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Comment by Garvi | Hacker News Reader

Looks 99.9% like Raleway to me: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway

Sure, I can see the subtle differences, but one costs $1650 for all styles, the other one is free. Most of the letters seem to be only stretched vertically by a few percent, with no other visible differences. If I had a job to create a new font, I wouldn't have the guts turning this in as my original work.

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They are clearly different if you look at them side by side.

Of course, if a document comes with one of them, I certainly wouldn't be able to tell you which one it is. But they are certainly not the same.

They're not at all the same font. If your job was creating fonts, you'd notice the differences.

And since most people's jobs are not creating fonts, most people wouldn't notice the difference. There-in lies the challenge. Typography /is/ important, but it may not be as important as typographists think that it is.

(I tell this story a lot.) I heard an ad on the radio a while back, from the American Podiatry Association, which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health.

I am sure that 95% of podiatrists honestly believe that's good and important advice. Just as 95% of font designers honestly think that subtle differences in kerning are strongly impactful.

> which recommended that everybody should schedule a checkup with their podiatrist once a year to maintain foot health.

Considering the large numbers of diabetics or pre-diabetics in the USA this isn’t actually a stretch.

If you need a free alternative, the closest I know of is Metropolis[0] by Chris Simpson, although it is closer to Gotham.

[0] https://github.com/dw5/metropolis

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