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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

Why anyone who isn't employed at Goldman Sachs would ever use this is beyond me, and yet they offer it up for public download. The license forbids creating or even modifying derivative works with it, or bundling/embedding it.

There are so many good, free typefaces out there. I really can't be bothered with yet another license-crippled vanity project from another huge corporation that had a marketing budget left to spend. IBM did the same thing with "Plex", which is arguably even worse quality-wise, but at least has an open license (SIL).

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My best guess is that this is a recruitment tool. GS has historically relied on a roster of digital agencies to do any sort of consumer-facing design. They've been trying to grow their in-house practice with mixed results. It's the same trend as the last recession. They can lure talent by offering a lot of money, but no with a creative itch is going to spend their career at a bank.

Yup, they're basically screaming to UX and visual designers "Hey, we're not your stale old bank! We have a design system and a Sketch library, come work for us!" You can also tell that this is career focused as the third link in the header is "Careers". Interestingly enough, I knew someone who worked in their design team. Lasted 2 years I think before heading back to the West Coast.

Banks are very creative in their OTC derivatives.

I frequently build/work on apps that need to show numerical outputs in a clean, easy-to read way, and many "consumer" fonts ignore or underweight the legibility of numeric data, especially at small sizes. So I would absolutely consider using this font, which I think also looks very nice, in apps I build.

> So I would absolutely consider using this font, which I think also looks very nice, in apps I build.

Unless that wasn't clear enough from my comment, you're not allowed to.

Sure you can. It's a restricted license with some standard CYA clauses, it doesn't mean that nobody is allowed to use it.

I think Plex is great. It features a nice mix of rounded and sharp edges to not look boring, yet is not too funky to be inconvenient to read. It looks good both on screens and printed with toner. I usually put a \usepackage{plex-otf} in my documents which handles all font variant selection for me.

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