from Hacker News

Reddit Sans

by platzhirsch on 11/29/23, 7:22 PM with 59 comments

  • by StevePerkins on 11/29/23, 9:51 PM

    What an interesting thread to read. "Typography aficionados" are one of the most ardent and vocal subcultures within the Hacker News community. Any given post may be hijacked at any time, for a meta-discussion about the font choices on that post's linked web page.

    When a post actually IS about a new font, people dissect that latest microscopic riff on Helvetica like whiskey snobs describing a spirit's nose and mouthfeel.

    However, a strong cross-cutting theme on HN is "hating Reddit even though you obviously spend a lot of time there". It's a clash of the titans, and a real role-reversal... this may be the first time I've ever seen a post about fonts mostly hijacked by something else instead.

  • by crazygringo on 11/29/23, 11:08 PM

    First of all, this is a surprisingly nice font. Modern, clean, it has personality but it's legibile. Well done!

    It has some similarities to Product Sans that Google has been rolling out in its interfaces [1] -- suggesting Futura [2], but Google's version is clunky and backwards-looking, while Reddit Sans is far more elegant and up-to-date.

    I do wonder if they're going to use it for the body text of conversation threads though? Because it still feels more like a display typeface than body text, with its highly geometric styling. It looks great in the tag bubbles they show, and it'll be superb for headlines and things, but I'm not sure I'd want to read comments in it -- but their blog post suggests that's what it's for.

    Using this geometric styling is what Google's done with all of its Workspace interface now (Gmail, Docs, etc.) and I think it's been a big mistake. Futura has always been best as a display font, not for body text, and I don't understand why Google has moved from Roboto to Product Sans for things like menus or e-mail subject lines.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Sans

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)

  • by jeffcox on 11/29/23, 8:27 PM

    I guess with less users and moderators they have more time to explore their hobbies over at reddit now.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 11/29/23, 8:58 PM

  • by bsimpson on 11/29/23, 9:09 PM

    I'm surprised to see a new brand font in nearly-2024 that doesn't have variable axes.*

    * https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introduc...

  • by agluszak on 11/29/23, 8:46 PM

    I don't really understand why every brand nowadays wants to have a custom font

  • by p1mrx on 11/29/23, 8:31 PM

    More like Sans Reddit, har har am I right?

    Discompliments to /u/spez.

  • by MR4D on 11/29/23, 8:27 PM

    This is a really clean font. Nice work!

  • by micromacrofoot on 11/29/23, 8:38 PM

    any explanation of why they embarked on a custom font? it's not such a simple task and most people wouldn't really appreciate the difference if they used arial for everything

  • by Sunspark on 11/29/23, 11:36 PM

    In my lay opinion, this font needs a 500 Medium weight.

    Also needs more spacing between the glyphs as the weight increases.

  • by riidom on 11/29/23, 11:14 PM

    .woff2 file sizes of >50kb each doesn't rock me off my chair though.

  • by deafpolygon on 11/30/23, 6:03 AM

    What font filetype should I be using on Windows? TTF? WOFF? WOFF2? OTF?

  • by firebot on 11/29/23, 9:31 PM

    Those are such beautiful glyphs.

  • by swader999 on 11/29/23, 8:31 PM

    I've been sans Reddit for a couple of years now and it's been very low stress.

  • by munchler on 11/29/23, 9:00 PM

    I see Reddit has entered its “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” phase.