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Comment by dan_pixelflow | Hacker News Reader

Designer here: Inter is my go-to font - a free (and incredibly made!) cross between Helvetica and SF Pro! Rasmus himself has worked at his fair share of Big Important Brands (part of the original team at Spotify, worked at Facebook, NodeJS, Dropbox, Figma) [0] and it's kinda crazy to me how much Rasmus has affected me: I see the Figma icon he created every day, I see the Spotify branding he founded, I use Inter, it's kinda crazy.

Inter is the kind of font that you use when you need something that just works. Not too fancy, not too simple, it's perfect for so many things. And it's free. And it's open source [1]. What's not to like!

[0] https://rsms.me/work [1] https://github.com/rsms/inter

Edit: it's also not a new thing, and not a 'new SF clone' - it's been around since 2016[2].

[2] https://rsms.me/work/inter/

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I beg to differ - for UX/UI, especially small screens you want large counters and tracking, as well as much higher x-heights than Inter.

It's a great general purpose font, but not the best for UX/UI. SF Pro has SF Pro Compact to deal with aforementioned issues (It is used on Apple Watch).

> much higher x-heights than Inter.

Large x-heights make me sad; I think they're helpful in screens the size of a phone or smaller, but I don't like them on desktops. Inter's x-heights are already beyond my personal aesthetic tastes.

I should clarify the purpose of x-heights and how it relates to legibility.

Taller x-heights leads to better optical legibility in small sizes.

Shorter x-heights are usually found in fonts such as Source Serif Pro for obvious reasons - it leads to be better shape recognition of the words and improved readability. Excellent in long prose and text use. Usually "Book" fonts have very short x-height. One of my favorites is Nexus Serif: https://www.martinmajoor.com/4_nexus.html

For UX/UI - ever wondered by EXIT signs are in all caps and not written as Exit? It's because of the relation of x-height to legibility at small sizes or larger distances. This is the same for avionics, warning labels, etc.

Inter isn't a good font for UX/UI IMO for the same reason why Helvetica and SF Pro aren't. They're general purpose fonts - neither good at text nor UX/UI but somewhere in the middle.

This is rather overstating the shortcomings for small sizes – Apple only uses SF Compact on the Watch; SF Text is used on even the smallest elements in iOS and macOS. Inter reduces approximately as well.

As for tracking, it’s already a good practice to use a slightly higher `letter-spacing` value at small sizes (something UIkit does automatically), so this isn’t really a function of the font family.

Inter is not a good font at all... maybe for super short text/labels, but for larger ones it has bad kearning.

If anybody wants a good example of how not-good looking Inter is for headlines/articles check out: https://thehill.com/

I think part of the popularity is that it is free, and it is a decent enough grotesk font to do the job, but you wont get great results with it.

the link looks fine

The o often has too much space around it in the middle of words. In "stave" the v cleaves too close to the e. (IMO).

The Hill isn't relevant at all. Every headline and the body all use 'Graphik', not Inter.

Would this be a good font to use on a small (2.8 inch) screen? I’ve got a little hobby hardware project I’m working on and am a total typography dunce.

Depends on resolution and color depth / shades of gray. If you have few pixels, and / or 1-2 of bit color depth, you may be better off with a bitmapped font.

If your display is many hundreds of pixels wide and has and several shades for antialiasing, any good font designed and hinted for screens would work.

Unibody 8 [0] is pretty excellent if you're dealing with a low resolution raster device. It looks like this in action: https://twitter.com/underware/status/947439103645245440

[0] https://underware.nl/fonts/unibody/styles

The variable font is awesome too. Love that one can control the parameters to one's will.

Hi user here.

Is there a estimated release date of the Inter Display font?

Wow it's actually an honor to respond here. I've used Inter in my app boilerplate for a while now and we love it.

Thank you so much for your work.

OP is a designer, not the designer.

Derp, I'm an idiot.

not your fault. That comment was misleadingly ambiguous. ("Designer here" and nothing later disambiguated.)

To be clear, the author of the parent you're responding to is not the designer of Inter, they are simply _a_ designer.

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