I 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.
I 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}
Ok, it is a font alright. To me, it looks exactly as all the other fonts I have on my OS already, but I guess that's just how it is if you are not in the font bubble.
So 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.
“neutral aesthetic”
Subdued, muted and neutral seems to be very much “in” at the moment. On one hand it definitely gives us highly readable, usable interfaces and text. But I do miss the chaos and vibrance of the early web. Modern web is starting to look really washed out.
Actually good comparison in the video: https://i.imgur.com/jSTJixC.png
Sadly to me Wittney feels clean yet coherent, Nebula Sans feels characterless like a UI thrown together without any real font choice made yet.
That seems like a lot of marketing effort for “we took an existing font and stretched some bits”?
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.
I’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
Most typefaces all look the same to me... I think I'm typeface blind if there is such a thing. It's all just text to me...
It's great to see more freely available fonts. But the site shows examples of a font in an elephant size; this seems to be the font for the main text so it would be nice to see a paragraph in a small size (like 16px, 14px, 12px, 10px). Out of curiosity I did it using Developer Tools in a browser - seems legible.
Why 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?
Looks great! My first impression is the spacing is a bit wide, but that can be adjusted.
No variable format in 2025?
Thanks for posting and commenting. The choice of font is a great way to add aesthetics to text - designers so use this opportunity a lot more IMHO.
My only wish to to have a font with: - Alt a - single story g - plain upper case I and L - geometric 3 - and a $
Inter is a just slightly bolder by default.
I'd like sans serif fonts more if they were readable, including being able to distinguish Weird Al from Weird AI.
yet nother font you cannot discern I l |. into the trash it goes.
I don't get how they call a font “readable” where the lowercase ell looks way too similar to the uppercase aye. I for one would not use such a font.
No smallcaps variant? Disappointing honestly.
> We believe in facts, science, and human rights
The font looks ok. This is an off putting sample sentence though. It sounds like a secular, pseudo-liturgical version of the Nicene creed.
Little PSA:
a) This is a clone of Whitney, an incredibly beautiful and unique typeface from 2004
b) Whitney was designed by Tobias Frere-Jones
c) He was an equal co-founder of the H&fJ foundry
d) He designed the vast majority of their most famous fonts, including Gotham, Archer and Armada
e) Somehow, for years, Hoefler never did the paperwork to confirm FJ's co-ownership
f) When pressed, he instead kicked FJ out, kept all the fonts and renamed the shop "Hoefler"
Hoefler is an asshole. A free clone of Whitney is the least of what he deserves.