Clear Sans

[mortenjorck]

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.

[_greim_]

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.

[killertypo]

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. :\

[rds2000]

> 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).

[ryanwhitney]

Unfortunate, but not surprising, to see it incorrectly implemented across the entire site: http://cl.ly/image/260h1Z302T24

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.

[grinich]

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.

[hndl]

Can you elaborate what you mean by "load and reference each weight in your stylesheet" for us who aren't CSS savvy?

[ambiguator]

Good eye.

[bbx]

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).

[CGudapati]

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.

[angry-hacker]

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.

[Kiro]

Is your list available somewhere?

[hiphopyo]

That made absolutely no sense.

[cmiller1]

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.

[singlow]

If you download it, the license file is in the root of the zip archive.

[cies]

i was also looking for the "terms of sharing" :)

couldn't find it on the website, so ctrl-f'ed the HN comments...

[devindotcom]

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.

[CamperBob2]

Agreed on both counts. The 'a' looks particularly awkward.

It's 95% of a really nice font, but that last 5% makes all the difference.

[ambiguator]

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.

[pekk]

Is a designer's taste more important than someone else's?

[npizzolato]

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?

[nilsbunger]

No @2x image? Seems like it would be helpful if you're trying to highlight a clear, readable typeface. Looks kinda blurry on my retina MBP.

[clarle]

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).

[pseut]

Was that anywhere on the website? I had to download the font to figure out its license.

[Geee]

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. :)

[abrowne]

I love Nokia Pure too. It looks great on their website and on the Asha phone I've used. The 4 is great.

For personal use, Nokia did post a version with Klingon character support (in addition to Latin) on their design blog for April Fools last year: https://assetportal.nokia.com/blog/view/item24419/

[leobelle]

I'm not a font specialists, but those I's seem to have serifs [1], and mixing serif with non-serif kind of irks me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I#Forms_and_variants

[aidos]

Genuine question, does it matter? I, for one, am enjoying being able to distinguish a capital I from a lowercase l :)

[chavesn]

Although they seem to be considered serifs[1], I wouldn't call it stock-standard "mixing", since it's fairly common[2]:

- Verdana (the font of this very comment: "I")

- Tahoma

- Officina Sans

- Bell Gothic

- Apple Monaco [3]

- Adobe Source Code Pro [4]

[1]: http://www.typophile.com/node/45715

[2]: http://typophile.com/node/50393

[3]: http://myfonts.us/td-LJbtZv

[4]: http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro....

[crystaln]

It irks you because of some design principle you read somewhere, or because it's actually a problem.

This is true of many fonts, and is a rational choice.

[PhasmaFelis]

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.

[normloman]

It's more common than you think. Take Verdana's capital I:

http://www.identifont.com/show?XG

[pyrocat]

I like Open Sans http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Open+Sans

[rkuykendall-com]

I love Open Sans and use it as my default font for everything, but... I may soon be trying out this Clear Sans.

[Mithaldu]

The font doesn't have hinting and ends up looking not very good at small sizes.

[rjd]

I agree, I can't read the text without my glasses on.

In comparison from the same distance and size I can read almost every other font I encounter on the web.

[gcp]

Are you using Chrome?

[telvda]

I was hopping this would be a new monospace font considering it's on the front page. It's okay, but there are much better open source fonts out there.

[telvda]

Also, for something that's emphasizing thin weight only the bold weight has italics? What's with that?

[betadreamer]

do you have any examples? i'm curious

[lifeformed]

Why can't I click on the specimen and view it in full size? :(

[satellitecat]

I was expecting a transparent/invisible font.. Disappointed.

[slowernet]

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.)

[degenerate]

Can you elaborate on this? (do you know why running it through FontSquirrel results in smaller sizes?)

[marban]

On a related note, FontPrep is now free & open source http://fontprep.com (Generate Webfonts from OTF/TTF)

[th3byrdm4n]

I find it difficult to read @ size 14. My eyes don't like how thin/compressed the letters are, but maybe it's just too early on Oahu.

[izietto]

I love Ubuntu fonts http://font.ubuntu.com/

[blt]

Poor hinting on Windows 7 / Chrome. The lowercase L is an especially noticeable 2px middle-grey line.

[aeflash]

Just have to wait for this bugfix to make it to Chrome stable:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=249099

[gcp]

Time to upgrade to a modern browser.