As much as I appreciate the tiny serif for lowercase L and numeral 1 to differentiate l I and 1, I am not the biggest fan of the capital I glyph without the horizontal serifs. It's my biggest design gripe with most sans-serif fonts as it makes it FRUSTRATINGLY difficult to differentiate when looking at words by themselves.
Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled reading them -- once in front of a class :)
This is why my favorite sans-serif typeface has been (and will always be) IBM Plex Sans [1]. It's an open font [2]. I have all my laptops and desktops set to using the IBM Plex typefaces, including browser overrides. If only there were a way to do it system-wide on my Android phone...
Marissa Mayer on why Google chose sans-serif fonts for search results:
When I had to make a decision about should the Google results pages be serif or sans-serif, I didn't have enough users to do the split A/B testing and mathematically figure that out, so I ended up reading a lot of research and ultimately finding out that serif fonts are more readable, and sans-serif fonts are more legible.
The serifs create a horizontal rule that guides the eye, so serif fonts are much better when you’re reading long pieces of text. Sans-serif fonts are more legible which means that... when the serifs are removed your eye can spot read a character much better and much more quickly, and as a result it is much better for spot reading. In an activity like search it turns out you want to facilitate spot reading to a much greater degree than reading long prose.
IBM Plex is very good. Recently, I have been enjoying https://rsms.me/inter/ for interfaces a bit more (with ss02 for body and ss02+tnum for tables activated).
Inter is the only libre typeface that has good coverage, and produces readable small text on terrible 80 DPI displays. I've tested probably hundreds of them.
I guess I can try to argue that it if it weren't as generally useful as Helvetica it wouldn't have been made the default in Figma and it wouldn't be, well, so generally used.
Hah, this one can go on Wikipedia as an example for "chicken or the egg"! IMO, there's probably a number of other fonts that could've been chosen rather than Inter as default Figma font, and if they had been, they'd now be more ubiquitous than Inter. Of course, we'll never know. Unless someone here is looking to do a research study into popularity of fonts over time compared to popularity of Figma and seeing how strong the correlation is - maybe a weekend project for someone into typography ;)
Ah, it initially appeared that the capital I and the lowercase L have identical-looking glyphs. But scrolling down, I see the ss02 and tnum features add noticeable glyphs. Looks like a nice typeface.
I really enjoyed reading through [1] as it gives a lot of insight into what goes into making a font. However I wonder what incentives does IBM have for putting this much work into making it public, accessible and widely used. Wouldn't the ubiquity of the font make it less strong for their brand identity?
That's why I love the Readex Pro font. It also has glyphs for Arabic and a lot more languages in the same file, so I can use one font file for everything.
I'd say “wasteful” diversity move == woke in this context, not sure if that's milder. Just another distraction thrown at us to keep us at each other's throats. (+ keeping better alignment with the carrot man's branding)
Psychoanalysing politicians aside, serif fonts used to be considered more legible, but that doesn't hold any more that much (e.g. much of research shows that people tend to underestimate familiarity when assessing legibility).
The other frontpage article on the same topic[1] makes a fairly good case that both Times and Calibri suck in this role (not least because they are default fonts and receive the social connotations of that) and notes in passing that the US Supreme Court uses Century Schoolbook, IMO a solid choice (helped also by their competent formatting) and perhaps a less artsy look than Garamond &co.
Looks nearly identical to Helvetica when I switch back and forth with inspector tool. Some letters are different and there’s some kerning changes but large parts look the same. at least to my untrained eye
I don’t think it’s that straightforward to answer that. They’re both body fonts. Public Sans is a bit wider (as it isn’t geometric) and roboto seems a bit thicker. Besides these bits which can be worked around, they’re functionally too similar. Maybe you’d prefer to use Public Sans because it’s less condensed which works well for readability of smaller fonts that would be in a body of text. But you can just adjust a number of things to get what you’re looking for here.
A more vague answer I can think of is that it’s preferential and doesn’t matter to most — with designers just being highly particular about preferences, in a way that isn’t really open to objective choice. One font may display slightly better but the other font pairs better with the title font. Or we’ll look for specific issues that I don’t really see in either fonts.
I'd say Public Sans is definitely a bit more readable for me (some vision impairment). Was kind of hard to tell why I liked it so much first looking at it today.. I saw a comparison of it with a few other Serif fonts and it's definitely the one I like the most visually myself. Will probably switch to using it moving forward over Roboto Sans, which has been my go to for nearly a decade.
Didn't they throw a fit over Calibri being "woke" or something recently? I hope this department got a clearance from the whitehouse on how woke it feels. Apparently, the previous admin worded it using terms like "inclusive" (of the visually impaired, adhd,etc..) and that was somehow "woke". I wonder if this font is a direct consequence of that.
No, looks like it was started late in Obama's second term. As for the current guys, they would probably use Instrument Serif for body text if they could.
Went down a short rabbit hole from this comment and they actually are using a condensed serif font like that on www.whitehouse.gov titles at the moment.
That's just the State Department. The federal government is a huge amalgamation of agencies, each with its own set of goals, responsibilities, and quirks. Even down at the local level, I've had a hard time getting the county and the city to agree on who owns the storm drain where the neighborhood connects to the highway.
Another generic limited font that isn't solving anything.
No Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, not even Greek letters (poor frats and physicists). I understand it's a product of the US government, but don't they have international relations requiring using characters other than Latin? It's not even a recent font, so you'd think inclusivity was important. So much for the cultural pluralism.
And a site without a character table, which means I had to download the font to check if it's of any use.
They didn't develop a new font, they improved an existing font that's packaged inside a larger design library used for building government websites. Creating a standard that states, cities, municipalities, townships, etc can utilize for digital services improves access for all.
$1M to the US Government is like dropping pennies, less than that actually. By the READMEs, this font is actually a modification to another font and more sleuthing revealed that the author actually worked on this in his spare time.
There are a lot of very strong opinions on relatively minor variances. I really like this font, but apparently it isn't nearly as complete as some alternatives.
I've tended towards fonts that I just find readable at the relatively small sizes most sites tend to use. I like Roboto a lot, I like this slightly more... I'm not as big on the Libre Franklin it's also being compared to. It's really personal and some people care more or less than others depending on their needs, and even visibility concerns.
Is that lota or Iota? Is that iodestone or lodestone? Both real examples where I fumbled reading them -- once in front of a class :)
This is why my favorite sans-serif typeface has been (and will always be) IBM Plex Sans [1]. It's an open font [2]. I have all my laptops and desktops set to using the IBM Plex typefaces, including browser overrides. If only there were a way to do it system-wide on my Android phone...
[1]: https://www.ibm.com/plex/
[2]: https://github.com/IBM/plex/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
Preview: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text...
When I had to make a decision about should the Google results pages be serif or sans-serif, I didn't have enough users to do the split A/B testing and mathematically figure that out, so I ended up reading a lot of research and ultimately finding out that serif fonts are more readable, and sans-serif fonts are more legible.
The serifs create a horizontal rule that guides the eye, so serif fonts are much better when you’re reading long pieces of text. Sans-serif fonts are more legible which means that... when the serifs are removed your eye can spot read a character much better and much more quickly, and as a result it is much better for spot reading. In an activity like search it turns out you want to facilitate spot reading to a much greater degree than reading long prose.
Here's the 2006 talk: https://stvp.stanford.edu/podcasts/nine-lessons-learned-abou...
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Next
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter?preview.text=lllll%2...
I never understood why a font designer would ever choose to do that. There should be an ironclad rule that different letters must look different.
It's not used because it's the default font in Figma.
It's the fact that it's the best modern alternative to Helvetica, making it universally useful and therefore the default in Figma.
Incidentally, I'll forever mourn that the designers didn't choose to go with a glyph for "1" that is closer to the one in Helvetica.
I guess I can try to argue that it if it weren't as generally useful as Helvetica it wouldn't have been made the default in Figma and it wouldn't be, well, so generally used.
Alternate glyph set that increases visual difference between similar-looking characters.
And somehow they did seem to capture a distinctive IBM vibe when designing it, whilst still making it general enough to be used by everyone else
I have Iosevka for everything I can set a custom font to.
- O / 0 - I / l / 1 / 7 - 5 / S - 2 / Z - 8 / B - 6 / G - 9 / q / g
?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/trump-times-...
The quote is milder and the "woke" bit was added by others, but the context is essentially correct.
In an interview, the font's creator took it as a compliment and was a good sport about it.
Psychoanalysing politicians aside, serif fonts used to be considered more legible, but that doesn't hold any more that much (e.g. much of research shows that people tend to underestimate familiarity when assessing legibility).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432862
Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19607371 - April 2019 (237 comments)
Anyway, the "c" and "e" are closing in too much.
A more vague answer I can think of is that it’s preferential and doesn’t matter to most — with designers just being highly particular about preferences, in a way that isn’t really open to objective choice. One font may display slightly better but the other font pairs better with the title font. Or we’ll look for specific issues that I don’t really see in either fonts.
related: USWDS React Component Library https://github.com/trussworks/react-uswds
For some reason I always thought that Plus Jakarta Sans was forked from on Public Sans.
<https://tokotype.github.io/plusjakarta-sans/>
Which for some other reason always makes me think of the book The Jakarta Method:
<https://www.librarything.com/work/24301785/t/The-Jakarta-Met...>
Color me... unperplexed
We can, at least, thank our stars that Rubio doesn't presume to lord over the entire government as his master presumes to lord over everything else.
No Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, not even Greek letters (poor frats and physicists). I understand it's a product of the US government, but don't they have international relations requiring using characters other than Latin? It's not even a recent font, so you'd think inclusivity was important. So much for the cultural pluralism.
And a site without a character table, which means I had to download the font to check if it's of any use.
Not a great job.
I've tended towards fonts that I just find readable at the relatively small sizes most sites tend to use. I like Roboto a lot, I like this slightly more... I'm not as big on the Libre Franklin it's also being compared to. It's really personal and some people care more or less than others depending on their needs, and even visibility concerns.