Sweden Sans
identity.sweden.se
identity.sweden.se
The amount of documentation and attention to detail spent on typefaces and when to use them is often off the charts compared to the time spent on stuff like keeping the website running, documenting the API or even the basic functionality of the app.
It's like if someone grows oak trees for a century and slices veneer from it with a handcrafted blade and soaks it in coconut oil for a year before slapping it on a IKEA pulp honeycomb. :)
I think it's pretty simple:
- there are a lot of people out there who love obsessing over typography
- they want to obsess over typography
- so they invent a purpose for obsessing over typography
I love it, I'm here for it, and I think we should give people money for obsessing over typography.
- there are not that many people out there who love obsessing about typography
- the few that do have figured out that they can make a viable business of selling typefaces for slightly less than the cost of licencing helvetica
- writing a document like the one linked here makes people feel a bit better about cutting a big cheque for a typeface
It might also be that people who obsess about typography are more inclined to create pretty documents whenever they can. API authors and DB designers are maybe less interested in making pretty documents, which is why their (at the very least equally important work) is often described in a readme.txt meant to be read from the terminal in the typeface of the reader's choice.
Design in general is highly detail oriented. In interior design, there are philosophies about the proper arrangement of furniture (feng shui). In visual design the balance of colors is crucial, and there are complex theories about the best ways to match and offset colors. This is highly technical work that might seem overly pedantic to outsiders, but really has an established theory about how it impacts the viewer.
So is the case with type design. There are infinite combinations of shapes and sizes of symbols, and an entire science behind how humans interpret characters to form words and communicate ideas. Think about how much design went into just this paragraph you're reading. A bad type can be tiring to read, while a good one can make the words flow off the page/screen. As readers, we take this for granted, but a type designer needs to take all this into consideration.
Consider the work it takes to design a logotype, and how it sometime seems deceptively simple, when in reality it takes a keen eye to design a brand logo. Now extrapolate that to all letters of all alphabets that a modern type should support, and it's no wonder that great type designers deserve all the praise and recognition.
So, yes, all these documents are necessary, and explain the intent of the designer, or how the user feels the type helps with transmitting their message.
I think it's pretty simple:
- there are a lot of people out there who love obsessing over software
- they want to obsess over software
- so they invent a purpose for obsessing over software
I love it, I'm here for it, and I think we should give people money for obsessing over software.
Just because it's simple on the surface does not mean that there's a lot that goes into it, or that the details don't matter. I feel like what you've written is a little reductionist to the hard work people put into designing frameworks for communications like this, and how much it can help to give voice and unify messaging in intra- and inter-institution communication. How do you keep two government agencies on the same page wrt to design language? or is it ok that one agency likes to produce communications in comic sans while the other uses sans and the third uses helvetica?
It's one of those 99% invisible things.
I have created a tailwind-based design system interpretation like this in the education space at a rather large scale. Our designs and our tailwind-config comes from the same spec.
Doing this removes the engineer from thought by reducing options and possibilities. It also serves as check and balance. Paddings, font-weights, all of it are consistent. Designs that deviate from line-height, padding, weights, colors, etc are incorrect mocks and our configured values will make it obvious to the dev. Code that deviates from the spec is incorrect. This requires a good communication flow between Eng and UX but actually works in practice.
In a functioning system, it is a weight off your shoulders as you end up knowing the defaults just by looking at something.
Might I also remind you, the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end. An app with amazing backend practices but fails at matching designs or specs is just a failure and is noticeable by customers.
> the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end
It’s a phoney argument. Once can just as easily say “the whole point of a front end is to provide simple access to the backend, rather than doing it via APIs”.
The whole system is important.
Some backends have appalling frontends and are still popular. The opposite is also true.
No no, FE consistency matters for sure! I really appreciate a good brand identity document, it's really nice to have.
But using Arial everywhere would also be consistent, right?
Many companies have these style guides around typography. Beautiful, thoughtful, very well made things for sure, yet when some backend dev makes a typo so the custom font drops to arial or whatever, it can be days before someone notices and the ones who notice are the font nerds from marketing. Nobody else seems to mind much.
Compare that with what happens if someone misunderstands the 20 year old SQL schema and writes the wrong magic string to a table. Instant crash, everybody notices immediately. Yet database schemas for internal applications tend not to be documented in Porsche-brochure-like sites like this Sweden Sans is.
How did the typography guys get a voice so strong? Note that I don't mind it, I like to see well made things in general, but it's puzzling. It's like there is a secret society of typography nerds that have spread to all major organisations.
>Might I also remind you, the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end. An app with amazing backend practices but fails at matching designs or specs is just a failure and is noticeable by customers.
Just checked my notes and it turns out that frontend is just a temporary fashion-dictated skin over the actually important features of the backend! ;-)
In my opinion the "typography guys" don't have an especially stronger "voice" than anyone else. They just do a job once, get paid some (relatively small) amount for it, and then move on to the next project. At the biggest these projects involve a few people working for a year or two. Their entire job is about communication, sales, and sweating small design details, so it's no wonder they do a relatively good job at those.
The amount of work those "20 year old SQL schemas" take, once you include every bit of other comparable detail across a whole organization, is (at least) thousands of times bigger and more complicated. Overall the "code guys" have much more resources spent, spend a lot more time, and everyone ultimately cares a lot more about their output. They are large teams of either long-term employees or long-term contractors, whose work never really ends.
In short: Code is a sprawling mess rather than a cutely packaged self-contained thing. Unsurprisingly it's harder to make sense of at a glance.
Backend people accomplish work by making systems work.
For that reason you’ve seen many fonts and many working websites, but not as many people showing how they created a font or made their website work.
We spend a lot more time reading body text than scrolling through menus or fiddling with radiobuttons.
Also, this comment is especially ironic on HN where the top 10 comments on every Show HN submission will be nitpicking about the design of the website or the wording used, etc.
The frontend design team naturally puts more effort into the clarity and visual design of their design documents than the backend engineers do. This shouldn't be surprising.
The people who design interfaces and the people who do branding and identity work are rarely the same people. I've done both (and was developer all over the stack for a decade,) but never at the same time. Branding and identity work is usually done by specialized agencies, and they're usually the ones who make decisions about the type stack.
What you and most other developers don't realize is that these things do actually matter— just not in ways that non-designers consciously pick up on. When looking at an individual website, most folks might not see much difference between a poorly kerned system font and a really expensive 'pro' font painstakingly hand kerned over months or years. However, when people are encountering a brand on a whole, having a uniform, polished look across media dramatically affects how it comes across, and that is hugely consequential. Think about how differently car dealership websites land than car manufacturer websites? And they're selling literally the same fucking product! A knowledgeable designer could write an essay on the difference in the two designs while a layperson would likely shrug and say "it looks... smoother I guess?"
It's really no different than performance for developers. Most people don't consciously notice the difference between a website that's really really streamlined and optimized and one that's just kind of okay... But the meh site will not inspire positive feelings about the experience. If your competitors do better, you likely won't be the one getting their business even if the customer didn't consciously reject your business because of it.
Generalizations like this are just so bad. My biggest beef with design/"product" folk in the tech world is this thing that many of them do, where they justify their existence as a group of people and a business function by bad-mouthing developers.
> this thing that many of them do
Lol. You can't just qualify a generalization with "many" to make it a non-generalization.
Before getting into design, I was a full-time back end developer for 11 years and worked in dev organizations in ops/support rules for a decade before that. The job market over the past decade had coddled developers so much, and made them so fragile and arrogant. Even intimating that my professional opinion on design is more informed than a developer's opinion on design often yields a intellectual temper tantrum.
For example this page. First thing you see is a hero image showing their font in use. It's a pretty important element that takes up the whole screen. It's blurry and pixelated. Not the worst I've seen but definitely gives me more car dealership not car manufacturer vibes. It's a 1.3MB png that looks just as good converted to an 80KB jpeg and imo even better as a 20KB avif. If it was instead a 1.3MB jpeg or avif starting from a high quality source that thing would look crisp and super car manufacturery.
There is also a section in the page where the text goes blurry because they've included a table as an image. Or I should rather say it's both blurry and an image because they could have just included a higher res image of the table. They have plenty of other images where it looks fine. Again something that gives me car dealership vibes. Actually I would say blurry text image table is specifically a dodgy second hand car dealership level of vibe.
Now you could say that the typography page isn't user or customer facing so its not that important but I see plenty of shitty blurry images on otherwise polished looking pages all over the internet, and also if they covered images in their design system like they do typography then it wouldn't matter. They'd just be in the habit of only using high quality images and have some process in place to deliver them in appropriate formats.
So while backend vs frontend or functionality vs polish are imo boring and played out webdev topics, I am super curious as to why they care enough about inspiring positive feelings through web design to make an entire custom font, have a page of guidelines on how to use said font, but dont have the same level of care for images. And why I see this contrast enough to consider it reasonably common in the industry.
Good one, but that's not my point just to be clear! I think this kind of documentation tends to happen in organisations that already spend so much on enterprise licences that a team of designers doing "graphical profile" work for a year is almost a rounding error, and I don't mind that it happens at all. It's just weird that it happens to such an extent around typefaces, of all things.
Large corps pay dearly for Dell servers, kubernetes solutions from IBM, even the HR-systems are shoved to the cloud. Fortunes can be saved doing those things in-house, but the thing that happens in-house is - replacing Arial with something that looks almost like Arial.
Isn't that a litte weird? (Even if it is also wonderful) :)
And because they like to nerd out so much about it, they put more effort into it.
Brand guidelines tend to seem expansive because they have to break things down in a way that's very easy for all sorts of people to adopt with minimal hassle. From what I've seen, the moment that process gets anywhere within a thousand miles of difficult, people will say "forget it" and do what they want.
Despite all that, branding doesn't really require much in the way of ongoing resource commitments from an organization. They get put together when the brand is updated, and more often than not, the entire process is often outsourced to agencies. Either way, once it's done, it's done for a while.
It's also often publicly available. You can find brand guides for all sorts of companies and organizations available online. Technical documentation is almost always internal, unless we're talking about stuff that's been open-sourced, API documentation, etc. It's also ongoing and is in constant need of updating as code gets updated. As a result, there's no need to pretty it up beyond whatever makes it accessible to your developers. The priority is on keeping it updated as best you can, within the limits of available resources. That doesn't always happen, of course.
Different audiences merit different approaches, and because one is more visible, it may give the false impression that it's of higher importance to an organization.
Is this the design system you created, or is this something others can use (or both)? As someone who's avoided frontend work primarily because I find CSS tedious, having a system over top of it that speaks design language sounds interesting.
Admittedly, looking at Tailwind now, looks like it's worth just trying that to start with.
If it's a differential comparison vs. tech then that differential should be treated as its own issue, not an issue of design guidelines deserving a label like pedantry just because something else isn't as well-planned or documented.
Also, design, including and sometimes especially typography, is accessibility and is often worth that sort of attention to detail for exactly that reason, keeping designs accessible to all users. Defining contrasts and visual hierarchy hugely influences how accessible something using a design might be.
One specific example I see is the callout in this particular example for using much less UPPERCASE text moving forward from whatever their previous design language was. This is something I know that I've fought designers I've worked with over as an accessibility problem they've missed. (It's also something that Microsoft went through a huge accidental blow up in very public with early "Metro" designs that they had to apologize for and then walk back in consequent "Fluent" designs.) In general people read word shapes more than individual letters, uppercase forms a lot of very similar looking "rectangles" and even for readers with no other obvious dyslexia uppercase words are the visual equivalent of "speed bumps" in a roadway. They slow reading, sometimes to a crawl, and generally just get in the way, for all readers. (For dyslexic readers I've known they sometimes are even more "walls" than simply "speed bumps" and text entirely in uppercase will completely upset them, if not make the content 100% inaccessible to them and they will nope out entirely.)
That's an important thing about typography that is easy to miss. I've seen so many designs use all uppercase text in places simply because it "looks nice" (those "all words create about the same sort of rectangular shape" that makes a dyslexic viewpoint absolutely hate seeing all uppercase text add a regularity and "cleanliness" to design shapes that some designers find they love; one person's massive accessibility bug is another's aesthetic feature).
You should check out the Netflix series:
Abstract: The Art of Design Episode: Jonathan Hoefler: Typeface Design
The guy has some of the most important typefaces. The episode does an amazing job detailing his career and how they develop new typefaces. His work is literally everywhere and its super fascinating some of the misconceptions about type.
2. https://nymag.com/news/features/jonathan-hoefler-tobias-frer...
First, it's basically one shot: once you have a type face and yhe guideline, only small tweaks are needed down the line. Changing it willy nilly has too much impact that it's just not an option either way. So you better spend time having it right.
Then it will be referred to in millions of places. Every single site made by the Swedish government will have to look at this guideline and decide where to use Sweden sans and when to use Noto. For their own project it wil be a small decision, but in aggregate the better the guideline is the lesser time needs to be spent bikeshedding on which font to use and if Times New Roman is acceptable.
I don't think the type section is unusually large, but I worked at a company for two years that exclusively made design manuals, and the well made ones tend to look like this.
As in those cases, the investment in these kinds of guidelines should be worth it because less time gets spent on such discussions later and consistency of products is improved.
If you really wanted to improve UX, one of those things is more worthy of attention.
Collect metrics in a lawful way and GDPR doesn't hurt your UX.
In the early 16th century, Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and sighted the great "Southern Sea" which he named Mar del Sur (in Spanish). Afterwards, the ocean's current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favorable winds on reaching the ocean. He called it Mar Pacífico, which in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian means 'peaceful sea'.
I think we hugged it to death.
In short if you use Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS then some archive.is domains won't load so you should perhaps use another DNS server.
Edit: Not because 1.1.1.1 is in the wrong it is just what the person behind archive.is recommends as he will not be changing his position and neither will Cloudflare so it's a bit of a stalemate.
It must be something in my network path because I just tethered to my phone's 4G connection and it works. Odd.
I like the Swedish Tax Agency's design language, if it can be called that. I don't think they use this Sweden Sans, but I'm not sure what they do use.
It’s run by the Swedish Institute.
> The Swedish Institute is a public agency that builds interest and trust in Sweden around the world. We work with Sweden promotion, cooperation in the Baltic Sea region and global development. […] SI’s operations are financed mainly through appropriations directly through the state budget. SI has approximately 470 million Swedish government funds in four areas: international cooperation, international assistance, education and university research and business.[1]
I did think that myself, certainly a bit of space and countryside to enjoy and getting around Sweden doesnt take long if you have a motorbike...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXiIJ32kaZU
Someone on Sweden was saying the Police have to catch you on the day to prove you are the driver, but I think I will stick to the German autobahns, less moose on the loose.
ghost rider patrik fürstenhoff
Is it? Norway has been topping all the livability charts for at least the past decade so that's the one I've always considered "the best in the world." Then probably the Netherlands, if you stretch the definition of Nordic.
In 2023 too, no less than six years in a row!
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/27/1166180048/finland-is-the-wor...
But plenty of sans fonts have a handful of serifs, particularly on the mistakable chars like l. And especially if they're expected to be used in technical contexts or as an "everything all the time" font like this one.
When I used to teach typography in the 2000s, sometimes students would point this out. Or as an example of a beginner's lesson, they'd use a font without really examining it, and some detail about the font would catch them out later.
It's weird but most people pick fonts without really thinking about the font itself, or even reading its name, let alone examining it. They are thinking about their design, their thoughts & feelings, their message, their amazing design opportunity, or whatever.
Skilled designers need to be trained to think about whether they're basically hallucinating the purpose of the font, as a few seconds of inspection will often make the original purpose really obvious. To people who learn how this works, it becomes just that obvious why those slab serifs might be in there.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/styles/typography/
The British government may be an omnishambles, but their websites are remarkably clear and readable, specially for an aging population with worsening eyesight.
https://styleguide.bundesregierung.de/sg-de/basiselemente/sc...
Their website is a nightmare to find content on, so here's the design guidelines: https://www.visiteuropewithskal.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...
The intro claims the character of the Estonia brand is "nordic, surprising, smart" but the Aino font in particular seems way too focused on being surprising at the expense of legibility, which certainly diminishes expression of the smart element.
The Estonia font looks useful for designing fluorescent lighting, though. :-)
Also...look under "Type usage" - they are using an image of a table instead of a table? Good lord.
I think the UK has done a great job with their government website and their digital platforms. So it's good to see more governments getting into it as well.
Are we playing with an idea that has similar dangers here? Ask the opposite question: what would happen if typeface designers didn't go to all this detail? Would we just want to know that "Arial is the round-ish one and Times New Roman has little footsy things?"
Font selection is a big deal to brand identity and marketing. They like to have lots of choices. We even design our own fonts sometimes. How many developers have, as I have, changed fonts in our code editors, looking for the one that's "just right?"
For whatever reasons, the demand for distinct fonts is high, and if there are lots of fonts, they need to be completely specified, so that they can be created and rendered correctly.
Sadly, it's Calibri. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/politics/state-departm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type
> The name comes from the fact that calligraphy-inspired typefaces were first designed in Italy, to replace documents traditionally written in a handwriting style called chancery hand. Aldus Manutius and Ludovico Arrighi (both between the 15th and 16th centuries) were the main type designers involved in this process at the time.
> The first use in a complete volume was a 1501 edition of Virgil dedicated to Italy [...]
> Italic type rapidly became very popular and was widely (and inaccurately) imitated. The Venetian Senate gave Aldus exclusive right to its use, a patent confirmed by three successive Popes, but it was widely counterfeited as early as 1502
I am interested in this part. Which signage system does it refer to? It does not immediately ring a bell for me.
"We started to think about how it would work with different typefaces, then started mood boards with different fonts and pictures – especially of old Swedish signs we'd seen from the 1940s and 50s," said Jesper Robinell, Söderhavet’s head of design.
Oh, you can't. So they just spent a lot of my tax money in order to create a font to promote sweden on social media. Great.
Also note that they use their social media to spread highly political content in which does not resonate with many swedes.
For publication, Garamond Premier Pro is my favorite of them all: https://fontsgeek.com/fonts/Garamond-Premier-Pro-Regular
Well, that seems to be its primary use-case so I guess it works as intended, no?
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/29444/norwegian-banknotes-2014-2...
Zero distinguished from capital "o"? CHECK
APPROVED
Sorry, I have to disagree. In fact, that was the first thing I saw and decided I "disapprove" this typeface.
Why? Because it looks too similar to norwegian Ø.
It's a very good idea to clearly distinguish zero 0 from capital O, but it should not look like Ø ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98 ) either, because there are many swedish businesses, websites, etc. operating in Norway. I know swedish alphabet uses Ö ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96 ), but still.
https://identity.sweden.se/en/about-this-site#abouttermsandu...
Definitely limited use in scope :) Back to Noto Sans!
It's adding consistency to the presentation and harmonizing with any accompanying non-motion graphic styles, as you might see in a cultural presentation environment with both packaging/signage and video or interactive elements for example.
And, later, those guidelines give a designer an institutionally-bought-in way to talk to someone without talking down to them. Refer to the guideline and discuss the guideline, not "I'm right, you're wrong." It's not meant as purely a technical spec as it may be interpreted by more tech-oriented mindsets IOW.
Something new here?