The quality of open-source typography has massively increased in just the past few years, and it's great to see Intel making its own contribution. The number of free options we have today for well-balanced, full, multi-weight type families (not just "fonts") would have seemed impossible just four years ago.
Intel's entry nicely fills a void left between more humanist types like Ascender's Open Sans and more geometric families like Natanel Gama's redrawn Exo family. It has a nice DIN-esque rigidity to the strokes that the other big DIN descendent, Roboto, doesn't fully embrace.
This needs to sink into the collective brains of the world's brand designers, many of whom still standardize upon proprietary fonts.
My company creates sites for a variety of brands, and we run into the same problem over and over again. No, we can't hotlink your copy of Frutiger. No, we can't host our own copy. No, we won't accept an email stating "we give you permission to use this font" in lieu of a license from the actual foundry. No, we're not going to embed typography in images or flash. People are often clueless about the technical and legal difficulties of proprietary fonts on the web.
People are often clueless about the technical and legal difficulties of proprietary fonts on the web.
A cynic might suggest that this is because of greedy foundries insisting on a rental model for web fonts, sometimes one so complicated that you need lawyers to figure out what you're actually paying for if you sign up. If they'd tried that with print fonts, most of those foundries would never have made it this far.
What really surprises me is how readily the web design industry caved and paid up, particularly given the relatively poor quality of most early web fonts even from the commercial services, and how many of them remain poor even today.
I'm hoping that sooner rather than later, the prevalence of good quality and fully specified free-to-use font families will force a change in the industry. Personally, I'd be happy to pay a reasonable amount for some good professional fonts. In fact, I have, from my own pocket and not any business's, on several occasions. However, I have no interest in locking myself, my businesses or my clients into ongoing payments for fonts when essentially no other stock resources work that way, and even less interest in hiring a lawyer to figure out whether someone's web font licence covers a particular not-entirely-standard use case.
If the SaaS has ongoing value -- for example, if it involves a hosted element that uses resources each month -- then it can be worth ongoing payments. Its value to the customer increases over time.
If the SaaS is just a static piece of software -- or something that might later receive updates of unknown value that you might or might not actually want anyway -- and it's something you will need for the long term, then it probably needs to be much cheaper to rent it than to buy it outright before it's economically worthwhile. Its value doesn't increase over time, so you have to compare the expected cost for as long as you think you'll need to rent it with the one-time cost of buying outright. Even then, you still have the security of your investment to consider if there is no guarantee that the software will still be there or still work the same way when you need it later.
In other words, yes, a lot of SaaS is also greedy.
We are willing to pay for SaaS monthly because the nature of the service is that they have to keep providing it for us to get value. Is that true for fonts? If the foundry stopped working, would I not be able to derive value from the font.
Of course, I support the foundries making up any business model they want. But the argument is not the same as SaaS.
I wouldn't call it "greedy", but when webfonts were starting to gain traction (2011-2012), foundries didn't sell licenses for web use, so their fonts were only available on services like Typekit or FontDeck. I don't if that's the case anymore.
Then again, Adobe has moved to SaaS only (or are they selling licenses for non-CC apps?), so designers don't have much of a choice anymore.
Then again, Adobe has moved to SaaS only (or are they selling licenses for non-CC apps?), so designers don't have much of a choice anymore.
Sure we do. You can still buy versions up to CS6 as a one-time purchase. Rather like Microsoft, Adobe's biggest competition has become the old versions of their own software that aren't crippled with ongoing payments and the risk of involuntary future changes to how they work or what they cost.
Presumably they've done the math and reckon they're going to make more money between the people who signed up for Creative Cloud and the people they can now lure in who can afford a relatively low monthly fee but couldn't front the whole cost of CS in a single payment before than they're going to lose from people who won't give them any more money now but might have paid for upgrades under the old scheme. Given how little value they seem to have added either in the later CS series upgrades or since the move to CC, I suspect they're right.
It isn't inherently something that needs to be SaaS. I could host the webfont on my own server, for example, if it were a legal option. But that isn't allowed, so you're forced to load it off their servers. So yes it's a SaaS but only because the licensing forces it to be that way.
I.e., it treats downloading the webfont into a user's browser as a copy and distribution of software. This is the bit that is ridiculous and needs to change. Print design for example labors under no such restrictions.
Does anyone actually sell stock photography on that basis? I can honestly say that I have never encountered such a thing, and I've bought rights to use images, including stock photography, on numerous occasions.
Getty and all the premium stock sites do (for certain collections).
When I worked in the agency world, most of our clients' budgets were a bit too tight for rights-managed photography (RM is generally more expensive on top of being more restrictively licensed), but when we did, there was usually a fairly simple set of web form selects for publication type, duration of publication, audience size, etc.
"What really surprises me is how readily the web design industry caved and paid up"
I don't think there were enough good alternatives at the time. Perhaps secondarily though, the people making these decisions just look at it as another line item on their invoice - it's not coming out of their pocket.
From a small business perspective, if someone tells me my website is going to cost more (maybe in perpetuity?) to use fancy fonts XYZ that creative agency ABC's designer 'just loves', I'd tell them to get stuffed and find something that's free or cheaper.
But agencies that make these decisions are typically dealing with larger clients, and the people making those decisions are working from a budget, not their own pocket.
Well, that's a bit like saying "the world's software developers, many of whom still use proprietary frameworks." Branding agencies use proprietary type families when they're the most appropriate for the job, just like developers use commercial software when it fits a need that the open source community hasn't filled to their liking. Open-source typography is flourishing, but that doesn't mean commercial typography is dead.
"Branding agencies use proprietary type families when they're the most appropriate for the job"
Except... they sometimes don't appreciate the breadth of the 'job'. For agency A to get their 'job' done, using fonts ABC works just fine. But now when that same font needs to be use in other areas they're not licensed for, their client either can't have the same brand experience in other media, or has to pay a heftier price to do so, or is running afoul of the licensing terms.
This is a couple steps above people just going to google images and grabbing whatever images come up for their own websites. Still same licensing/terms-of-use problems, just with a higher price tag attached. And somehow, when people are using big fancy agency XYZ, they think (rightly?) that the agency always knows what they're doing (often they do, but sometimes they don't).
> Open-source typography is flourishing, but that doesn't mean commercial typography is dead.
Agreed, I just think the pendulum hasn't swung far enough on the open direction, because of the relative newness of the tech. In other words, it seems that branding agencies sometimes use proprietary type families out of habit and ignorance, not because they've evaluated the tradeoffs and made a careful choice.
In other words, it seems that branding agencies sometimes use proprietary type families out of habit and ignorance, not because they've evaluated the tradeoffs and made a careful choice.
I think their choice is more rational than you give credit for. While there are now quite a few good freely available fonts for use on your blog or small business site, there are still few, if any, open font families that offer the same breadth as good commercial offerings. If you're a large organisation, bringing in an agency to create overall branding guidelines that will apply to everything you produce from slideshows to printed brochures via web apps and business cards, it would be foolish of that agency to suggest typography that didn't offer enough range to be future-proof.
My (anecdotal) experience has been that given a large enough organization, you're probably going to run into a lot of subsets of the organization that just don't know any better or aren't aware of the company branding strategy and guidelines. It's probably a reasonable bet to say that most of those groups won't be creating public facing content, but I've seen it happen often enough before. Not a broad study, but an interesting note.
Basically, just that it's useful to remember that large organizations, as much as they'd like to be, aren't always as homogeneous and cohesive in branding and approach as they'd like to be.
The following is also anecdotal: I work in the contact center world, and it's pretty surprising just how isolated and disconnected some companies are when it comes not just to brick and mortar vs e-com, but e-com and it's call centers.
Add in more prefaces/cya's that I haven't done formal research on the subject where necessary :)
Perhaps. I can certainly appreciate that a brand designer may be worrying about a wide range of print and advertising media, and in that grand scheme of concerns the web isn't all that important.
"Open-source typography is flourishing, but that doesn't mean commercial typography is dead"
The two should also not be opposites. There should be room for commercial open-source typography.
If it isn't the typography world is going to be poorer - coz designing good fonts is a hard, skilled, time consuming task and not everybody has the time and inclination to do it for free.
What you're suggesting is that designers limit themselves to the what? < 100? professionally designed type families that are freely available? Like it or not, most of the open source fonts in the world are amateurish at best, hideous at worst.
I truly appreciate the open-source typography as it makes it reaaaaly easy to put fonts into my games. I do not have to design them myself or rely on unscalable image fonts. :\
> The quality of open-source typography has massively increased in just the past few years, and it's great to see Intel making its own contribution. The number of free options we have today for well-balanced, full, multi-weight type families (not just "fonts") would have seemed impossible just four years ago.
What are some examples of the recent ones? (links are preferred, please).
If you want to use multiple font weights, you have to load and reference each weight in your stylesheet. Otherwise, you end up with a browser-added faux-bolding instead of the actual bold font.
Someone should make a Chrome developer tools extension to catch stuff like this. It's incredible how many people mess it up and don't realize it, simply because developers still aren't accustomed to good typography on web pages.
A separate font file is required for every style and weight of a typeface that you want to use. For example, to use four unique styles of a typeface on a site (say Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic), you would need to import four font files (ClearSans-Regular, ClearSans-Italic, ClearSans-Bold, ClearSans-BoldItalic).
If you give a chunk of type a style or weight that you haven't loaded the appropriate font file for, browsers will add weight to or slant the text themselves. ("faux-bold", "faux-italic"). This gives you ugly, rough, less readable text that counteracts the primary reasons to use a web font in the first place. Default CSS styles (H1 automatically adding font-weight: bold;) can also cause this in some cases. [See link]
That technique is actually what I'm referring to. I've seen that not work before; sorry don't have details. I just don't mess with that anymore and instead use every font-family explicitly when needed.
Designing a font is one of the few things on my "bucket list" (designing a Linux desktop environment being another one). But it being quite the undertaking, I end up relying upon fonts I find while browsing the web (I keep a list of the best-looking/most useful ones).
Typekit and Google Web Fonts really changed the state of font usage in web design. We're not restricted anymore by a fixed amount of fonts, nor have to rely upon images or weird technologies (remember Cufon?) to display custom fonts. It has its drawbacks (loading time, unreadable thin characters...), but it's overall a great step forward in software-less web design and graphical variety (which in turn improves visual identity).
I used to design typefaces as a hobby. It is not so easy. You might think that your typeface looks fine but some experienced typeface designer will rip your design to pieces saying the bowls are not smooth, the stems are not having consistent thickness etc(he is not wrong. I just didn't have the "eye" for spotting such things).
But as they say, practice makes man perfect. Good Luck.
It takes around 6-7 months to design just a "regular" typeface. Be patient if you ever take this up.
If you get far with Linux desktop evrioment, let us know. I still haven't found anything decent that doesn't scream it was designed by the same guy whi is also responsible for kernel dev.
Above all i think Linux world needs mire unified ux experience, how its possible with sone many desktop environments out there, I don't know.
Actually no. It's only available in some corner of my brain for now... But I recently redesigned by blog [1] and have been considering adding a "Bucket list" section, which would only include design-related challenges, both digital (like a complete phone OS) and physical (a car dashboard without touch controls, a kitchen layout...).
Obviously, most of these problems would be hard to tackle, considering they're usually out of my skills scope. It's just that I often think to myself "This could be improved".
It doesn't say this on the website, but they are releasing this under the Apache license.
I wish they made this more clear from the get go because with all of the formats they are releasing it in as well as the release note on browser compatibility, they are clearly targeting this towards web development.
I'm a bit put off by the "bent-iron" quality of how the curves and straights meet, like this is a type designed to mimic neon signs. There are some nice touches, though. It looks great bold.
That said, having that image with the type super small and basically at the extreme limit of legibility (I can barely read it) I don't think does you a service. Do a nice big species with lots of common use cases! This one looks like mush.
I've started noticing different a's recently in typography since it was pointed out to me that people with dyslexia and people with lower literacy skills struggle with the "upright" style lowercase A (as show in this font and a lot of other popular fonts) as opposed to the "italic" style lowercase A that most people hand write.
You're right, the italic a is like from a completely different typeface, wow. I kind of like it better, and since it's under an open-source license, I might make a version with this version as the general one.
This is basically a less humanistic version of Frutiger. As a designer I find the entire face irksome. The legibility doesn't come close to Adrian Frutiger's namesake.
Not at all. I just wanted to point out that it looks like one of the best typefaces of all time except without it's best features. Did not mean to come across as arrogant. I understand it will be useful to some people who don't care or who are unable to pay $30 for Frutiger.
Most of the time, that is. Some fonts have a specific clause that they are not allowed to be used on the web, including a surprisingly large portion of otherwise free fonts. The best example of this is the fonts at http://losttype.com/.
Ahh yes, you'd owe Linotype a few hundred bucks if you want to do that. I'd love to see Adrian Frutiger release an open source font before he goes... Imagine if Univers was free!
I'd be okay with a few hundred too. The issue for me is that for web use prices are easily available. For programatic use, it suddenly becomes a conversation about licensing with a salesman, and I don't have time for a long conversation.
A designer's taste of a type is an educated one, and thus it is more important than one that is not educated. Some knowledge of type is essential for an utter designer, at last.
And this is why I always find font debates useless. I, personally, found the font very legible. In fact, legibility seems like a pretty low bar, so I can't even imagine how one legible font could not come close to the legibility of another font. What makes you say that?
Was going to say similar; it's quite ironic how a site advertising a "clear font" has a very blurry graphic right in the middle of the page demonstrating said clear font...
For anyone like me that was wondering about the open source license they were using, it's licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (so it's GPL-compatible).
The 'Nokia Pure' is one of the best (if not the best, IMO) of the modern sans types. Pretty unique but very clean. It's used on their website (as Windows Phones use Segoe UI), and apparently on the new Android phone too (notice the 'g'), for example: http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/nokia-xl/
I'm just hoping that someone would make a similar but open-source version of it. :)
That said, I as a news designer I believe there to be conventional reasons for using, for example, sans serifs for headlines and serifs for large blocks of body text.
Great article, thanks for the link. I like how the conclusion is that it basically doesn't matter, but by all means use what seems to be the preferred choice for the target audience and/or aesthetic considerations.
By the way, what is it with all these people (in the comments) misspelling "Arial" as "Ariel"? They don't misspell any of the other fonts (ok I saw one person write "Veranda"), is it some kind of in-joke? Or is it people that don't have Arial installed and never see the word in their font listings? (in which case I'm not too sure on their opinions about it, particularly since it requires quite the expert eye to distinguish it from the beloved Helvetica)
What's a word where that is a problem? In coding it would be a problem, but I don't use sans-serif flexible width fonts when writing code.
Edit: asking a question == downvote. I never said it wasn't a problem. Spending more time on lobste.rs anyway, this place is declining at breakneck speeds.
As someone who spent embarrassingly long trying to log in to a system one afternoon because I was misreading an "l" as an "I", I can say that it does sometimes matter - it doesn't need to be in the same word.
Then again, since you set the challenge - lamb and Iamb
I can see no good reason for us to ever use the same symbol to represent two different letters, that's just silly business.
Edit: for the record, I didn't downvote you. Interestingly enough, I just noticed that it looks as though I can no longer downvote direct replies to my comments. Seems like a reasonable rule to have in place.
It's not just about words. Written media is no longer limited to a few basic structures and voices. Grammar needs to be able to shift away from English in-line while maintaining semantic clarity, and sometimes that means the reader needs to distinguish between graphemes without any of the typical contextual cues that classic written languages provide.
The most common issue is hand-copying a piece of text between devices, such as a cryptocurrency address or a URL. Sure, it would be great if those sorts of non-linguistic bits of information were always tagged appropriately such that they show up in a different font, but that rarely happens in reality. Even here, on Hacker News, we can only talk in plaintext with a few minor markup features.
A general-purpose web font should be able to handle a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strings and not choke up on edge cases. In that respect, I really like the differentiation between a capital I and a lowercase L in Clear Sans, no matter the inclusion of 'Sans' in its name.
Thank God for that, and I wish it was a universal standard. Fonts where you can't tell the difference between capital eye, lowercase ell, and numeral one are a pain in the ass. Improving legibility doesn't violate the purity of sans-serif.
I like the ability to have different glyphs for lower case L, capital I and numeral 1. Many fonts achieve that with a tail on the lower case L, but this seems a valid alternative. By the way, I believe this is the default Firefox Android font.
Make sure then to stay clear of those slabs, slab-serifs, semi-serifs and various in-betweens. Type designers just really don't know any shame these days.
Note that the included webfont variants have fairly enormous filesizes (WOFFs: 120K+, SVG: 1.2M+).
Quickly running the .ttf through FontSquirrel at default settings produced versions several times smaller (caveat lector, not sure what glyphs are being stripped out, etc.)
FontSquirrel's generator will strip out a lot of unneeded characters. By default this means including just the basic Latin subset with the main punctuation glyphs. If you look at the character set for Clear Sans (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/clear-sans) you will see that it includes Cyrillic and Greek letters, among other things like musical notes and smilie faces, so those can be removed if you don't want them (or included if you do).
I have no idea whether this is just my problem or something that more people will notice, but I actually have trouble reading that. The letters seem to blur together more than most common fonts, and seem "fuzzy" in general.
glancability? that l is an embarassment. sorry, but the idea that this a well designed font is to me - a joke. and i am not particularly an expert. this is much less readable than comic sans or courier new imo at least with my config on windows 8 with cleartype and chrome!
The Linux tool "fc-scan" claims that it covers the following languages: "aa af av ay be bg bi bin br bs ca ce ch co cs cy da de el en eo es et eu fi fj fo fr fur fy gd gl gn gv ho hr hu ia ig id ie ik io is it ki kl kum la lb lez lt lv mg mh mk mo mt nb nds nl nn no nr nso ny oc om os pl pt rm ro ru se sel sk sl sma smj smn so sq sr ss st sv sw tk tl tn tr ts uk uz vo vot wa wen wo xh yap zu an crh csb fil hsb ht jv kj ku-tr kwm lg li ms na ng pap-an pap-aw rn rw sc sg sn su za"
Either there is a piece missing from my brain that prevents me telling the difference between fonts in the same general category, or some of y'all are discussing the stitching on the emperor's new shirt.
Intel's entry nicely fills a void left between more humanist types like Ascender's Open Sans and more geometric families like Natanel Gama's redrawn Exo family. It has a nice DIN-esque rigidity to the strokes that the other big DIN descendent, Roboto, doesn't fully embrace.