Browse websites by fonts | Hacker News Reader

Browse websites by fonts

maxibestof.one

99 pointskosasbest23 comments

Doesn't surprise me that Inter is number one. It is just so good. Every time I try out something else, it feels like a subtle downgrade.

Counterpoint it is a worse copy of Apples San Francisco. Made by very determined but not very experienced typographer. It started by taking Roboto and redrawing/morphing San Francisco over Roboto. This leads to lots of inconsistencies (something that got better over time especially with outside contributions) and it wont get you much respect with type community.

Not to say its not better UI typeface than most (especially open source ones). Or that creating such typeface is not time consuming. I often use it too. I am just trying to point out that the why it works so well for UI should be attributed mostly to team behind San Francisco.

San Francisco is fantastic, but you can't use it outside of Apple platforms. Anything in this style better than Inter, even commercial? Graphik, Circular, Neue Haas Grotesk, Proxima Nova have been popular at various times, but are not as refined and versatile. Some brands have custom fonts that come close in my opinion, but they keep them to themselves.

Good workhorse grotesk is bread and butter of any commercial type foundry. I would say you will find many ones that are of higher quality than Inter.

The question becomes more interesting when you want specifically typefaces for UIs. One of the main qualities of San Francisco imho is the versitality and amount of cuts/versions specifically with digital screens in mind. I think thats not very popular segment with type foundries.

For example Klim type Untitled is in my eyes one of the best UI typefaces. But it doesnt have the breadth (i guess it wasnt that popular to dedicate the time). So you might have to pick their other typeface Sohne which is not made specifically for UIs (although it works just fine because Klimt is top of the top in the craft). There are things like FK Grotesk, Post Grotesk, Rooobert... there are many which work well and have the breath but are not specific to UIs either. This does not matter as much anymore because of hidipi screens though.

And also its not like Inter has ever been specifically optimised/hinted to lowdpi screens (not unlike all the SF, Arials, Verdanas, Helveticas of the world).

So Inter is not the best but its good enough and its free.

Installing on Linux and using as your primary OS font goes a very long way to making the system feel modern.

I hadn’t heard of Inter but I’ve been doing this with Roboto for some time and highly recommend it.

Inter is extremely pleasant to read long walls of text. It is also fantastic because of great disambiguation options for accessibility (which many "modern" fonts miss out).

I've seen Inter used so much, that I instantly recognize it whenever it pops up on a website. Definitely a good font, but fear it may be overused.

I’m curious, is there a resource that teaches font appreciation and utility implications, like color theories?

I imagine fonts are like a plot full of weeds, there’s all sorts of information they give off to people who know, but most people don’t have eyes for what they are looking at.

You can check out Butterick's online book on typography.

This is great - very useful. I noticed however that because the fonts are being detected (I assume) automatically, this can lead to some false positives.

For example, in the first example of Inter usage [0], the main font used in most (if not all) of the web page text - especially that visible in the screenshot - is actually "Manrope" and not Inter.

Inter is the default font used in Tailwind UI example components [1], so I expect there may be quite a few sites out there now that may have this font imported by default, but may not necessarily be actually using it as their main font.

Still a very useful resource though. Bookmarked.

Edit: A cool update to this site might be to calculate the % of text styled with each font on a given page, and show the breakdown in the side-bar of the website profile (which admitedly might slow down scraping quite a bit if that's how the sites are being collated).

[0] https://maxibestof.one/websites/51457-10x-designers

[1] https://tailwindui.com/documentation#optional-add-the-inter-...

Also see: https://fontsinuse.com/

Genuine question, why is HN so obsessed with fonts? Most people do not care at all. And we all know the strange love towards comic sans from "not computer people", that might even show a complete different understanding of beauty.

Well, you're right that most people don't care about fonts. But people do appreciate good design, and fonts are a big part of that. Similarly, most people don't know, or care about, anything related to music theory, yet people do appreciate good music. People don't care about color theory, but they appreciate good art. You get the drift.

Someone liking or disliking Comic Sans is just a matter of taste. Fonts are not design, they are just fonts. You can make a good design with Comic Sans, and you can make a bad design with the best font in the world.

I think they do care, it's just not something most people notice until it looks wrong. I'm not a painter-decorator, when I walk into a house I won't notice the paint colour, unless it looks terrible or clashes or something, in which case I probably will notice.

There's a lot of things like that. A classic example I'm very aware of is something called "juice" in game development, which you would never notice whilst playing a game until you play one without it, at which point its immediately obvious.

> "Most people do not care at all."

I think that might be directly contradicted by your first sentence. People do care. Design matters, and typeface selection is a big part of that.

HN is not "most people".

People who love Comic Sans also care.

People do care. They might not know it, but they'll immediately recognise a badly designed or badly used font in a UI or magazine or wherever. Why?.. because it effects readability and thus their experience consuming whatever media they're looking at.

If someone plastered a inappropriate font all over hackernews you'd notice right away.

Good design isn't always noticeable but bad design is frequently the first thing you'll see when you open that new app and fonts are a part of that.

some coders love good, eye-pleasing, or bland design. fonts are as important to visual memory as a person's outlook on the first day of a job interview. of course, it's hard to agree on the appeal or necessity of it.

See also https://www.typewolf.com -- a long-running and popular curated look at trends in web typography

Zero results found for comic sans?

I'm sure at least some websites use it exclusively.

Its curated gallery of websites with good design. Not search of all websites

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