" is a temporary argument at best. At any rate, I like Nebula's curated content better than the ai-slop/clickbait slop Youtube provides.
Only pet peeve I have is... jeffiot is in Nebula, Tom Scott is in Nebula, Lindsey Ellis is in Nebula... where is f4mi????????
bjoli
We shouldn't forget that Google tried to push the whole remote browser stack attestation thing (WEI). That is where they want to go. We shouldn't follow them there.
misstuned
I have both, and I find my YouTube home page way more diverse than Nebula. Nebula is an invite-only clique and they invite people who look like them. YouTube, for me, has a lot more British creators, a lot more people of colour, a lot more women creators, a bigger diversity of topics and subjects, a lot more deep technical stuff. Nebula is a lot of American guys discussing movies and politics, with only the very recent addition of Token Brit Tom Scott.
I'm yet another person who only got Nebula for week-early access to Jet Lag, and I think if that particular show ever went away or took an extended break, Nebula would be struggling. I find myself watching something on YouTube most evenings, I rarely find myself on Nebula when Jet Lag isn't on.
NoGravitas
Wasn't Abigail PhilosophyTube, a British woman, one of the Nebula founders? I guess perhaps it has changed since the early days.I remember them kicking off JT Second Thought.
misstuned
I'm not saying it doesn't have any, just that it doesn't have as many. My YouTube is just so much more diverse in every way, I'm never going to get my favourite UK canal boat creators on Nebula for instance. Nebula is a narrow thing for a narrow audience that likes one specific type of online video.
My Nebula runs out at the end of the year and I'm not renewing, I'm not that fussed about seeing Jet Lag a week late, and none of the other stuff is really for me. I'll divvy up my £60 a year Nebula sub to a few creators I like.
ARandumGuy
Seconding this. I've been subscribed to Nebula for a couple years, as I watch a lot of video essayists on Youtube and like half of them are on Nebula. In addition to ad-free viewing, you also get:
* No in-video sponsor segments
* Exclusive videos (including some creators and series that upload primarily to Nebula)
* Early access to some videos
* Uncensored videos, as Nebula does not have the automatic content or copyright enforcement systems that Youtube has
* A decent TV app (at least on Roku), so I can watch ad-free on the TV without paying for Youtube premium
All for a much cheaper price then Youtube Premium ($60 annually vs $160, with frequent promo offers). If you already watch a lot of Youtube channels that are on Nebula, I'd highly recommend it.
_thisdot
Wish these guys did localised pricing. YT Premium costs around ~$12 annually in India. Nebula costs the same $60
bonoboTP
> It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month?
You can remove videos from your watch history. Or you can open the link in a private/incognito window. Google may still be able to connect it but I don't think it will impact your recommendations that way.
malnourish
I suggest just turning off watch history/suggestions.
I only use YouTube when I want to watch something specific. If I find something I want to return to, I like it or bookmark it or add it to a playlist.
I feel like the only thing I'm missing is a home page which doesn't tell me I have watch history disabled.
OskarS
Yes, of course you can, but this sense of always having to curate your watch history and hide from the algorithm is just not there for Nebula. I guess it's different from person to person, but it's remarkable how freeing it feels to me to use a service where that isn't a concern. I'm watching what I want to watch, not what the algorithm is manipulating me to click on.
Maybe it will enshittify like most everything else, but it hasn't so far, and for now I'm a very happy customer.
bonoboTP
To me it doesnt feel limiting. I curate it to get good recommendations. I also switch between accounts. One for trash binges, and one for everyday stuff, one for serious technical content etc.
I use "do not recommend this channel" a lot, and click "not interested" a lot. Open the YouTube front page, remove stuff you would prefer not to have there, refresh, repeat, the algo will adapt.
Same hygiene on social media. Add muted phrases, mute people, click "not interested". It improves the experience a lot.
jonas21
You can also just turn off your watch history completely and use the subscriptions page as your starting point. I did that for a while, but turned it back on when I realized that the algorithm was actually quite good at surfacing content that I learned a lot from -- most of it was stuff that I would never search for on my own (or even know to search for).
dcow
Unfortunately for me it went the other way. I was an early Nebula subscriber but in my experience the content got super stale and I found myself struggling to find anything interesting to watch after a few months. After a few years of using it maybe once a quarter, I pulled the plug. I hope it's temporary and I am an avid Kagi user so I am 100% willing to pay for add free content. I wish Nebula had a pay-per-view option so I could pay for the content I use.
evo_9
For the past day or so I’ve been baffled why this font has lingered on HN’s front page. And I read this comment several times and I kept wondering what is he talking about, it’s just a font. A very good font that I actually think is nice and my friend who is a designer is quite taken by, but still it’s a font.
Today, I finally search for nebula streaming and found the actual site his comment is referring to so here it is: https://nebula.tv/
Side note: it’s a minor nit that HN seems to have a very frequent problem with threads getting hijacked with unrelated comment threads, often the top comment(s). I wish there was a way to split the comments off with a new title that clearly explained that this is not related to the original post.
kzrdude
I guess Nebula is better for video watching, but without recommendations and video comments, it feels dead. I did pay for it for a year and then gave up. Is the problem me?
magarnicle
I log on once a day and can see everything that was uploaded in less than two minutes. No need for recommendations. Considering how cheap it is I'm happy if I only find one or two videos a week worth watching.
OskarS
I think that's totally fair, it's just different people come to youtube for different things. Nebula is just a different value proposition.
dspillett
Yes, but no.
Different tools work better for different people, if you want/need yt features that aren't found in the alternative then it is the right choice for you.
riddley
Nebula is very much my cup of tea in theory but the android app is So Bad that I unsubbed. Watching a long video and need to stop? Better luck next time, we're not about to save your spot. Didn't remember the exact name of something? Good luck finding it again. Not at all interested in a certain creator? Too bad! You're going to see them whenever they produce.
zeristor
I signed up for Nebula, it is a lot more for HD quality, which I though was sneeky.
In the end I never got in the habit of opening Nebula to watch the content.
I pay for Premium YouTube and have noticed when there's an in video ad you can skip through to the end of the ad, YouTube have set that up.
I tend to watch 2 minute of several videos on rotation, I guess I should just put the Apple TV out of reach and I can't keep channel twitching
ChickeNES
Yeah I...just never end up opening the Nebula app, which I honestly find harder to use than the Youtube app.
wvh
This is interesting, I didn't know about Nebula. Anything to support less intrusive platforms and stop being followed for months by horrible content because you clicked on the wrong video.
Anonyneko
I absolutely love the idea behind Nebula, but to this day there isn't a single creator there that I'm interested in actively following...
A big part of it is just my hobbies being different, but a no small part is that the videos are still the same YouTube videos that are first and foremost built to satisfy the algorithm. And since these are all people who are successful on YouTube, the concentration of such videos is higher than on actual YouTube.
xd1936
Seconded. My only complaint is the bad buffering on the TV versions of the Nebula app. It starts out so low quality and takes forever to snap to 1080p, with no option to override quality, on symmetrical 2.5GBe.
OskarS
Obviously YMMV, but I haven't had any issues like that, the quality of the videos is the same I get in the YouTube app. They take a few seconds longer to start though.
bl4kers
> The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform
I bought a lifetime subscription originally for Legal Eagle videos (both for the Nebula-exclusive videos and the Nebula-exclusive extras at the end of the videos), but I've also enjoyed Not Just Bikes and Tom Scott's England series.
MattGrommes
I would absolutely love to subscribe to Nebula but they don't have an Xbox app which is where I watch almost all my TV/Youtube/streaming. I hope they have the resources to do it at some point.
bearjaws
Swear whenever your company decides to invent its own font its like a version of "The Headquarters Curse". You had nothing else better to spend your teams time on so might as well make a new font that 10% of your customers will notice if you are lucky.
They could have just picked any other font and used it. It's a video streaming website, how much text content is there vs video content?
Headquarter Curse: A theory suggesting that companies often experience setbacks or decline after constructing a lavish new headquarters.
OtherShrezzing
Not sure this counts for Nebula. Font licenses (even very liberal ones) are a massive pain and expense for content creators who publish to multiple platforms in a variety of different mediums.
Collectively their creator/owners will be paying thousands of dollars/month for their fonts. Something you’ve correctly assessed that a very low number of their viewers will notice or care about.
Nebula can make one upfront payment (likely less than a single months font foundry payments for their owners), and give the creators absolute certainty that the created font is free forever, no matter the viewing platform or medium.
Seems like a decent place to allocate some idle cash.
notahacker
Plenty of fonts with the same SIL open font license around already, especially if what you're after is a nice but generic modern sans serif font which 99% of users can't distinguish between.
Can't think of any reason why Nebula creators would go for this one other than to blend in with the platform's corporate house style for the 1% of users pedantic enough to notice and... well they could have picked an existing SIL open font for that if it had been about simply minimising creators' costs
I'd understand it way more if they were a big corporate creating something very distinctive and very closed source for their marketing material...
pibaker
Judging from the kind of content creators nebula hosts I'd imagine they do in fact have the kind of nerdy audience that notices miniature font differences.
bjoli
In some ways I feel that caring a lot about fonts is on the opposite side of the spectrum to whatever it is making a population feel their lives have more meaning during wartime or crisis.
As a visual designer, sure, it is you job. As a computer user whose ultimate goal of using a computer is something else... I am kind of an old fart, but I often find that the best content is often found in conjunction with "font-family: sans-serif".
isolatedsystem
I'm a mechanical engineering PhD who works on numerical computing, data analysis and the like. I've spent several hundreds of dollars on fonts. Because I like things being just so, because I like seeing the artefacts I produce being nice to look at, and because they're just plain beautiful.
Day to day, I use open source fonts that Butterick recommends. But once in a while, I like using just nice stuff. It's like a nice fountain pen for others.
bjoli
I believe everything you say. I hope you didn't feel attacked. It is just a feeling I often get when I'm online. Some people seem to spend more time on form than actual content, and while I agree that how things look is a part of the expression, I am somewhat of a brutalist because I feel that it rarely matters much, and most of the time it is a distraction.
but again, I am an old fart who is sad gopher lost.
> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.
suprjami
This is even more baffling because Source Sans is open under SIL which permits free commercial use without restriction.
So if the goal was to save money, wouldn't the smart move be to use Source Sans for $0, instead of paying the designer of Source Sans to make some very minor tweaks to end up with another SIL font?
jacobolus
You are misunderstanding. The Nebula people were previously using the Whitney typeface. The organization that produced/sells Whitney changed ownership and the licensing became prohibitively expensive overnight.
They wanted something that could be a drop-in replacement for Whitney with the same letter sizes and spacing, so that they could put it into all of their products without needing any other redesign.
They couldn't find anything like that available off the shelf, and fonts they found that were close to Whitney in appearance were still also somewhat expensive, so their alternative was to take Source Sans, which has a free license, and make some quite significant but semi-automated modifications to it.
Making changes to just the typeface was presumably cheaper than making changes to all of their other designs.
suprjami
That makes more sense now. Thank you for the explanation!
Freedom2
Perhaps I'm your typical HNer like the GP comment and the topmost comment, but I don't see an issue with changing the style of the font entirely. Sure, it may be jarring to customers, but it's a short term pain for almost zero cost.
jacobolus
There's no inherent issue with it. It just requires doing a bunch of additional design work, which is not free.
Marha01
Is it more expensive that designing an entirely new font?
jacobolus
That's why they didn't design an entirely new font. Instead they made semi-automated modifications to a free font, and then tweaked a few specific characters afterwards.
The result is not as good as what they had before, and not as good as it would have been if they hired a professional to design a new font from scratch, but it was cheap and solved their problem.
TheOtherHobbes
They took something workable and Arial-ised it. And now they're using a bland, mediocre font.
Fonts are weird voodoo. Good and bad choices can both make a measurable difference to ROI.
So I'm not convinced this is going to be the profit booster they hope.
Destiner
oh no, an indie company is having fun instead of increasing the shareholder’s value!
mbo
you should have seen the reaction when Are.na collaborated with Dinamo on a new version of Arial (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012995) - like, are we not allowed to make art for arts' sake?
pibaker
Hacker News gets mad if you deviate a little from the usual profit maximizing routine to do something a little humanistic. And then they keep upvoting articles on how corpo streamlining sucks all life out and how the modern society lost its humanistic spirit. You can't win. May very well just play you own game and enjoy it.
The key difference is this: Areal is a proprietary typeface. Nebula Sans is an open source (SIL) typeface.
dumpHero2
Or passing the income to it's creators
RobotToaster
A generic corporate sans-serif typeface is your idea of fun?
xyzzy_plugh
So, funnily enough in my own career I've experienced The Headquarters event several times, and each time, after the lavish new headquarters is built, I think to myself, "this is it, we've peaked!" and each time it was an inflection point followed by even more growth and success.
I think I'm at 5 now.
Also three of those companies designed their own font too, though none of them still use it.
robocat
Somebody at Jane Street is ingesting data about new $X (HQs and fonts as two examples) and predicting share prices from that.
runarberg
They could have, but they didn’t. Another way to look at this is they could design their own font, and they did.
Companies are allowed to make fun things.
waldothedog
It also seems like they are trying to put this out as a creative endeavor that gives access to a really nice set of fonts without a fee associated (they link directly to Hoefler saying this is an open license replacement)
Feel like these things happen all the time in software as creative projects? Could be a tool for attracting design talent / interest?
shrug. It’s a nice typeface, cool project.
muglug
I think it's important to point out how much easier it is to create a new typeface based on an existing one and using the metrics of another one, than to create one from scratch.
For example, I've built metrics-compatible versions of Aptos and Verdana in the last few days based on other open-source fonts that matched the shapes closely.
For Verdana I just told an LLM to add bars to DejaVu Sans and extend some shapes. For Aptos I had to get a bit more creative, designing a new double-storey g, but it was otherwise fine.
brokencode
Idk, how much could it cost to design a new font like this? Probably like tens of thousands of dollars?
This doesn’t seem like an extravagant expense to me. And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
nullfern
For me personally, I feel like a lot of tech companies are bloated and a lot of people are justifying their salary by doing unnecessary projects.
In many cases, it's all internal and no skin off noses such as this font project. In other cases, it means the UI changes every 4 to 6 months or even worse, the software becomes so bloated with "features" it becomes unusable so a clean replacement comes on the scene then the cycle repeats.
Sometimes, I feel, it would be better for companies to clap their hands and go "We did it, we solved the problem" then just stop. Keep the infrastructure running, do bug fixes, listen to customers on new features or changes but otherwise not do product churn for the sake of justifying salaries.
To expand on my view in an abstract way, when constructing a building construction workers, architects, project managers, and the whole cadre are hired then the building is built then all those people move onto new projects. Continual development of software is like if construction never stopped so that the construction crew still had jobs. A construction site should strive to transition from architects, cranes, and concrete trucks to maintenance staff, mop buckets, and screw drivers.
georgemcbay
> And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
Nebula Sans is a derivative of Adobe's Source Sans which is available to use for free for any purpose include commercial under the SIL Open Font License (the same license Nebula Sans has to use as a derivative of Source Sans).
So they could have just used Source Sans for free and virtually nobody but the most dedicated font nerds would have known the difference between that font and Nebula's tweak of it if not for the PR announcement.
All that said, I don't care what Nebula spends their money or time on, so I'm not saying they shouldn't have had this font made... but doing it wasn't a money-saving move.
tishomingo
I understand your point, but it does send a message that the company values design and art. It can be a great signal to attract talent. I know I would be!
Analemma_
A lot of font foundries are switching from one-time payments to pay-per-use licensing schemes, to try and get huge payouts from e.g. companies which serve web pages trillions of times, and those companies are mostly responding by just commissioning their own fonts instead.
0xffff2
10% seems incredibly generous. I'd be shocked if it's 1%.
nullfern
Oh my gosh! I have always felt and talked about The Headquarters Curse but never had a 'word' for it. Today I am one of the 10,000 [0].
You should read Parkinson's research, or his book "Parkinson’s Law And Other Studies In Administration".
Gualdrapo
The differences are really, really subtle, I'd bet most people (including me) would have a really hard time telling them apart.
I agree with that one person (I can't recall when or where I read this) who said modern typography is getting so frivolous about doing personalised typographic families for startups instead of extending the existing ones to cover more languages and scripts than latin.
But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")
bonoboTP
Typography is just a nice geeky topic. Happy for the people who could make Nebula pay them for fussing around with a font. It's clearly bikeshedding and irrelevant though. If their previous font was too expensive, they should have switched to an existing free font. Their priority should be the streaming offerings. When the business isn't working, it's not the furniture that you have to replace.
I one subscribed to CuriosityStream and Nebula in a combo deal, but didn't end up watching it much. I find them to be overproduced edutainment that's often too plastic for my taste. A kind of Netflix but for IFL science redditor types. I rather prefer low production quality YouTube videos from oddball makers who just show something cool, explain something obscure with a simple slideshow etc.
tobr
The differences are even subtler if you compare it to Source Sans (which it is derived from) rather than Whitney (which it is replacing). I posted this comparison last time Nebula Sans were on the HN front page: https://imgur.com/JPwgYkj
mock-possum
“For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda
elinfame
para la plata baila el mono -- Wilfrido Vargas 1994
kissgyorgy
I'm not sure we are looking at the same font, this one looks way crispier and more readable than any other font I have ever seen before.
Aurornis
I like this font and the license it comes with:
> The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works.
Very nice. I’ve paid for fonts for personal use in the past but I was always nervous about accidentally putting a screenshot or other incidental capture somewhere that might get distributed and violate the license.
zerocrates
The SIL Open Font License is pretty much the standard for freely releasing fonts. Poke around on Google Fonts or other places that have freely-licensed fonts and you'll find the vast majority use OFL.
Adobe's Source (the basis for this one), Google's Roboto and Google Sans, the very common Inter, Lato and Open Sans, coding/monospace fonts like Iosevka, JetBrains Mono... chances are that a free font you're aware of uses the OFL, particularly if it's even vaguely recent.
CharlesW
I don't believe they had a choice, since it's a derivative of Adobe's OTF-licensed Source Sans.
y1n0
I must be the only person in the world that thinks so many of these fonts are casually indistinguishable.
I feel like I’m reading reviews of wines. This font has chocolatey overtones that bring the reader to a meditative state of hyperflow.
Understated yet elegant, you wouldn't immediately notice it is different from your default sans-serif. But it has a soothing regularity that makes it easy to absorb in large quantities and the lowercase g is a quiet encouragement to drink your tea with your pinky raised.
ashton314
Erik Spiekermann is a genius. He made Fira Sans to be a total antithesis to Helvetica. Now, I like Helvetica, but I also love the pure character of Fira Sans and it’s my go-to sans serif.
> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.
kwanbix
Which they license for 30 per year?
EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.
dramm
In what Universe does worrying about the typeface of your startup effort matter? Google for one has some just lovely free to use high quality typefaces. Do I care about design, hell yes, for one I worked for Adobe helping introduce InDesign, etc. but this makes no sense.
iuvyfthknjv
Ah, so you are one of the many to blame for InDesign’s many, and I mean MANY, annoyances, weirdness, quirkiness, failures to follow other Adobe app standards and general fuck ups? Good to know.
Waste of time and money on their part. There are more than enough typefaces in this world that look just like this one.
t098i3
According to their website this saved them a lot of money, plus they also made a documentary about making the font which is content for Nebula.
celsoazevedo
Where did the savings come from? Maybe they were licensing a paid font? I doubt saved them more money than using a free font.
cleech
They were licensing Whitney SSm, they switched to a Source Sans derived typeface to save those costs but forked and adjusted it to more closely match Whitney SSm to minimize brand disruption.
t098i3
In the documentary video, their CCO explained if they used a different existing font they would have had to rework a lot of their media for the different font metrics, while making their own allowed them to have a drop-in replacement.
ChrisRR
Saved them money on licensing their existing font, so why didn't they just move to another cheaper or free font?
t098i3
Because those fonts have different metrics, so they wouldn't have been drop-in replacements, they would have had to re-do all of their branded media.
Loose programming analogy: The free replacements had a slightly different "API" (metrics) that would have required adjusting hundreds or thousands of "call sites" (media using the font), so instead they made their own "API-compatible" (metrically compatible) replacement that dropped straight in.
This is all covered in the documentary short about the font.
petesergeant
I just bought a Nebula subscription, and hadn't heard of it before, so there's some value there
gralab
Then this PR stunt worked I suppose. I still see no need to create yet another derivative sans-serif typeface. Especially for an online streaming service of all things.
panja
We're apes on a spinning rock... Time and money are both made up, Let the people enjoy their font lol
etchalon
"Why bother doing something original when there's something generic that's good enough" is certainly one way to approach things.
gralab
No. You know that's not what I'm saying. There are many other very respectable typefaces available that they could have used. This one, while it may be custom made, *looks* generic. If I never saw this post, I would have zero clue they made it in-house. This is a PR stunt to get attention on sites like this.
etchalon
There are so very, very many things you're missing here.
gralab
Explain.
t098i3
In the documentary video, their CCO explained if they used a different existing font they would have had to rework a lot of their media for the different font metrics, while making their own allowed them to have a drop-in replacement.
lirolero
ok boomer
msla
Ah, sans-serif, where you can't tell the difference between "Weird Al" and "Weird AI" because who needs letters that don't collide, right?
aidenn0
There are many sans-serif fonts that distinguish the lower-l and upper-i. For some reason they aren't as popular as the ones that do not. Perhaps the popularity of Helvetica (and other neo-grotesque typefaces) caused this.
bbx
Feels like a mix of Open Sans and Source Sans Pro. These were all over the web about 12 years ago. They got well with Montserrat in all caps and Merriweather: https://www.fubiz.net/
Whitney was the main font of Stripe when Benjamin De Cock initially redesigned the brand. It was one of the most beautiful websites I'd ever seen (and still is): https://dribbble.com/shots/2974913-Home
pjerem
You cannot be a fancy startup if you don't have your own font I guess.
yoz-y
I subscribe to nebula. However what i would really like to have is to automatically mark any videos watched on nebula as watched on YouTube.
Dormeno
Same, and I'd like a browser extension to tell me automatically if the same or a better version of the video on YT is on Nebula.
isidjwjdjefj
Why is everyone here acting like they shut down operations on all divisions and teams JUST to design and build this one font?
I’m willing to bet that the design team that worked on this font was not in charge of coding, business, finances, deals or anything else besides design.
Is it a revolutionary font? Not in the slightest. It’s just a “fine” font for all intents and purposes. But let’s not play this childish game of “they shouldn’t have wasted time with this and should have done that instead!”. We’re all grown ups here (hopefully), we ought to know better.
fredley
> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic
Good God I am sick to the back teeth of the neutral aesthetic. If you're going to spend all that money, can we have some _opinionated_ typefaces please? Especially against the backdrop of AI making everything look and feel exactly the same everywhere, the last thing anybody needs is another neutral, characterless, soulless typeface.
duderific
There's something so ... bland about this typeface. I get no feeling from it whatsoever. It's like the textual embodiment of the AI conversational style.
DiscourseFan
Its very boring. This trend started with the Nazis taking away Fraktur. Bland typefaces=nazism (this is what Adorno would say probably).
kixiQu
I definitely agree with your sentiment in general. However, I'll note that I find this sans serif to have a nicer feel than many I see these days (even among humanist ones) and it's cool that they've managed to achieve that while being acceptably inoffensive for mainstream use
iuvyfthknjv
It’s a good font. Nothing special about it. Not remarkable in any way, but not bad either. Just a perfectly OK font. Not sure why this is on HN but here we are.
meerita
I went to the website and the letter-spacing is something they maybe forgot to add to everything. I just tried letter-spacing: -0.05rem; and everything looks more readeable and the font shines even better.
t098i3
I think that was intentional so the font would fit into all the places they were previously using the paid font without reflowing all the content.
SubiculumCode
How did you do that? I noticed the spacing was very wide between leters,it bothered me.
meerita
Opened the inspector, add letter-spacing to a general rule they have for all text elements.
abcd_f
F12
dmitrygr
Am I just an uncultured heathen if all of these fonts i see posted here once every few weeks all look precisely the same to me, without a side-by-side? And even with one, they look minutely, irrelevantly different. I do not get eye fatigue nor any other effects people name when looking at ... any of them. Do I just need to absorb more culture and take an art class or five? Am I missing something obvious?
Genuinely, can someone please clue me in?
hakfoo
It's interesting to see their intent to make an explicit drop-in replacement.
I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".
impure
What is going on with the kerning in ‘print’? Yuck.
ilumanty
Free fonts always do free advertising for paid fonts made by actual professionals
andai
Well they definitely nailed "neutral" — I kept scrolling, waiting for the font to show up!
zestyping
It's a crime in this day and age to make a new font with an uppercase I and lowercase L that look the same.
It's hard to believe people are still designing new fonts with this glaring error. In 2026!
dmackerman
Looks nice. I've personally been obsessed with Atkinson Hyperlegible. Not sure what it is about it but it's just so pleasing.
strenholme
Atkinson Hyperlegible, like Nebula Sans (or, if you will, Source Sans) is an open source font available under the OFL license.
codeflo
They say it's a modified version Source Sans, but then don't compare it with Source Sans to show the differences. The only comparison is with their previous, unrelated font (Whitney SSm). Why?
sgc
Rather late to comment here, but are there plans to support Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and other scripts? I love the readability and elegance of this font in English and Greek, and would like to use it at CatholicLibrary.org.
thinkingtoilet
The font looks great. However, I get the same sense reading bios of Grateful Dead cover bands all pretending what their doing is different when I read descriptions of fonts. You're not "forging a new legacy with a fresh take on the Dead", you're just another cover band. And this is just another font.
leokennis
If you’re a startup but you don’t have a blog post with some wishy washy doodah showcasing your own personal font, its cute glyphs, its heritage in 1800’s Europe and some translucent overlays showing how it’s definitely different but not really compared to your initial bog standard font, are you really a startup?
elAhmo
Oh man, I wish I had free time and money to spend designing and releasing a new font.
isidjwjdjefj
Maybe if you spent less time being snarky on topics you clearly have no understanding of you’d get your wish.
The implication that this is an effort entirely devoid of value is so ridiculous it borders on stupidity.
frantzmiccoli
Really enjoyed the video! That kind of thing is a great way to build branding!
bjourne
Very nice font! However, I wish the default line height would have been a little bigger. It's a bit too dense for long paragraphs.
3eb7988a1663
I am not a font person, but is the "book" weight a standard thing? I have never seen this before.
burnoutdv
I was wondering the same..and got no answer. I _could_ ask an LLM but I prefer no to. On the other hand..this is the kind of question that is really hard to google..even if one got 2016 google. The word "book" and "font" in one query will yield stupid results that are not what i asked for.
So I went the way of lowest resistance, and to paraphrase, the LLM said, and it might be entirely wrong that Book is something between Light and Medium, a text weight that is supposed to be better readable for longer texts. So Something around 350/400 weight. Some fonts just use "Regular"
It's kind of funny how there is all that talk on the page about a new "humanist" font and important typographic and aesthetical considerations - and in the end, the entire reason for this were licensing fees...
But on that note, can you really call it your "own" font if the differences to your "inspiration" are so tiny you literally need to overlay the texts to even see them?
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but wouldn't this be a textbook example of a "derived work"? The page also explicitly mentions the relationship to the base fonts several times, so it's not even hidden.
Did the owners of Whitney SSm demand outrageous license fees, but also permitted unrestricted creation of derived works in their license? That would seem like a massive oversight on their part.
Also, not a typography nerd, but what is the wider utility of now having three fonts that are barely distinguishable from each other and only exist to evade each other's licensing restrictions?
katspaugh
Cute font!
Round, like we’re trending towards Comic Sans but still professional.
JackOneSG
I'd like to have a single continuous stroke dollar sign and variable font.
nnevatie
I swear, whenever there is a new font, there’s a documentary of its making.
isidjwjdjefj
For good reason. Typefaces often have fascinating beginnings and design processes.
Not an expert, but I believe humanist would be somewhat antithetical to brutalist. Where brutalism has hard edges/corners and are "cold" humanist designs have fewer right angles and are more warm/inviting.
delta_p_delta_x
I posted this comment[1] in the previous discussion. Reposting here, because I don't like slightly-derivative typefaces that are just FontForge tweaks of a typeface that was designed from the ground up, even less if they have given it an entirely new name.
All 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.
Are there any good paid fonts that you can just buy and use without having to worry about what websites you put them on and how many people view those websites?
6581
> The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux.
GTK4 doesn't even support subpixel rendering any more, and with OLED market share increasing I'd anticipate Windows moving away from it at some point too.
delta_p_delta_x
> OLED market share increasing I'd anticipate Windows moving away from it at some point too
Quite the contrary: many new OLEDs are moving back to an RGB stripe subpixel arrangement.
lovegrenoble
Nice font, I like it
Daiz
Having your own font is nice and all, but I wish Nebula would spend at least as much time on their subtitle rendering as they've spent on this marketing site... The subtitle rendering on Nebula is worse than what Youtube offers, and Youtube isn't exactly some pinnacle of subtitle rendering either. I'd really expect better from a premium service.
amanfromsolan
pretty close to how Source Sans looks like
pmkary
I for one love this website. Reminds me of ~2010ish designs. I miss those days. And who cares how much they spent on the typeface, was their money; I'm glad to have a new beautiful typeface for free.
m3kw9
subscription for a font is some crazy work
nozzlegear
What?
varispeed
I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.
dguest
There are people who don't want a perfect font, they want a new one every few years.
The rest of us just don't want it to be distracting.
mihaelm
We did that with Comic Sans MS
limaoscarjuliet
Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.
dkdbejwi383
And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.
swiftcoder
I've been making the Basque burnt cheesecake every year lately, it really is a delight
> I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.
"Perfect font" can only happen when we stop developing new display technologies, and print dies out completely. If "perfect" is not subjective in the first place, it is definitely context-dependent. Fonts designed to work on budget smartphone displays don't necessarily look good on 6K desktop displays, and so on...
crazygringo
That's like reaching the state of having a perfect button-down shirt.
Styles change (like collar size, slim vs roomy), and what looks good on one torso doesn't look best on another. What fits well for one company/product/book doesn't fit well for another company/product/book.
eichin
I've just been collecting monospace fonts, and have a bit of elisp to cycle through the collection when I'm bored with the current one. (Sometimes that's enough to conclude that no, really, the original was fine and I go back to it :-)
hoofedear
It'll be the same day we reach the state of having the perfect programming language
zem
that reminds me of the time there was one particular combination of my laptop dpi, screen resolution, and windows 2000 font renderer that made lucida sans typewriter look perfect, but when I switched to linux the same font seemed less crisp and clean, and I ended up using bitstream vera instead. I still try lucida sans typewriter out every now and then but whatever sweet spot it hit on that machine never happened again.
That happened in 1957, but we can’t leave well enough alone.
azatom
define perfect!
- read? mostly coders
- sell? mostly marketing
- fraud? rn.com vs m.com mostly designers
dbbk
Is it just me or does this look really... cheap?
1attice
A handsome font and a worthwhile contribution. Satisfying. Nebula notches yet another mark.
1attice
..downvoted. OK. Perhaps I didn't say enough:
- I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts
- The use of Whitney as a target font is also interesting. I like this font a lot but a lot of nice fonts have annoying properties for web dev (looking at you Frutiger) esp around numbers. I have wasted life years fiddling with tabular number presentation.
There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)
etdznots
Great! Sounds like you might need some assistance, just let me know if you want to tackle that weekend project you’ve been thinking shoot, practice a new skill, or just chat, I’m right here and happy to help.
1attice
The horrible thing is I wrote that all by hand
cobertos
Gave me a laugh, but comment was also originally dead'd because I assume sounds too much like AI. (For obvious reasons)
furyofantares
I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font
reaperducer
I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font
I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.
azatom
Pipe, capital i, small l are just line
Edit: WOW I did not know if that I write WHAT I don't like, then I will get downwoted here, like on other sites for pure hatred, ynews really goes down
fishgoesblub
It's always interesting to see companies spend time, money, and make a big deal (websites even, apparently) solely for a Sans Serif font. One that, at least on my system, is blocked by uBlock Origin and gets converted into Noto Sans (which should be default, screw your fonts, respect my browser's font please!)
cassepipe
I don't have the same animosity against web fonts but yes I realized I could just do that on Firefox and I appreciate relying on the same font across web pages. I don't feel like I am missing out on much and aesthetically I like the idea of reusing what I already have instead of downloading a new font on every page
isidjwjdjefj
I’ll never understand why you lot pretend like graphic design doesn’t matter. Thats so childish and narrow minded it borders on pathetic. C’mon now. Let’s act like the grown ups we all (hopefully) are.
With Nebula, no such worry. The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform, it's just a bunch of high-quality videos and channels that I can watch with no fuss. It's remarkable how nice that feels in 2026. Really highly recommended.
Don't get me wrong, Nebula is great (although yt actually has a better profit share believe it or not), but the internet needs to look in the mirror before services like it can actually compete with yt.
This is complicated by Nebula's "creator owned" situation. Which is complicated [0]. It's something like:
So it's fair to say there are creators with significant equity stakes in Nebula. It's NOT fair to assume that the 50% of revenue left after share is distributed evenly among all creators on the platform via an equity mechanism.Of course then there's Floatplane, which is entirely owned by LMG. At least a couple years ago they targeted "a 70/30 split" but arrive there via "a fixed cost menu for features [...] based on bandwidth/maintenance costs' [1]
I'm glad YT is still sharing a meaningful amount of money with creators.
[0] https://medium.com/@cameron-paul/who-actually-owns-nebula-95...
[1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1335443-floatplane-creator-s...
They're doing their best to stop sharing anything with all but the largest creators, since they keep increasing the monetisation requirements.
Only pet peeve I have is... jeffiot is in Nebula, Tom Scott is in Nebula, Lindsey Ellis is in Nebula... where is f4mi????????
I'm yet another person who only got Nebula for week-early access to Jet Lag, and I think if that particular show ever went away or took an extended break, Nebula would be struggling. I find myself watching something on YouTube most evenings, I rarely find myself on Nebula when Jet Lag isn't on.
My Nebula runs out at the end of the year and I'm not renewing, I'm not that fussed about seeing Jet Lag a week late, and none of the other stuff is really for me. I'll divvy up my £60 a year Nebula sub to a few creators I like.
* No in-video sponsor segments
* Exclusive videos (including some creators and series that upload primarily to Nebula)
* Early access to some videos
* Uncensored videos, as Nebula does not have the automatic content or copyright enforcement systems that Youtube has
* A decent TV app (at least on Roku), so I can watch ad-free on the TV without paying for Youtube premium
All for a much cheaper price then Youtube Premium ($60 annually vs $160, with frequent promo offers). If you already watch a lot of Youtube channels that are on Nebula, I'd highly recommend it.
You can remove videos from your watch history. Or you can open the link in a private/incognito window. Google may still be able to connect it but I don't think it will impact your recommendations that way.
I only use YouTube when I want to watch something specific. If I find something I want to return to, I like it or bookmark it or add it to a playlist.
I feel like the only thing I'm missing is a home page which doesn't tell me I have watch history disabled.
Maybe it will enshittify like most everything else, but it hasn't so far, and for now I'm a very happy customer.
I use "do not recommend this channel" a lot, and click "not interested" a lot. Open the YouTube front page, remove stuff you would prefer not to have there, refresh, repeat, the algo will adapt.
Same hygiene on social media. Add muted phrases, mute people, click "not interested". It improves the experience a lot.
Today, I finally search for nebula streaming and found the actual site his comment is referring to so here it is: https://nebula.tv/
Side note: it’s a minor nit that HN seems to have a very frequent problem with threads getting hijacked with unrelated comment threads, often the top comment(s). I wish there was a way to split the comments off with a new title that clearly explained that this is not related to the original post.
Different tools work better for different people, if you want/need yt features that aren't found in the alternative then it is the right choice for you.
In the end I never got in the habit of opening Nebula to watch the content.
I pay for Premium YouTube and have noticed when there's an in video ad you can skip through to the end of the ad, YouTube have set that up.
I tend to watch 2 minute of several videos on rotation, I guess I should just put the Apple TV out of reach and I can't keep channel twitching
A big part of it is just my hobbies being different, but a no small part is that the videos are still the same YouTube videos that are first and foremost built to satisfy the algorithm. And since these are all people who are successful on YouTube, the concentration of such videos is higher than on actual YouTube.
A simple fix for YouTube is bookmarking the subscriptions page and making that your entrypoint: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
They could have just picked any other font and used it. It's a video streaming website, how much text content is there vs video content?
Headquarter Curse: A theory suggesting that companies often experience setbacks or decline after constructing a lavish new headquarters.
Collectively their creator/owners will be paying thousands of dollars/month for their fonts. Something you’ve correctly assessed that a very low number of their viewers will notice or care about.
Nebula can make one upfront payment (likely less than a single months font foundry payments for their owners), and give the creators absolute certainty that the created font is free forever, no matter the viewing platform or medium.
Seems like a decent place to allocate some idle cash.
Can't think of any reason why Nebula creators would go for this one other than to blend in with the platform's corporate house style for the 1% of users pedantic enough to notice and... well they could have picked an existing SIL open font for that if it had been about simply minimising creators' costs
I'd understand it way more if they were a big corporate creating something very distinctive and very closed source for their marketing material...
As a visual designer, sure, it is you job. As a computer user whose ultimate goal of using a computer is something else... I am kind of an old fart, but I often find that the best content is often found in conjunction with "font-family: sans-serif".
Day to day, I use open source fonts that Butterick recommends. But once in a while, I like using just nice stuff. It's like a nice fountain pen for others.
but again, I am an old fart who is sad gopher lost.
> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.
So if the goal was to save money, wouldn't the smart move be to use Source Sans for $0, instead of paying the designer of Source Sans to make some very minor tweaks to end up with another SIL font?
They wanted something that could be a drop-in replacement for Whitney with the same letter sizes and spacing, so that they could put it into all of their products without needing any other redesign.
They couldn't find anything like that available off the shelf, and fonts they found that were close to Whitney in appearance were still also somewhat expensive, so their alternative was to take Source Sans, which has a free license, and make some quite significant but semi-automated modifications to it.
Making changes to just the typeface was presumably cheaper than making changes to all of their other designs.
The result is not as good as what they had before, and not as good as it would have been if they hired a professional to design a new font from scratch, but it was cheap and solved their problem.
Fonts are weird voodoo. Good and bad choices can both make a measurable difference to ROI.
So I'm not convinced this is going to be the profit booster they hope.
Goomba fallacy strikes again! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
I think I'm at 5 now.
Also three of those companies designed their own font too, though none of them still use it.
Companies are allowed to make fun things.
Feel like these things happen all the time in software as creative projects? Could be a tool for attracting design talent / interest?
shrug. It’s a nice typeface, cool project.
For example, I've built metrics-compatible versions of Aptos and Verdana in the last few days based on other open-source fonts that matched the shapes closely.
For Verdana I just told an LLM to add bars to DejaVu Sans and extend some shapes. For Aptos I had to get a bit more creative, designing a new double-storey g, but it was otherwise fine.
This doesn’t seem like an extravagant expense to me. And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
In many cases, it's all internal and no skin off noses such as this font project. In other cases, it means the UI changes every 4 to 6 months or even worse, the software becomes so bloated with "features" it becomes unusable so a clean replacement comes on the scene then the cycle repeats.
Sometimes, I feel, it would be better for companies to clap their hands and go "We did it, we solved the problem" then just stop. Keep the infrastructure running, do bug fixes, listen to customers on new features or changes but otherwise not do product churn for the sake of justifying salaries.
To expand on my view in an abstract way, when constructing a building construction workers, architects, project managers, and the whole cadre are hired then the building is built then all those people move onto new projects. Continual development of software is like if construction never stopped so that the construction crew still had jobs. A construction site should strive to transition from architects, cranes, and concrete trucks to maintenance staff, mop buckets, and screw drivers.
Nebula Sans is a derivative of Adobe's Source Sans which is available to use for free for any purpose include commercial under the SIL Open Font License (the same license Nebula Sans has to use as a derivative of Source Sans).
So they could have just used Source Sans for free and virtually nobody but the most dedicated font nerds would have known the difference between that font and Nebula's tweak of it if not for the PR announcement.
All that said, I don't care what Nebula spends their money or time on, so I'm not saying they shouldn't have had this font made... but doing it wasn't a money-saving move.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I agree with that one person (I can't recall when or where I read this) who said modern typography is getting so frivolous about doing personalised typographic families for startups instead of extending the existing ones to cover more languages and scripts than latin.
But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")
I one subscribed to CuriosityStream and Nebula in a combo deal, but didn't end up watching it much. I find them to be overproduced edutainment that's often too plastic for my taste. A kind of Netflix but for IFL science redditor types. I rather prefer low production quality YouTube videos from oddball makers who just show something cool, explain something obscure with a simple slideshow etc.
> The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works.
Very nice. I’ve paid for fonts for personal use in the past but I was always nervous about accidentally putting a screenshot or other incidental capture somewhere that might get distributed and violate the license.
Adobe's Source (the basis for this one), Google's Roboto and Google Sans, the very common Inter, Lato and Open Sans, coding/monospace fonts like Iosevka, JetBrains Mono... chances are that a free font you're aware of uses the OFL, particularly if it's even vaguely recent.
I feel like I’m reading reviews of wines. This font has chocolatey overtones that bring the reader to a meditative state of hyperflow.
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fira+Sans
Understated yet elegant, you wouldn't immediately notice it is different from your default sans-serif. But it has a soothing regularity that makes it easy to absorb in large quantities and the lowercase g is a quiet encouragement to drink your tea with your pinky raised.
Here’s a better link for Fira Sans: https://carrois.com/fira/
Also, if you have Fira Sans installed on your computer, you can use it in Slack with `/slackfont Fira Sans’
> /slackfont is not a valid command. In Slack, messages that start with “/” are interpreted as commands.
> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.
EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591225
Loose programming analogy: The free replacements had a slightly different "API" (metrics) that would have required adjusting hundreds or thousands of "call sites" (media using the font), so instead they made their own "API-compatible" (metrically compatible) replacement that dropped straight in.
This is all covered in the documentary short about the font.
Whitney was the main font of Stripe when Benjamin De Cock initially redesigned the brand. It was one of the most beautiful websites I'd ever seen (and still is): https://dribbble.com/shots/2974913-Home
I’m willing to bet that the design team that worked on this font was not in charge of coding, business, finances, deals or anything else besides design.
Is it a revolutionary font? Not in the slightest. It’s just a “fine” font for all intents and purposes. But let’s not play this childish game of “they shouldn’t have wasted time with this and should have done that instead!”. We’re all grown ups here (hopefully), we ought to know better.
Good God I am sick to the back teeth of the neutral aesthetic. If you're going to spend all that money, can we have some _opinionated_ typefaces please? Especially against the backdrop of AI making everything look and feel exactly the same everywhere, the last thing anybody needs is another neutral, characterless, soulless typeface.
Genuinely, can someone please clue me in?
I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".
It's hard to believe people are still designing new fonts with this glaring error. In 2026!
The implication that this is an effort entirely devoid of value is so ridiculous it borders on stupidity.
So I went the way of lowest resistance, and to paraphrase, the LLM said, and it might be entirely wrong that Book is something between Light and Medium, a text weight that is supposed to be better readable for longer texts. So Something around 350/400 weight. Some fonts just use "Regular"
With my new "knowledge" I went about and googled and found this: https://gist.github.com/lukaszgrolik/5849599
So Strangers whos name is just a hex number, the LLM seems to be right. And that is your answer.
But on that note, can you really call it your "own" font if the differences to your "inspiration" are so tiny you literally need to overlay the texts to even see them?
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but wouldn't this be a textbook example of a "derived work"? The page also explicitly mentions the relationship to the base fonts several times, so it's not even hidden.
Did the owners of Whitney SSm demand outrageous license fees, but also permitted unrestricted creation of derived works in their license? That would seem like a massive oversight on their part.
Also, not a typography nerd, but what is the wider utility of now having three fonts that are barely distinguishable from each other and only exist to evade each other's licensing restrictions?
Round, like we’re trending towards Comic Sans but still professional.
What is a humanist font?
All 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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591662
GTK4 doesn't even support subpixel rendering any more, and with OLED market share increasing I'd anticipate Windows moving away from it at some point too.
Quite the contrary: many new OLEDs are moving back to an RGB stripe subpixel arrangement.
The rest of us just don't want it to be distracting.
"Perfect font" can only happen when we stop developing new display technologies, and print dies out completely. If "perfect" is not subjective in the first place, it is definitely context-dependent. Fonts designed to work on budget smartphone displays don't necessarily look good on 6K desktop displays, and so on...
Styles change (like collar size, slim vs roomy), and what looks good on one torso doesn't look best on another. What fits well for one company/product/book doesn't fit well for another company/product/book.
- read? mostly coders
- sell? mostly marketing
- fraud? rn.com vs m.com mostly designers
- I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts
- The use of Whitney as a target font is also interesting. I like this font a lot but a lot of nice fonts have annoying properties for web dev (looking at you Frutiger) esp around numbers. I have wasted life years fiddling with tabular number presentation.
There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)
I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.
Edit: WOW I did not know if that I write WHAT I don't like, then I will get downwoted here, like on other sites for pure hatred, ynews really goes down