Making Google Sans Flex | Hacker News Reader

Making Google Sans Flex

design.google

116 pointsmeetpateltech92 comments

Since even after 2 hours nobody is discussing the actual font, let me tell you what comes to my mind when I read anything about Google and design:

They got phone design right.

I just can't get my head around it that even Apple, which is supposed to be THE design company, is making phones that can't lay on a table without wobbling like a barstool on a crooked floor. It just feels so broken to me. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.

Google phones tackled it with an elegant solution. Thanks for that. I wouldn't know what phone to use if Pixels didn't exist.

What bugs me most is that Apple DID do this (I still hold that iPhone SE 1 is the goat) and then decided to drop it because it wasn't as profitable.

Too bad Pixel support for factory-broken screens sucks so my "well designed" Pixel has green vertical line in the middle of the screen. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.

Original iPhone got design right.

I don't think there's a single modern smartphone that I like. My latest favourite smartphone was iPhone 4S. No camera bump. Perfect size, fits well in my hand, operable with one thumb. Perfect display size, enough to present all information I need. Perfectly usable without ugly case.

> Perfectly usable without ugly case.

Why would you buy an ugly case and not a clean and well designed, functional one ?

If you liked the original iPhone design, getting a rounded and hand fitting case would be the go too IMHO (on the size difference, there's no way out at this point)

My previous phone was the iphone 8. It’s trully a world of difference in usability compared to the iPhone 13 I’m using now. I have big hands, so I can ise the latter one-handed, but a lot of people I’ve seen don’t.

Why not the excellent iPhone 13 Mini?

My only beef with that one was the slippery soap-bar edges if used without a case. Otherwise, yep, perfect size, disappears in pocket.

My favorite phone of all time (based on hand feel and appearance) was the OnePlus One. It had its software problems, but every phone I've held since then has been a disappointment in the hand.

I've just got a new Samsung and it's wobbling too. I hate this. Why can't they at least put the cameras in the middle? Or maybe horizontally centred? Or they could just put another bumper on the other side to make it symmetrical. I'm looking for a cover to balance this out, but no luck so far.

iPhone 17 pro max is balanced with their standard case.

Apple probably has swathes of real-world usability data showing that virtually no-one uses their phone for prolonged periods of time while it's laying down on a hard flat surface.

You may be right about the aesthetics (and Lord Jobs may well have agreed with you) but they may have made the tradeoff consciously.

One can say "they probably had data to support it" about virtually any decision. It is not really a defense from critique. It may have been deliberate, but it still feels wrong and bad.

I think the point is it feels wrong and bad to benign number of people.

Hot take: a wobbly phone is much easier to pick up from the table.

I've come to realize that barely anyone I know uses swipe typing anymore, and that this is why using it laying flat is viable in the first place

The irony is that you're still not discussing the font

That's his point. Since nobody else is, he's not going to either.

I'd rather have a wobbly phone (how often do you push on your screen when it is flat on the table?) and a proper OS than a proper phone and a wobbly OS.

Gesture navigation on Android was introduced half a decade ago and it is still broken. In most apps my edge swipe to pull out a drawer or a swipe on the right side to 'forward' are still detected as back button swipes. Editing details at the edge of a photo often gets detected as a back button swipe. Ridiculous.

The wobbling is the worst part of the hardware on my iPhone mini, annoys me probably more than fifty times per week.

Because I often unlock it when it is on the desk I also miss Touch ID a lot, because with Face ID I also have to lean forward every time for it to recognise me.

1°) Gesture navigation is entirely optional.

2°) Android followed UX/UI 101 about where to put frequently used buttons: where you can reach them with your thumb. Basic design, right ? Apple iOS: the close/back button is usually on the top left corner, unreachable by right-handed users that only constitutes 90% of people, number about the same in all countries and cultures. That's only one example, but that bag where it comes from is deep.

You should take a few steps back before displaying publicly polarizing opinions and maybe nuance your words a bit.

1) that’s like saying good UX is entirely optional - sure it is but users will still complain

2) disregarding another blatant discrimination of left-handed users: I switch a couple times per week between android and iOS devices for various reasons and the android UX is so janky and unintuitive it hurts - it might just be my particular device and it’s much better in other cases.

This might be extremely polarising but I agree with GP.

> 1°) Gesture navigation is entirely optional.

It is the default on all modern Android flavors and the overwhelming majority (>90%) of users sticks with defaults. It is likely Google is going to deprecate the navigation bar within a couple of Android versions.

> Apple iOS: the close/back button is usually on the top left corner, unreachable

You clearly never used iOS, because you just backswipe. You rarely if ever touch back buttons.

Not that I disagree although you're fighting the wrong fight. The big problem is controls being on the top instead of the bottom. Neither Apple nor Google has attempted to fix this, only Samsung partially has with OneUI. And they can't force developers to adhere to "content top, controls bottom". Ironically enough Apple had this fixed until iOS.. 12? From 7-12, the control center was at the bottom. All they had to was move the notification centre there and figure out a way to make it compatible with a gesture bar.

> right-handed users that only constitutes 90% of people

People tend to one-hand their phone with their non-dominant hand to keep their dominant hand usable.

> You should take a few steps back before displaying publicly polarizing opinions and maybe nuance your words a bit.

I use and develop for both platforms. You just sound like an angry, unknowledgeable fanboy.

Perhaps take heed to your own advice :+)

Edit: if you want an example of something that Android does way better: notification management via notification categories. I get to disable stupid promotional or "typing.." notification categories from an app, whilst maintaining functional ones. iOS should take a page from Android there.

Some of these companies are now designing the phone on the assumption you're going to case it. No other reason to make a Pixel camera bump w/ scratch-vulnerable screen stick out so far.

If a phone needs a case, then phones should be sold with a case included. I hate cases and have never put one on my phone--and have never had a phone break or crack.

If that is the case, then either the phone should come with a case or it should not be marketed as a complete product.

How about making the phone more durable by adding 1 mm to its thickness, so that a 50 gram, 4 mm thick case won't need to be added.

I used my case not so much to protect my device, although it definitely does, but so I can hold onto the damn thing.

Without a case it's like holding the last gasps of a bar of almost flat soap. Also keeps it from sliding off surfaces.

> I just can't get my head around it that even Apple, which is supposed to be THE design company, is making phones that can't lay on a table without wobbling like a barstool on a crooked floor. It just feels so broken to me. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.

Of all the controversial design choices, I think Apple got this one right.

I do not care if my phone wobbles when flat on the desk. I don’t use my phone like that. It’s in my hand if I’m using it.

I use my phone camera sparingly, but when I pull it out I want it to work very well. And it does. If it takes a little bump out to fit better optics then I don’t care in the slightest.

> Google phones tackled it with an elegant solution. Thanks for that. I wouldn't know what phone to use if Pixels didn't exist.

Making your entire phone choice revolve around the shape of the camera island is the oddest top priority I’ve heard yet, but I’m glad you found one that works for you.

Just so you know, HN in general does not appreciate Reddit rudeness. Your comment would have been fine if not for that last sentence.

Wasn't meant to be rude. More confused, because it's really a unique criteria to pick a phone by.

I think HN mostly doesn't appreciate any defense of Apple or other large companies. I really should stay away from any threads that turn into collections of complaints about big companies because the audience they draw is only interested in negative comments about the companies.

Cool work on a font, but this page is proof that google is turning the web into some kind of JSON for their app, Chrome.

Extremely sluggish on non-Chrome. Starts with a black blank empty page. Fans spinning. Takes way too long to load for just some text and some videos. Clicking a link does some SPA magic that takes me to another black blank page, and takes ages to load. Clicking back doesn't work anymore. I need to reload the entire page, again blank and waiting. Once done loading, scrolling is extremely sluggish.

Yes, there are probably some interactive widgets in there, but all that and much more has been done without bogging down the browser like you're running a 3D game on WebGL.

Oh, and of course reader mode doesn't work.

Just use Chrome on a MacBook Pro M4 like everyone else

This flashed back so many of these comments, I unconsciously reached for the downvote button. Well done sir.

Use it on an Air and there aren't even fans to be spun up

No thanks, I'm good.

It's not up to me to use Google's browser. It's up to them to make webpages that work for all.

Huh. Firefox on a mid-range android phone had no issues.

Works much better than desktop, but clicking back doesn't restore the scroll correctly, e.g. the link I clicked was hidden behind the header on return, disorienting.

I had no issues using Firefox on a 2021 M1 Pro or my Framework 13. Reader mode does not work, however.

Like the other commenter, my mind also fixated on the mouse cursor. Great post on the fonts, but I spent most of my time seeing how the strange cursor behaved. I don't like it much, especially because there's some inconsistency once you're down hovering over the related posts.

However, there was one spot where I had to give it to them: when I hovered over the content about Google Sans Code, it expanded horizontally. For a second, I wondered what was going on, then it clicked that the content must be horizontally scrollable, which it was!

Of course, that could be shown with a much more obvious horizontal scroll bar...

It should not be possible for a webpage to change my mouse cursor.

Is there a monospaced version of this font?

Pretty much every font I try has one or two things that bug me. I’ve spent the last ten years making my own, first in FontForge, now in Glyphs.app, but it’s incredibly time-consuming. I’ll work on it for a while, then give up for months, delete everything, switch to a different font, use it for a few days, start hating it… and end up back at making my own font again. This cycle repeats pretty much every year.

You’ll probably want to recommend your favourite font, but trust me, I’ve tried all the well-known ones, and they all have their quirks.

Edit: I’m going to try Guguru (“Google” pronounced with a Japanese accent) Sans Code for a few days → https://github.com/yuru7/guguru-sans-code , created by https://x.com/tawara_san

From TFA:

> Google Sans Mono was created in 2020 to support contexts that needed fixed-width characters for editorial design, at medium and large text sizes. Despite this, it soon got its first big product integration, replacing Roboto Mono in Google Chat. The only problem? Developers hated it.

[...]

> Recognizing this critical need, a dedicated effort was launched to craft Google Sans Code, a monospaced typeface specifically designed to make code more readable. This involved thorough research into the 20 most common programming languages and how developers interact with code, aiming to make the new coding typeface more visually appealing while reducing the ambiguity of similar-looking letterforms. Based on these insights, Google tasked the Universal Thirst foundry to meticulously focus on specific letters, numbers, and operators to meet these requirements. The result is an eminently readable and surprisingly playful typeface.

> Google Sans Code launched as an open-source font in 2025, and is the typeface used to display code in Gemini.

What is that abomination of a curly brace. It looks like a squiggle that someone had to jot down in a rush.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Google+Sans+Code

Hmm, my first reaction was the same as yours. But I have quite bad eyesight and looking at the "regular 400 at 16px" example on the page reminded me that I definitely sometimes find myself squinting trying to work out whether a character is a parenthesis or a brace (Droid Sans Mono). So I suppose it'd probably be quite helpful to have a brace that's very visually distinct from parenthesis even if it's not particularly pretty on its own.

Squishing it down to <12px I can see that problem, even when compared to other good coding fonts like Jetbrains Mono or a font designed for readability like Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono / Next.

Definitely was too quick with my judgement. Still, it just looks really out of place at bigger font sizes and it makes me wonder if there isn't a more elegant solution out there.

Oh, it can't be that ba.... OMG KILL IT WITH FIRE! WE HATES IT!

--my actual reaction

Mine: It's not that ba... oops, I have custom fonts disabled...

...yikes...

...goes back to disabling custom fonts in browser.

Curly braces can be really hard to distinguish from parens because they appear in the same sort of place in e.g. JS, and IDEs and highlighters often render them in stupid low-contrast colours. I hate it aesethetically, but I get the usability need.

I’m curious. What are the critical features you’re looking for? I always like to hear the specifics of how people want to use fonts.

What about JuliaMono? That's my workhorse, I can't switch away.

i feel your pain my friend. i really do.

i don't have your skills of actually customizing or changing glyphs in fonts directly but i've customized and used scripts to fix glyph characters available as open type features. I've done this for fonts like:

- [Iosevka](https://kau.sh/blog/build-iosevka-font-mac-os/)

- [IBM Plex Mono](https://kau.sh/blog/freeze-alt-char-open-type-font/)

- [Jetbrains Mono](https://github.com/kaushikgopal/JetBrainsMono-KG) (yes, plenty of customization there)

- [Recursive](https://github.com/kaushikgopal/recursive-code-config)

it really is a sickness. a terrible sickness, if you care deeply about fonts. I know you don't care specifically about recommendations, but inevitably i've found myself gravitating to these fonts:

1. Berkeley Mono (paid)

2. SF Mono (walled)

3. Recursive (truly open and legible)

4. Commit Mono

I love the above fonts, but there's a few characters or quirks that drive me bananas on certain days, so inevitably find myself switching between them.

A bit OT: What's up with the mouse pointer on that page? Why on earth would a site that has "design" in it's domain name change my mouse pointer to a finger-sized circle blob on my 4K desktop screen?

it's part of the Material Design 3 branding, for some reason. The original thread for the launch of the design system [1] is full of people baffled by Google making a cursor that lags

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352

Look at all the rubes who can't understand that a lagging mouse cursor is an integral part of Google's Molasses-Forward Design Language Initiative.

I just checked Material Design 3, as I use a lot of it in projects, and it still uses Roboto font for everything, so they're not even dogfooding the Sans font there yet, but they'll make us suffer their cursor :)

Cursor feels terrible. Native cursor moves very fast. This cursor does not feel native and moves very slow and sluggish. Do they paint it with Canvas or something like that?

I recall that it is a Div that uses the css invert property, but this can be cpu intensive depending on how it is moved (transform uses gpu I think but position is cpu)

Yeah I wish there was a way to disable such a useless gimmick.

This may be an unpopular opinion but I like the effect where the cursor turns into the button hover state when you hover over them, like the pause icon button on the video.

> It’s one of the most-served fonts on the internet, clocking in at some 120 billion font requests a month.

Isn't this an incredible waste of bandwidth? Surely people only need the font once.

Browsers made a fundamental change a while back to not share caches between origins because caching it became a side-channel to detecting if someone had visited it before.

So now if two different websites embed the same remote font then visitors will have to download it separately for both sites.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning

Surely one of the most popular browsers in the world could ship with some commonly requested fonts and all you'd learn is that they were using chrome which the user-agent said anyways.

I never come to complain about websites, but clicking on this thing made my chrome freeze for a whole second on my MBP. What has Google become xD

Took me so long to realise that "Google Sans Flex" is the name of the font. I read the title as "creating Google without using Flex [whatever that is]"

Yes! I had a similar confusion. I thought perhaps it mean “how we made Google Sans impressive” or something like that. It’s not until halfway into the article that “Google Sans Flex” is mentioned specifically as a different font from “Google Sans”. “Google Sans” vs “Google Sans Text” is confusing as well…

Flex is the brand they use for their variable fonts. Roboto has Roboto Flex. Google Sans has Google Sans Flex.

> The majority of how people experience the Google brand is through typography

Ok, who wants to tell them?

Unless you experience Google through the assistant you experience through the typography.

You read search results that are rendered via typography.

Why do new fonts still make "l" and "I" indistinguishable?

Utility is no longer a core design principle in Silicon Valley these days.

It's hard to make them distinguishable for a sans serif font, I think it's acceptable to give up for a sans font

How is it hard to add curved base to l?

  > Product teams eagerly adopted Google Sans and Google Sans Text but soon highlighted a new issue: Billions of people around the globe use non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese, ... The effort was monumental. It meant meticulously crafting hundreds of thousands of new ... from the flowing curves of Arabic to the complex strokes of Japanese and the distinct ...

What I know about CJK font is that one does not simply make a CJK font: they're nearly always made by modifying something existing. Even Google's previous attempt at it was made by a joint multi-year project with Adobe and bunch of experts from various companies tasked to fix what are locally sticks out for each relevant regions without breaking overall theme to make a total of 4-5 language specific fonts with major bugfixes happening for few times over couple years.

That above quoted part reads to me like "oh and there's of course the fusion version of this micro nuclear because that's important", which makes little sense, so I searched around a bit just in case, and there doesn't seem to be non-Latin versions of Google Sans. The credit section does not mention obvious source of easily licensable CJK font other than "U+ Type", either.

My assumption would be that either they made an assumption that a font in CJK can't take that long relative to font in Latin, or they couldn't get one in favorable terms and the full version is proprietary. Or is it really coming later? That would be interesting if that's the case.

Other than changing my mouse cursor to a circle that just makes it unintuitive to use can someone explain the point of a circle in the right upper corner that expands automatically into two icons: search and a hamburger menu? The "saved" space is not used for anything anyway. Isn't it just a bad design that makes navigation harder for no reason?

Clickable elements seem to be underlined with the exception of one: the Google Design logo in the left upper corner. It seems inconsistent and confusing.

Are those new principles of designing things - making it more confusing and more difficult to find (and then click) for 0 gain?

EDIT: also scrolling all the way down is difficult because random stuff block the page, gets loaded. There is "Privacy & Terms" link at the bottom that is impossible to reach because of it. The design is just terrible, wtf Google?

I wish I had the luxury of spending probably dozens of millions on a meaningless effort like this. Any similar font like this one would do the trick, without the need to have a fancy series of blog posts trying to convince users this font is awesome.

I find the whole “corporate blogging about fonts” subculture really funny

Go to a type conference someday...

They've served 113 trillion: https://fonts.google.com/analytics

They're entitled to take fonts seriously.

There is something about the page that makes me dizzy on mobile. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle animation but I get the feeling of things moving/deforming while I read.

It is present on desktop but it's much worse on mobile. I had the same experience

I have the same thing reading this page. It feels really similar to the overscroll stretch animation in Android (12?+) which makes me feel ill and unfortunately often doesn't respect animation settings.

>> Product lockups didn’t match the new Google logo >> The 2015 logo redesign was a smashing success.

Watch the distance between these two lines.

It changes to more compact - subtly- as we scroll it into view (am on mobile- chrome on android).

Feels like the page is trying to do too much fancy stuff. I cant take their blog seriously if this is their idea of good design and user experience.

Ugh, you’re right. It’s like a parallax for the titles. Not really a good impression.

To declare "open source", you have to provide a way for the public to get access to the source code. But there seems to be none at least for the time being.

I never saw the cursor changing size to fit the button you are hovering on, it's pretty cool, I don't know if it's better but it's cool.

iPadOS had it for about 5 years.

Looks cool. Feels horrible. I don't want my mouse cursor to morph into buttons or anything. I don't want it to be a lagging blob either.

having spent a lot of time on finding the right monospace fonts, one of the things i've noticed, that's particularly important in the context of coding is a visual symmetry.

some fonts individually have beautiful glyps or characters but when you preview them with blocks and blocks of code, there's a quirkiness that throws of that symmetry.

I'll give a few examples:

- Mono Lisa font https://www.monolisa.dev/ (truly gorgeous font)

- Recursive https://www.recursive.design/ (particularly note the casual axis)

I bring this up because Google Sans Code, is super quirky; preview a few characters individually and they look good; put it all together in real code, and it's just not as smooth visually.

It's a really pretty, humanist font, and those tend to be my favourite fonts. I was never the biggest fan of the grotesk-style Roboto/Inter/Univers, especially in the context of a user interface, which should feel a little bit friendlier imo.

I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive.

This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.

Where is this page's RSS feed?

Google broke up with RSS in 2013[1]. :D

To be fair, they re-implemented feeds for YouTube and added feed support in Google Workspace the other day[2]. So perhaps there's hope.

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

[2] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/12/introducing-...

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