Reddit Sans | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Sans

github.com

71 pointsplatzhirsch59 comments

What an interesting thread to read. "Typography aficionados" are one of the most ardent and vocal subcultures within the Hacker News community. Any given post may be hijacked at any time, for a meta-discussion about the font choices on that post's linked web page.

When a post actually IS about a new font, people dissect that latest microscopic riff on Helvetica like whiskey snobs describing a spirit's nose and mouthfeel.

However, a strong cross-cutting theme on HN is "hating Reddit even though you obviously spend a lot of time there". It's a clash of the titans, and a real role-reversal... this may be the first time I've ever seen a post about fonts mostly hijacked by something else instead.

It's only when two highly-prized priorities are pitted against each other that you can really determine which is higher up on the priority list. I guess now we know. Hating on the outgroup is a strong trait amongst humans, perhaps even stronger than font snobbery.

Does the world really need yet another font with a purely rectangular lowercase 'l'? There. I guess you can see where my priorities lie.

It's a shame, because I thought font snobbery might encourage some interesting discussion here.

But on your second point -- there are two lowercase "l" glyphs, of which the default option is not purely rectangular. Without any stylistic set activated, "1Iil" are all visually distinct.

First of all, this is a surprisingly nice font. Modern, clean, it has personality but it's legibile. Well done!

It has some similarities to Product Sans that Google has been rolling out in its interfaces [1] -- suggesting Futura [2], but Google's version is clunky and backwards-looking, while Reddit Sans is far more elegant and up-to-date.

I do wonder if they're going to use it for the body text of conversation threads though? Because it still feels more like a display typeface than body text, with its highly geometric styling. It looks great in the tag bubbles they show, and it'll be superb for headlines and things, but I'm not sure I'd want to read comments in it -- but their blog post suggests that's what it's for.

Using this geometric styling is what Google's done with all of its Workspace interface now (Gmail, Docs, etc.) and I think it's been a big mistake. Futura has always been best as a display font, not for body text, and I don't understand why Google has moved from Roboto to Product Sans for things like menus or e-mail subject lines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Sans

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)

I guess with less users and moderators they have more time to explore their hobbies over at reddit now.

Reddit has always had a ton of stupid irrelevant side projects. Remember "creddits"/ReddCoin, the "social cryptocurrency" they were developing? Hard to believe that was a decade ago. Harder to believe that in retrospect, they should have just done it, been ready when the crypto hype wave came and exited/IPO'd as billionaires.

On the other hand, that big pixel board thing they do once a year is a great idea. Some of these other things also led to fun community behaviours.

Not once a year, it was supposed to be a one off in 2017, and they did it again in 2022 and 2023.

The 2023 one in particular came right after /u/Spez started cracking mod heads, and was full of "fuck spez" right up until the end.

Fewer. </davos>

Blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38465233

Specimen site: https://redditsans.s-ings.com/

>> Yes, Snoo (and our brand colors and typography) is getting a makeover to help better reflect how our growing user base uses Reddit. These changes will help redditors worldwide continue engaging in conversations with each other.

And yet they're not addressing how non-redditors engage with content on their site. Any day you want to stop nagging about the app or just show me all the dang comments would be great. In the meantime, there's always teddit.

Snoo looks like he has a beard now:

https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/_1440xAUTO_crop...

Looks like snoo is working through the night but hasn't stopped hitting the whisky bottle prepping for that IPO.

They've lost track of why the old logo resonated.

I'm not sure management ever understood what resonated about any part of reddit.

I'm surprised to see a new brand font in nearly-2024 that doesn't have variable axes.*

* https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introduc...

The font is almost 4 years old at this point.

According to the blog post it's new today:

https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-m...

"We’re introducing new bespoke typefaces, Reddit Display, and Reddit Sans."

First commit was on April 7, 2020 https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/commit/08de53e01be8e8c2...

Was that public or announced or the final typeface though?

Why would Reddit say they're announcing this now, otherwise?

Reddit has been using these fonts internally for a few years in their marketing. They were not available to the public. They have been made available this week, hence the announcement. (The Github repo was made public a few weeks ago in preparation for adding them to the Google Fonts service.)

There is some work to do still[1], but a variable version will probably be available once the fonts are released on the Google Fonts service.

[1]: https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/6812

I don't really understand why every brand nowadays wants to have a custom font

Hipster design teams. Typography lets them be "artists", returning to bohemian roots. In reality, they're just designing apps around dark patterns or whatever the product management team thinks is righteous. Companies can't say no, they're in demand, so its really a "20% project".

Is typography not an art? So how then are they not artists?

It is an art. But not every company or brand needs it's own font. I see this as companies letting designers flex and work on a passion project vs work that moves the needle in anyway.

I'm curious about it too, I'd love to read something by someone with more specific insight than I have.

I know that people love to make fonts: it's a really common hobby activity and people make incredible fonts all the time just for the hell of it. I don't really know how that translates so commonly into the institutional will to do it that every company seems to have. I can kinda guess but it's just conjecture.

It's cheaper. Many fonts require ongoing licensing fees based on views or some other metric. Creating your own font means you own it — no more fees.

And this sucks because Calibri is an awesome font. ;)

Licensing costs. It’s cheaper to design your own typeface than to license others when a platform reaches a large scale.

I didn't either, until I tried typing a capital F, followed by a period, followed by a (regular, non-curly) quotation mark, on Twitter, and saw how it condensed it down far too much into an ugly mess—"oh, designers just have too much time on their hands."

Part of it has to do with licensing costs but also "brand-able" ownership.

Say if you use Arial or Helvetica for your logo, then it's a generic typeface easily reproduced by whoever else that has them installed on their computer. So often, many brands for their logo take a generic font and customize it to make it their own. However, when you customize a font for a logo the font file itself is not customized, just the vector version of it for the character of the brand name. So if you want to extend the usage of the font style to say headline text or advertising text, then you need a whole custom built font. Custom fonts cost money, but picking a pre-existing "designed" typeface from other type foundries cost a lot more than getting a custom font. So two birds with one stone, you get a unique font for your brand and don't pay additional licensing since you own it.

More like Sans Reddit, har har am I right?

Discompliments to /u/spez.

s/\/u\/spez\./\/user\/spez ./

s%/u/spez.%/user/spez .%

This is a really clean font. Nice work!

It is a handsome typeface.

It's terrible.

L != I

any explanation of why they embarked on a custom font? it's not such a simple task and most people wouldn't really appreciate the difference if they used arial for everything

Someone wanted to make work for themself.

Or justify themself being present at their "job". :)

To me, it looks like creating a font isn't terribly difficult based on https://kokorobot.ca/site/making_a_font.html.

That said, I'm a no-talent hack and I'm sure any font I created would look like I ate and subsequently vomited off-brand crayons onto the screen.

there are degrees to it, a personal handwriting font is easier because you can manually adjust it as needed... you don't really need to worry about the endless number of edge cases produced by other languages and user-input text

In my lay opinion, this font needs a 500 Medium weight.

Also needs more spacing between the glyphs as the weight increases.

.woff2 file sizes of >50kb each doesn't rock me off my chair though.

The large size is due to the number of glyphs and alternate styles. If you want a smaller footprint, I'd suggest subsetting the font as needed.

There are also 6 ready-made subsets[1], each about 15kb, matching these unicode ranges. These are set up to work with the @font-face unicode-range property[2].

  A: U+0020-00BF
  B: U+00C0-00FF
  C: U+0100-01FF
  D: U+0200-0FFF
  E: U+1000-1FFF
  F: U+2000-FFFF

[1]: https://github.com/reddit/redditsans/tree/main/fonts/Reddit%...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/...

Ooh nice! Didn't think about checking that. 15kb or maybe 30kb sounds indeed very good.

What font filetype should I be using on Windows? TTF? WOFF? WOFF2? OTF?

WOFF is just for the web.

For desktop, if hinting is desired and if it is present within the font, then TTF. If no hinting, then OTF.

Those are such beautiful glyphs.

I've been sans Reddit for a couple of years now and it's been very low stress.

HN is just a glorified subreddit run under a different domain name lol

I fear that with popularity HN will become the horrible place that reddit is today....

It seems to be the life cycle of digital communities. There's a certain threshold of critical-mass popularity where quality of content almost seems to become inversely proportional to quantity of people in the community. That threshold is a moving target, but it certainly seems to manifest around the same time as people start throwing around the letters IPO; or at least, when the community is big enough for some MBA to come in and try and squeeze them for profit.

I admit I'm unclear on the exact nature of HN and YC, but with YC being a VC, and my assumption that HN is a property of YC, I think two big things HN has going for it is that it's probably not going to IPO as a result of that situation and dang does a fantastic job moderating (there's something to be said for a well moderated community, most don't appreciate that).

Never know when company will decide it's time for a pivot and shake things up though.

HN seems immune to VC pressures specifically because it's owned by a VC.

Single core process, single server, single moderator. No react, no chasing growth. It's actually right-sized or even undersized because it's intentionally a loss leader.

It's owned by a capital management company and it will eventually be given the capital treatment and sold to someone else, probably with very different motives.

Until someone at YC says: Hmmm we have a lot of traffic on HN, we should monetize it...

I see Reddit has entered its “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” phase.

It's a sinking shit show.

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