Show HN: Webfont for Press Logos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Webfont for Press Logos

fontfamous.com

56 pointsada198130 comments

You got some potential there, but you need to grow that collection by several orders of magnitude.

You're suggesting the author expands the list at least from 28 to 280 logos (or maybe 2800?). What exactly are you expecting to get for free?

We will be adding more logos and it's open source so others can contribute if they are so inclined.

I think you did fine work, and could very well stop there. The "orders of magnitudes" comment is absurdly exaggerating.

I think you have zero potential. This was nice, but I wouldn't recommend following this advice and trying to grow the collection just because some random person asked for it. It is too much work.

"I think you have zero potential" is a very bold and mean thing to say without explaining why they don't have potential.

Why aren't you asking the "you've got potential" guy to explain why he thinks this has potential?

Sure, here you go: this font is really awesome IMHO. The project could turn up as the go-to webfont for logos in the immediate future. Something like font-awesome. This will increase awareness about the author.

How the author will choose to capitalise on that awareness, it's up to him, but he needs to gets there first and getting there is not easy.

That said, I understand where you're coming from. Some people have not been able to capitalise their open source contributions. Even companies struggle (e.g. twitter). Others were able to capitalise though. At this stage, I wouldn't worry about that, we can't even see all possibilities here.

Success can be defined in multiple ways. Getting some visibility to the ever-growing web-dev community is a great first step towards success IMHO and here's a very good chance of doing just that.

Thanks, I'm going to add logos as I need them, as clients need them, or as the community requests them. Not in a huge rush and happy to grow it organically.

From the rules:

"Be respectful. Anyone sharing work is making a contribution, however modest.

Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is learning, help them learn more.

When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is. But don't be gratuitously negative."

Very cool! Using a font is a great idea for monochrome cases.

A few years ago I tried my hand at a similar project[0], but using SVG, CSS, and hand-written sizing[1] for each logo.

It was useful for us at Segment[2] because we needed to our partners's logos all over the place, and I didn't want to have to create new assets for every possible size/color combination, and to keep them all visually aligned too.

And then I started adding more non-Segment-partner logos too, like Heroku[3] or GitHub[4]. Here's an example in use from a side project[5].

Using CSS and SVG meant that we could keep "full color" and "full color reversed" version of the logos, in addition to just flat colors. Trouble was that hand-writing the sizes is something that only people with a trained-enough eye can do, since they need to be nicely optically aligned, so it got unmaintainable quickly, especially once we wanted to let partners onboard themselves. At one point my co-founder Peter had even written a Slack bot that would create vector versions of the logos automagically using Nightmare[6] and Swiftly[7] under the covers.

Anyways, some of the vector files or prior thinking might be useful for expanding your collection. Good luck!

[0]: https://github.com/logo/logo

[1]: https://github.com/logo/heroku/blob/master/index.css

[2]: https://segment.com

[3]: https://github.com/logo/heroku

[4]: https://github.com/logo/github

[5]: http://www.hn-button.com/

[6]: https://github.com/segmentio/nightmare-swiftly

[7]: https://99designs.com/blog/inside-99designs/swiftly-now-99de...

Thanks for the input and resources!

This would probably be more useful if they were optically the same size. Looks like it's currently basically a monospaced font. E.g. The New York Times is illegible next to CNN.

I was curious about how we might be able to solve that. Not entirely sure. Open to css based solutions!

It isn't really a technical problem, so I don't think it makes sense to look for a technical solution. But it's not complicated; like kerning and optical adjustment of letter shapes, someone with an eye for it will need to adjust the size of each logo manually so they all "feel" equal and look good together. For reference, Tobias Frere-Jones has an interesting blog post about optical adjustment of typefaces [1].

As it currently stands, anyone using the font will need to do this themselves.

[1] https://frerejones.com/blog/typeface-mechanics-001

No I think they're just each set to the same fixed width.

Looks fine to me, the NYT would be dominatingly wide if normalised alongside CNN.

If any looks out of place, I'd say it's PH.

http://herearesomelogos.tumblr.com/

FontFamous.com strives to tbe the official font of Here Are Some Logos ;)

Is it legal to show their logos on one's site without permission?

There is a solid legal opinion that if you are featured on a site you can use their logo or if you are discussing the brand company.

No.

Well, this could be a case of fair use. You're using New York Times' trademark to discuss a certain aspect of the company (they wrote an article on this topic). That could fall under the "News Reporting" exception itself.

No not with the logo.

    > Stop wasting time searching Google Images

I don't think there's much of an advantage in development time to find, download, and implement this over doing the same with images. That's an odd angle to take in the opening paragraph IMO.

For me, the attraction is purely at 'runtime': I'd much rather serve a font over someone else's CDN than a bunch of images on my own host.

Plus, if the companies' logos/fonts change; I trust the community to be more on top of patching that than me noticing and grabbing a new image!

Good point, I hadn't actually thought about that as an advantage. I manage many sites and get press for lots of projects, so this will save me a bunch of time, but I like that benefit as well. Thanks!

That's actually pretty cool.

Thanks! Let me know if you use it!

Any specific reason why the class name is prefixed with `pr`? :)

Might be pr as in PR (public relations)

Thanks for the feedback, we will be adding logos for sure.

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