Swear whenever your company decides to invent its own font its like a version of "The Headquarters Curse". You had nothing else better to spend your teams time on so might as well make a new font that 10% of your customers will notice if you are lucky.
They could have just picked any other font and used it. It's a video streaming website, how much text content is there vs video content?
Headquarter Curse: A theory suggesting that companies often experience setbacks or decline after constructing a lavish new headquarters.
Not sure this counts for Nebula. Font licenses (even very liberal ones) are a massive pain and expense for content creators who publish to multiple platforms in a variety of different mediums.
Collectively their creator/owners will be paying thousands of dollars/month for their fonts. Something you’ve correctly assessed that a very low number of their viewers will notice or care about.
Nebula can make one upfront payment (likely less than a single months font foundry payments for their owners), and give the creators absolute certainty that the created font is free forever, no matter the viewing platform or medium.
Seems like a decent place to allocate some idle cash.
Plenty of fonts with the same SIL open font license around already, especially if what you're after is a nice but generic modern sans serif font which 99% of users can't distinguish between.
Can't think of any reason why Nebula creators would go for this one other than to blend in with the platform's corporate house style for the 1% of users pedantic enough to notice and... well they could have picked an existing SIL open font for that if it had been about simply minimising creators' costs
I'd understand it way more if they were a big corporate creating something very distinctive and very closed source for their marketing material...
Judging from the kind of content creators nebula hosts I'd imagine they do in fact have the kind of nerdy audience that notices miniature font differences.
As an example, Tantacrul made a video about developing a sheet music font for Musescore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng)
In some ways I feel that caring a lot about fonts is on the opposite side of the spectrum to whatever it is making a population feel their lives have more meaning during wartime or crisis.
As a visual designer, sure, it is you job. As a computer user whose ultimate goal of using a computer is something else... I am kind of an old fart, but I often find that the best content is often found in conjunction with "font-family: sans-serif".
from https://nebula.tv/nebulasans:
> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.
This is even more baffling because Source Sans is open under SIL which permits free commercial use without restriction.
So if the goal was to save money, wouldn't the smart move be to use Source Sans for $0, instead of paying the designer of Source Sans to make some very minor tweaks to end up with another SIL font?
You are misunderstanding. The Nebula people were previously using the Whitney typeface. The organization that produced/sells Whitney changed ownership and the licensing became prohibitively expensive overnight.
They wanted something that could be a drop-in replacement for Whitney with the same letter sizes and spacing, so that they could put it into all of their products without needing any other redesign.
They couldn't find anything like that available off the shelf, and fonts they found that were close to Whitney in appearance were still also somewhat expensive, so their alternative was to take Source Sans, which has a free license, and make some quite significant but semi-automated modifications to it.
Making changes to just the typeface was presumably cheaper than making changes to all of their other designs.
Perhaps I'm your typical HNer like the GP comment and the topmost comment, but I don't see an issue with changing the style of the font entirely. Sure, it may be jarring to customers, but it's a short term pain for almost zero cost.
There's no inherent issue with it. It just requires doing a bunch of additional design work, which is not free.
oh no, an indie company is having fun instead of increasing the shareholder’s value!
you should have seen the reaction when Are.na collaborated with Dinamo on a new version of Arial (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012995) - like, are we not allowed to make art for arts' sake?
Hacker News gets mad if you deviate a little from the usual profit maximizing routine to do something a little humanistic. And then they keep upvoting articles on how corpo streamlining sucks all life out and how the modern society lost its humanistic spirit. You can't win. May very well just play you own game and enjoy it.
> Hacker News gets mad... And then they...
Goomba fallacy strikes again! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
Or passing the income to it's creators
So, funnily enough in my own career I've experienced The Headquarters event several times, and each time, after the lavish new headquarters is built, I think to myself, "this is it, we've peaked!" and each time it was an inflection point followed by even more growth and success.
I think I'm at 5 now.
Also three of those companies designed their own font too, though none of them still use it.
I think it's important to point out how much easier it is to create a new typeface based on an existing one and using the metrics of another one, than to create one from scratch.
For example, I've built metrics-compatible versions of Aptos and Verdana in the last few days based on other open-source fonts that matched the shapes closely.
For Verdana I just told an LLM to add bars to DejaVu Sans and extend some shapes. For Aptos I had to get a bit more creative, designing a new double-storey g, but it was otherwise fine.
Idk, how much could it cost to design a new font like this? Probably like tens of thousands of dollars?
This doesn’t seem like an extravagant expense to me. And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
For me personally, I feel like a lot of tech companies are bloated and a lot of people are justifying their salary by doing unnecessary projects.
In many cases, it's all internal and no skin off noses such as this font project. In other cases, it means the UI changes every 4 to 6 months or even worse, the software becomes so bloated with "features" it becomes unusable so a clean replacement comes on the scene then the cycle repeats.
Sometimes, I feel, it would be better for companies to clap their hands and go "We did it, we solved the problem" then just stop. Keep the infrastructure running, do bug fixes, listen to customers on new features or changes but otherwise not do product churn for the sake of justifying salaries.
To expand on my view in an abstract way, when constructing a building construction workers, architects, project managers, and the whole cadre are hired then the building is built then all those people move onto new projects. Continual development of software is like if construction never stopped so that the construction crew still had jobs. A construction site should strive to transition from architects, cranes, and concrete trucks to maintenance staff, mop buckets, and screw drivers.
> And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
Nebula Sans is a derivative of Adobe's Source Sans which is available to use for free for any purpose include commercial under the SIL Open Font License (the same license Nebula Sans has to use as a derivative of Source Sans).
So they could have just used Source Sans for free and virtually nobody but the most dedicated font nerds would have known the difference between that font and Nebula's tweak of it if not for the PR announcement.
All that said, I don't care what Nebula spends their money or time on, so I'm not saying they shouldn't have had this font made... but doing it wasn't a money-saving move.
I understand your point, but it does send a message that the company values design and art. It can be a great signal to attract talent. I know I would be!
10% seems incredibly generous. I'd be shocked if it's 1%.
They could have, but they didn’t. Another way to look at this is they could design their own font, and they did.
Companies are allowed to make fun things.
It also seems like they are trying to put this out as a creative endeavor that gives access to a really nice set of fonts without a fee associated (they link directly to Hoefler saying this is an open license replacement)
Feel like these things happen all the time in software as creative projects? Could be a tool for attracting design talent / interest?
shrug. It’s a nice typeface, cool project.
Oh my gosh! I have always felt and talked about The Headquarters Curse but never had a 'word' for it. Today I am one of the 10,000 [0].
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/
You should read Parkinson's research, or his book "Parkinson’s Law And Other Studies In Administration".
A lot of font foundries are switching from one-time payments to pay-per-use licensing schemes, to try and get huge payouts from e.g. companies which serve web pages trillions of times, and those companies are mostly responding by just commissioning their own fonts instead.