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Mona Sans and Hubot Sans

by waldekm on 12/2/22, 5:59 PM with 70 comments

• by smoldesu on 12/2/22, 8:27 PM

  It's too grotesk. I think Apple accidentally set everyone off on the "search for the perfect sans font" but neither this nor the new Discord font is anywhere near as nice as San Francisco.

  If you want a clean sans font, I'd highly recommend Plex sans: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans

  Very straightforward, highly legible at all weights, normal-human-being-style kerning and nicely tucked edges. If you're looking for something more flavorful than Roboto, use this or Inter. Please don't design your own eye-melting garbage, for my sake.

• by gnabgib on 12/2/22, 8:16 PM

  This was discussed 22 days ago(119pts, 48 comments)[0], slightly different content[1] but not by much. It seems a shame this blog post didn't address samueloph's point[2] (lower L and upper i are ambiguous)

  [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33553659 [1]: https://github.com/mona-sans [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33554633

• by dandellion on 12/2/22, 7:21 PM

  I wish they introduced GitHub Sans Downtime instead of this. There's already plenty of high quality free fonts to choose from.

• by yunohn on 12/2/22, 9:23 PM

  Why is everyone talking about these as /coding/ fonts? They clearly don't have that positioning or intent:

  > Mona Sans ... work as our primary font across mediums ... You can see it in use on our more marketing-oriented pages on GitHub.

  > Hubot Sans ... is our secondary brand font at GitHub ... you can see it in use in the ReadME Project, and on the GitHub Universe site.

• by aidenn0 on 12/2/22, 7:49 PM

  Maybe I'm weird, but I loathe body text in sans-serif fonts. They aren't all equally bad, but ilI are often confusing. Just the other day I was reading something somewhere with a name that ended in "ill" and I had to copy-paste somewhere else to tell it wasn't just a roman-numeral 3 smushed on the end.

  And of course sentences that start with "Ill" just break my flow of reading.

• by lwhsiao on 12/2/22, 11:01 PM

  For those that really care about the 0Ol1I situation, I would suggest Atkinson Hyperlegible [1].

  Previously discussed on HN here [2].

  [1]: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont

  [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799872

• by mariusmg on 12/2/22, 7:30 PM

  Everyone and their dog are making fonts these days. Not complaining about high quality free fonts, just find it a bit strange...

• by flobosg on 12/2/22, 9:05 PM

  There’s an earlier font named Mona: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_(font)

• by noizejoy on 12/2/22, 7:43 PM

  I’m still very happy to see more high quality and free variable fonts. They save a few lines of code and a bit of network egress when self hosting fonts (for better privacy).

• by 19h on 12/3/22, 12:11 AM

  Of all the fonts I've used throughout my career, the one I love the most is JetBrains Mono. It's just perfect. I even use it in my terminal.

• by jccalhoun on 12/2/22, 9:44 PM

  In my opinion, any font that makes it hard to distinguish between I and l is a failure.

• by maxloh on 12/3/22, 1:09 PM

  Seems that many big techs are adopting similar style/variant of sans-serif as Mona Sans for branding.

  Google's Google Sans: https://imgur.com/N0ePA5O

  Microsoft's Segoe UI Variable: https://imgur.com/Rq8RKNQ

  Netflix's Netflix Sans: https://imgur.com/Rax5DNF

• by stevefolta on 12/2/22, 7:41 PM

  Is Hubot-Sans.ttf working in XWindows for anyone? Mona-Sans.ttf is fine for me, but not Hubot.