HN Reader

Since even after 2 hours nobody is discussing the actual font, let me tell you what comes to my mind when I read anything about Google and design:

They got phone design right.

I just can't get my head around it that even Apple, which is supposed to be THE design company, is making phones that can't lay on a table without wobbling like a barstool on a crooked floor. It just feels so broken to me. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.

Google phones tackled it with an elegant solution. Thanks for that. I wouldn't know what phone to use if Pixels didn't exist.

Cool work on a font, but this page is proof that google is turning the web into some kind of JSON for their app, Chrome.

Extremely sluggish on non-Chrome. Starts with a black blank empty page. Fans spinning. Takes way too long to load for just some text and some videos. Clicking a link does some SPA magic that takes me to another black blank page, and takes ages to load. Clicking back doesn't work anymore. I need to reload the entire page, again blank and waiting. Once done loading, scrolling is extremely sluggish.

Yes, there are probably some interactive widgets in there, but all that and much more has been done without bogging down the browser like you're running a 3D game on WebGL.

Oh, and of course reader mode doesn't work.

Is there a monospaced version of this font?

Pretty much every font I try has one or two things that bug me. I’ve spent the last ten years making my own, first in FontForge, now in Glyphs.app, but it’s incredibly time-consuming. I’ll work on it for a while, then give up for months, delete everything, switch to a different font, use it for a few days, start hating it… and end up back at making my own font again. This cycle repeats pretty much every year.

You’ll probably want to recommend your favourite font, but trust me, I’ve tried all the well-known ones, and they all have their quirks.

Edit: I’m going to try Guguru (“Google” pronounced with a Japanese accent) Sans Code for a few days → https://github.com/yuru7/guguru-sans-code , created by https://x.com/tawara_san

A bit OT: What's up with the mouse pointer on that page? Why on earth would a site that has "design" in it's domain name change my mouse pointer to a finger-sized circle blob on my 4K desktop screen?

> It’s one of the most-served fonts on the internet, clocking in at some 120 billion font requests a month.

Isn't this an incredible waste of bandwidth? Surely people only need the font once.

Took me so long to realise that "Google Sans Flex" is the name of the font. I read the title as "creating Google without using Flex [whatever that is]"

> The majority of how people experience the Google brand is through typography

Ok, who wants to tell them?

Why do new fonts still make "l" and "I" indistinguishable?

  > Product teams eagerly adopted Google Sans and Google Sans Text but soon highlighted a new issue: Billions of people around the globe use non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese, ... The effort was monumental. It meant meticulously crafting hundreds of thousands of new ... from the flowing curves of Arabic to the complex strokes of Japanese and the distinct ...

What I know about CJK font is that one does not simply make a CJK font: they're nearly always made by modifying something existing. Even Google's previous attempt at it was made by a joint multi-year project with Adobe and bunch of experts from various companies tasked to fix what are locally sticks out for each relevant regions without breaking overall theme to make a total of 4-5 language specific fonts with major bugfixes happening for few times over couple years.

That above quoted part reads to me like "oh and there's of course the fusion version of this micro nuclear because that's important", which makes little sense, so I searched around a bit just in case, and there doesn't seem to be non-Latin versions of Google Sans. The credit section does not mention obvious source of easily licensable CJK font other than "U+ Type", either.

My assumption would be that either they made an assumption that a font in CJK can't take that long relative to font in Latin, or they couldn't get one in favorable terms and the full version is proprietary. Or is it really coming later? That would be interesting if that's the case.

I find the whole “corporate blogging about fonts” subculture really funny

Other than changing my mouse cursor to a circle that just makes it unintuitive to use can someone explain the point of a circle in the right upper corner that expands automatically into two icons: search and a hamburger menu? The "saved" space is not used for anything anyway. Isn't it just a bad design that makes navigation harder for no reason?

Clickable elements seem to be underlined with the exception of one: the Google Design logo in the left upper corner. It seems inconsistent and confusing.

Are those new principles of designing things - making it more confusing and more difficult to find (and then click) for 0 gain?

EDIT: also scrolling all the way down is difficult because random stuff block the page, gets loaded. There is "Privacy & Terms" link at the bottom that is impossible to reach because of it. The design is just terrible, wtf Google?

having spent a lot of time on finding the right monospace fonts, one of the things i've noticed, that's particularly important in the context of coding is a visual symmetry.

some fonts individually have beautiful glyps or characters but when you preview them with blocks and blocks of code, there's a quirkiness that throws of that symmetry.

I'll give a few examples:

- Mono Lisa font https://www.monolisa.dev/ (truly gorgeous font)

- Recursive https://www.recursive.design/ (particularly note the casual axis)

I bring this up because Google Sans Code, is super quirky; preview a few characters individually and they look good; put it all together in real code, and it's just not as smooth visually.

I never saw the cursor changing size to fit the button you are hovering on, it's pretty cool, I don't know if it's better but it's cool.

It's a really pretty, humanist font, and those tend to be my favourite fonts. I was never the biggest fan of the grotesk-style Roboto/Inter/Univers, especially in the context of a user interface, which should feel a little bit friendlier imo.

I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive.

This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.

Where is this page's RSS feed?

Like the other commenter, my mind also fixated on the mouse cursor. Great post on the fonts, but I spent most of my time seeing how the strange cursor behaved. I don't like it much, especially because there's some inconsistency once you're down hovering over the related posts.

However, there was one spot where I had to give it to them: when I hovered over the content about Google Sans Code, it expanded horizontally. For a second, I wondered what was going on, then it clicked that the content must be horizontally scrollable, which it was!

Of course, that could be shown with a much more obvious horizontal scroll bar...

I never come to complain about websites, but clicking on this thing made my chrome freeze for a whole second on my MBP. What has Google become xD

There is something about the page that makes me dizzy on mobile. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle animation but I get the feeling of things moving/deforming while I read.

I wish I had the luxury of spending probably dozens of millions on a meaningless effort like this. Any similar font like this one would do the trick, without the need to have a fancy series of blog posts trying to convince users this font is awesome.

To declare "open source", you have to provide a way for the public to get access to the source code. But there seems to be none at least for the time being.