GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans | Hacker News Reader

GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans

github.com

119 pointsstanislavb48 comments

Wow, two brand new fonts in 2022 and they still make lowercase "l" look exactly like uppercase "i", I thought we were past that by now :(

Worse than look exactly alike, they are exactly the same. Pixel for pixel when I compare the examples on the site. Sigh.

At least they both don't look like the 1.

Someone's gonna lose a LOT of crypto over this.

Unlikely given that's precisely why Base58 was invented.

I'm thinking things like (if_user != walIet) kinda code, where it looks like it's checking something but it's not actually.

Neither of these are coding fonts.

There's an issue with the editable / interactive section on Firefox, might be what you're seeing. Otherwise mono is slightly rounder than hubot (look at the "t")

The parent is talking about “I” versus “l”, not Mona versus Hubot.

In their defense, these fonts aren't meant for code but prose and copy.

lmao, they are actually identical.

Good point. I like the look of these fonts but upon noticing your point I decided I won't use them.

l had to Iook very carefully to make sure you hadn't substituted the two Ietters. :)

Here's the text

  Ill Ill Ill Ill Ill

in Mona Sans:

https://i.ibb.co/3mv1Myx/Ill.png

What a pleasing symmetry.

Many sans fonts including Helvetica, Inter, Franklin Gothic, etc., do not properly distinguish I and l.

Yes, and that's a mistake.

- Time spent on making font: 3 hours - Time spent on making website with cute CG robots to promote font: 5 months, $700,000 in graphic design and engineering labor

These are not only text fonts, but continuously-variable fonts, these can be very labor intensive. Are there other open source variable fonts at all?

I don't disagree that variable fonts require a lot of effort to create but there are hundreds of open source variable fonts available: https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true

Sorry, but getting a versatile and properly balanced font family to work takes far more than 3 hours; months, years even. If anything those relationships are flipped - surely there are teams at GitHub capable of putting together a website like that in 3 hours.

I wonder if we could train a "Font Copilot" on a bunch of fonts and then claim the output is license free

Fontfaces aren't copywritable in the US.

Interesting. A bit of Google and it seems that although this is technically true, the digital representation of a typeface (ie the font file itself) is copywritable (it is treated like software).

TrueType font hinting is Turing-complete, so font files can be considered computer programs.

Already happening https://picsart.com/blog/post/ai-fonts

   > Licensed under OFL (basically, use it on your site or in your app and credit GitHub—read the full license)

Requiring only attribution and nothing else is very generous and only fair. Would be a serious dick move if someone fails to do even this, more so if it's for a commercial product.

Where can we find a similar such thing for the sources repurposed and/or redistributed for or through Copilot, anyway?

Funny, didn’t GitHub start the trend of using system fonts on their site? That was such a refreshing change.

I love the design and presentation of this page. It makes the announcement fun in a way I'd never have thought to do myself.

Just a quick note - the "body" text on the page uses Alliance, also designed by the same studio I think (https://degarism.com/Alliance). The two fonts themselves are catered more towards headers / titles.

Might be wrong, but looks like the body text is just using the mono font. They've named the fonts Alliance1 (mono) and Alliance2 (hubot) in the stylesheet.

I’ve observed a lot of sport brands have been using similar fonts.

Examples:

- https://uk.formswim.com

- https://www.nike.com

- https://www.reebok.co.uk

The font matrix is actually interactive. Now about UX: I had a brain-something when I first scrolled past it... it seemed some fonts changed weight... but I couldn't understand - is it my eyes going wonkey when some char is closer to monitor upper edge rather than lower or what? I scrolled again and again and again, trying to parse whether my eyes are OK or my eyes don't like that font and kind of didn't notice anything... then few more times, by spending at least half a minute trying to figure it out. I figured: they are being changed automatically! I thought: It would have been better to design some kind of carousel, so I can switch between modes.

I revisited that page after reading HN comments and then noticed that mouse pointer is actually changing weight and width... doh.

Wow that lowercase y is quite something.

> Licensed under OFL (basically, use it on your site or in your app and credit GitHub—read the full license)

Is this common for F/OSS fonts? I don’t know that I’ve seen many fonts that require attribution.

TIL any the OFL (https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id...)

tech company don't design a geometric sans serif challenge [impossible]

All I’m asking for is a drop in replacement for Univers with good licensing.

I don't understand why they invest(or buy?) fonts?

Perhaps I'm misreading your question, are you asking why they invest in fonts?

If so, the answer is that fonts are a major underpinning of how an organization or a product is presented to the world.

To make an analogy that the hn crowd might understand, the value of a typeface for a design system is like the value a cryptographic primitive or a library like openssl to a functioning security system.

Nobody (aside from designers and typographers) will think "oh wow that font is so great they must have invested a lot into it", but it underlies every written visual interaction between the brand/product/company and its audience.

That said, are there many other fonts available that fall into the appropriate style, usage, licensing terms, etc that GitHub need? Perhaps. But uniqueness is a value in itself, and having a decision about a set of fonts that the company uses is a pretty important thing.

It's like the 3 spaces or 4 spaces vs tabs discussion. Some people use one, other people use another. But in a company, having an approved typeface that is recognized internally as the typeface to use (of course, you can have different typefaces for different scenarios/uses) - is just as important as determining which one to use.

Standards make sense but it how many san serif fonts do we really need as a species? It was someone’s job here to set out and reinvent the wheel, and that seems like a waste of effort to me.

Fine, but are there any good reasons to spend resources on fonts?

Maybe if they spent less resources on achievements, fonts, etc. and more on reliability they could improve their downtime, which seems to be happening more and more often.

Does money/time spent by designers/front end take away from that towards back end?

Since companies have a limited amount of resources, yes. For example, they could have hired more SREs and less designers, but they didn't.

The time/investment they spent on their two brand identity typefaces is one side of the equation, the other side is the many, many minutes spent on font decisions in each and every little project in their company if employees are allowed (or maybe even encouraged, it can be quite motivating) to dabble a bit in "visual project identity". And on font licencing awareness training, because those engineer doodles will likely be public. And a Microsoft subsidiary will be an extremely juicy target for licence vultures, github simply can't afford any mistakes in that field.

This is where the wide parameterization of the fonts comes into play: "use one of those two fonts, feel free to go wild with the parameters" is much more likely to actually be followed than "use one of those n fonts, no exceptions", for almost any value of n. And better for morale as well.

You're saying it's better for morale, but do you have any proof? My personal experience says the contrary, the company I work at did the same (albeit it's much smaller than GitHub) and I asked some coworkers what they thought about it, about three of them considered it was a waste of resources, I only remember one saying it was OK, so overall morale went down.

In other words, marketing budget big and needed to be used up or else shrunk next fiscal cycle.

Realistically, this is probably very cost efficient as it’s a relatively low effort project compared to a fully fledged feature, and something that can make someone say “hey, that y reminds me of GitHub”.

To save money on licensing existing fonts. Own the font, do what you want with it, independent of whatever license changes a third-party might impose years down the line.

It's pocket change for GitHub but fantastic branding. Lots of people absolutely love JetBrains Mono, for example, even people who don't use their products.. but they won't forget who JetBrains are. If I were in marketing at a tech company with a huge marketing budget, I'd certainly be considering a typeface in the outreach mix.

See also IBM Plex: https://www.ibm.com/plex/

I thought I was looking at apple.com for a second.

I really like Jetbrains Mono.

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