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Comment by flixic | Hacker News Reader

As a UI font, this is pretty great. Almost a mix between Circular and San Francisco, it should work well.

However, most disappointing and worrying part of font presentation is applications to different movies and TV shows. With the same typeface, they completely lose their identity.

Strong, condensed typeface of House of Cards. 80s-inspired typeface for Stranger Things. Minimal and geometric typeface for OA. Cyrillic alphabet inspired treatment of R in Icarus.

They all were different and appropriate, and here they are all very 2010's generic sans-serif, losing all personality.

I'm happy to see Netflix Sans in UI, but sure hope it doesn't go deeper, into actual show branding.

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My assumption was that the design firm wanted to make sure the font held up well when used dynamically in complex media, using well known photography available to Netflix, not that they were proposing logo changes for those properties.

Are they even responsible for creating those show branding/advertising graphics used in the examples? I thought that'd be the responsibility of the production companies as they submit content. Although maybe they want some consistency when it's within the Netflix app...

But agreed, I hope it becomes their UI font and not used in everything out of laziness or some pursuit of functional standardization over emotional aesthetics.

I got the impression the article author had put those together.

Credit below these images goes to Netflix and Dalton Maag (one of the most famous typeface design studios, https://www.daltonmaag.com/)

Seems like an odd thing for them to do. For me it came off as netflix either changing the branding or wanting to show off the font in a creative way.

One thing that annoys me on Netflix... is the Netflix logo on show's thumbnail...

I wouldn't mind a Netflix label in the UI, but watermarking every covers feels gross, it dilutes the personality of each show.

I actually appreciate the instantly visible branding; Netflix shows are among the few guaranteed to have proper subtitles.

I see you have not watched La Casa de Papel (or, as they have recently creatively rebranded it in English, "Money Heist"). Yeah, it wasn't produced by Netflix, but they stick their branding on it and have numerous errors in the subtitles.

Netflix productions have errors and missing lines, but they're at least always available. I report the problems and they get fixed pretty quickly.

Here (Japan region), it's fairly difficult to find things with subtitles, which I pretty much need, so I'll take what I can get.

You get extremely lucky then. Violet Evergarden has a hilariously badly subtitled sequence in S1E2 at 7:25. The whole thing is wrong, but in short, she says "you wanted a girl" when she said "your parents wanted a girl" and talks about him saying a girl's name in bed when she was talking about herself.

I reported this back in jan 19, and it's still fucked.

That does sound bad -- have you tried pinging them again? Usually when I report issues, they're English issues, so the check/fix process is probably much simpler for them.

For a little background information, I'm mostly deaf, so I generally use subtitles for English (my native language) in English-language programs, so the problems we encounter are likely very different. :)

At this level of handicap, I'm simply happy that the subtitles exist -- I can't say the same for Hulu or Amazon Video.

As someone with decent difficulty understanding spoken english, yeah, i do choose netflix over amazon video for that reason as well (no hulu in germany, and often amazon subs have only german subs here).

I've poked Netflix again this week, but really, i don't expect anything. It's not like they respond to the original complaint. Often these services just put up the files given by their contract partners and then walk away. RWBY on crunchyroll has no english subtitles either despite being originally english. Roosterteeth, the creator company, is aware of this and hasn't fixed it in the year since i reported it. To make it worse, the page claims english subs are available.

For evergarden though, torrenting from a dedicated translation group is the only option to get non-broken subs at the moment.

Called them directly and they told me "it's only fixed if many people report it" (ain't gonna happen), and "since this is licensed content, it depends on the other company and we have no idea whatsoever when or if it's gonna be fixed, or even how long we'll carry the series for". So much for "netflix original".

That's terrible service, sorry to hear that. :(

It's sadly how the licensing business works. Although i do 100% blame netflix for calling it a "netflix original" when all they did was buy a license and be sent files they can't touch.

That's about the only guarantee though. Some 'Netflix Originals' are purchased from other broadcasting companies, there's wildly inconsistent quality across then...

I love Netflix and all but the little name in the corner doesn't mean much.

Yes if the watermark was for original Netflix Originals I would appreciate the utility. Even Red vs. Blue is marked as a Netflix Original but I believe it predates even YouTube.

I would disagree with that... Netflix's subs might be passable when they don't have to deal with translating on-screen text, but when that is the case (like with anime, which they've been investing a lot of money into) the presentation is just horrible. Just look at the video in this tweet: https://twitter.com/Daiz42/status/949379951194726401 (also look for the video in the follow-up tweet demonstrating how much better it could be with just some simple changes)

The state of official anime subs is just bad everywhere. Crunchyroll's are not-infrequently total gibberish. Netflix's handling of signs is indeed awful but they do at least (usually) write decent translations. I won't say that fansubs are any better on average but the only actual well-done subs are all fansubs which is kind of sad.

They seem to state in the article that they will use this in brand and identity but they don't mention use of this in the UI.

> As a UI font, this is pretty great.

I disagree. With high-resolution displays becoming the norm, I'm questioning why so much of the industry is still stuck on sans-serif fonts for UI, and worse, regressing from humanist sanses to neo-grotesk fonts, which are the worst (seriously, if you have to use a sans, use something like Myriad or Noto Sans... which Apple and Google used to use before they jumped on the neo-grotesk bandwagon).

The only reason to not use a serif font is because at low resolutions, the serifs blur into a mess, but low resolutions aren't an issue anymore. And on top of that, hinting is a thing. Serif fonts have objectively better readability, and subjectively they're much prettier than anything else.

I've been using Noto Serif as my main UI font on pretty much everything for a couple of years now, and it's absolutely perfect. I'll never go back to a sans for UI.

> With high-resolution displays becoming the norm

It will be years before TVs as well as desktop monitors are HiDPI in overwhelming numbers. 720p/1080p is pretty much the norm for those now. These fonts are meant to be usable on the vast majority (> 95%) of customer's screens, not just the minority (majority soon) of HiDPI screens.

> The only reason to not use a serif font is because at low resolutions, the serifs blur into a mess, […]

Nonsense. It's also an aesthetic call. We are not just using sans-serif fonts because our screens can't do better; sometimes they just work on their own merits (whether that's legibility or appearance).

>Serif fonts have objectively better readability

This claim is often repeated but questionable at best.

>subjectively they're much prettier than anything else

They might be pretty to you (and this is such a subjective claim that using it as evidence for favoring serif fonts is pointless) but users are pretty used to sans UI fonts at this point, and there's 0 reason to alienate them with something "prettier".

My reaction as designer is different. Today, UIs often get quite complex, and can contain at least few different sizes of the text.

1. Serifs often have uneven stroke weights which make them actually actually harder to read in small sizes (8-15), since the thin parts start to breakdown.

2. Letterforms are more complex and generally create more "visual noise" or the texture of the text gets noisy since you have lot of points and ticks on the screen.

I think serifs can work well on titles that are large, quotes, in print or simple ui like articles where you one column of text, mostly in one size. For UI, especially mobile UI feel like it can be quite jarring in any more complex app.

Legibility also comes from the different factors of the typeface (x-height, open counters, distinct letterforms) not only from the fact that it's serif or sans serif.

Have to agree, it's bit disappointing the most common style of font used are the minimalist ones like Google's font or Facebook's. I mean for pixel blurring reasons it makes sense but if we have stronger computers, we can avoid that problem more often, no?

> Serif fonts have objectively better readability

Actually, for reading long books some serif fonts will tire my sight faster than sans-serif fonts.

It seems to me font readability design is a lot more complex than simply serif vs sans-serif.

I have been using LinuxLibertine for text. It's just about perfect. Noto Serif looks like it was intended as a caption font.

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