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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You may be right about the aesthetics (and Lord Jobs may well have agreed with you) but they may have made the tradeoff consciously.
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.
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)
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
> 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.
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.
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...
Isn't this an incredible waste of bandwidth? Surely people only need the font once.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352
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.
Ok, who wants to tell them?
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-...