Hacker News Reader

Comment by beefhash | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering why all these new fonts tend to have a strong focus on sans serif font (Fira has no serif variant, Source Serif Pro came later than the other Source fonts). Aren't there a lot of situations (namely, lengthy legal documents) where you'd prefer a serif font before you want a sans serif?

View on HN

Primarily because they focus on interfaces, not publishing. Serif is traditionally used for legibility of long text. Sans always wins for actual interface design (at least those with some manner of complexity) because it's much less visually distracting when used in a variety of weights and sizes. Interfaces tend to have much more mixed usage so we usually go with sans.

Generally just using the system font is fine for most UI interfaces and the only good reasons to change it are:

1. You have a specific branding style you need to achieve (this is becoming rare) 2. Your interface has pixel perfect user created content where the difference in font to font usage between OSes / Browsers would cause actual breaks in layouts from user to user.

I run into the later often, and so we end up picking a neutral style font like this because it's the closest thing to a generic "system font" like Roboto or San Francisco that has a friendlier license.

Personally I prefer Inter UI https://rsms.me/inter/

Ooh, Inter is very nice. Thanks!

Thanks for the link! I've been looking for a free-as-in-beer, good-looking font family with tabular numbers and had pretty much given up on hope. Inter UI is fantastic!

Not really. Serifs used to be too detailed for displays and still are except hdpi displays. So for digital so go sans and people really attached serifs with something archaic and institutions dont want to look like that.

For print sure serifs are good but again it depends. There are many highly readable sans serifs (that have big x-height).

If you're just looking for a font for your microsft word or other office document software, you're most likely not going to bother downloading new fonts when Word has plenty of fonts available easily.

I would imagine tech geeks and artists are generally the people who are downloading new fonts, and those poeple are probably spending most of their time using sans serif fonts or monospace.

I agree that it's worth looking at all public structures of font selection as well. The Highway department is in this right now. Highway Gothic is old an difficult to read, yet instead of a public domain free to use sign font, they are battling the use of Clearview which comes with a cost because it has a copyright attached to it.

There are multiple needs here and it seems the only action comes from the "sexy" side of things.

Not all, I believe. Merriweather is serif.

* https://github.com/uswds/uswds-for-designers#fonts

* https://designsystem.digital.gov/components/typography/

* https://github.com/SorkinType/Merriweather/blob/master/READM...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com