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Comment by gralab | Hacker News Reader

Waste of time and money on their part. There are more than enough typefaces in this world that look just like this one.

According to their website this saved them a lot of money, plus they also made a documentary about making the font which is content for Nebula.

Where did the savings come from? Maybe they were licensing a paid font? I doubt saved them more money than using a free font.

They were licensing Whitney SSm, they switched to a Source Sans derived typeface to save those costs but forked and adjusted it to more closely match Whitney SSm to minimize brand disruption.

In the documentary video, their CCO explained if they used a different existing font they would have had to rework a lot of their media for the different font metrics, while making their own allowed them to have a drop-in replacement.

Saved them money on licensing their existing font, so why didn't they just move to another cheaper or free font?

Because those fonts have different metrics, so they wouldn't have been drop-in replacements, they would have had to re-do all of their branded media.

Loose programming analogy: The free replacements had a slightly different "API" (metrics) that would have required adjusting hundreds or thousands of "call sites" (media using the font), so instead they made their own "API-compatible" (metrically compatible) replacement that dropped straight in.

This is all covered in the documentary short about the font.

I just bought a Nebula subscription, and hadn't heard of it before, so there's some value there

Then this PR stunt worked I suppose. I still see no need to create yet another derivative sans-serif typeface. Especially for an online streaming service of all things.

We're apes on a spinning rock... Time and money are both made up, Let the people enjoy their font lol

"Why bother doing something original when there's something generic that's good enough" is certainly one way to approach things.

No. You know that's not what I'm saying. There are many other very respectable typefaces available that they could have used. This one, while it may be custom made, *looks* generic. If I never saw this post, I would have zero clue they made it in-house. This is a PR stunt to get attention on sites like this.

There are so very, very many things you're missing here.

Explain.

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