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meerita 46 seconds ago [-]
I went to the website and the letter-spacing is something they maybe forgot to add to everything. I just tried letter-spacing: -0.05rem; and everything looks more readeable and the font shines even better.
OskarS 1 hours ago [-]
It's a little beside the point of the post, but I just want to fly a flag for Nebula: I subscribed solely to get early versions of Jet Lag: The Game, but I'm finding myself watching it more and more! It has many of the channels I would go to YouTube for, but I've also discovered several really good ones that I had never heard of. And it has a similar feel to Kagi, in the sense of "freeing" yourself from the algorithm. It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month? What does this tell Google about me?". Same thing with all the big streaming services.
With Nebula, no such worry. The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform, it's just a bunch of high-quality videos and channels that I can watch with no fuss. It's remarkable how nice that feels in 2026. Really highly recommended.
bonoboTP 35 minutes ago [-]
> It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month?
You can remove videos from your watch history. Or you can open the link in a private/incognito window. Google may still be able to connect it but I don't think it will impact your recommendations that way.
OskarS 23 minutes ago [-]
Yes, of course you can, but this sense of always having to curate your watch history and hide from the algorithm is just not there for Nebula. I guess it's different from person to person, but it's remarkable how freeing it feels to me to use a service where that isn't a concern. I'm watching what I want to watch, not what the algorithm is manipulating me to click on.
Maybe it will enshittify like most everything else, but it hasn't so far, and for now I'm a very happy customer.
xd1936 36 minutes ago [-]
Seconded. My only complaint is the bad buffering on the TV versions of the Nebula app. It starts out so low quality and takes forever to snap to 1080p, with no option to override quality, on symmetrical 2.5GBe.
OskarS 20 minutes ago [-]
Obviously YMMV, but I haven't had any issues like that, the quality of the videos is the same I get in the YouTube app. They take a few seconds longer to start though.
Gualdrapo 1 hours ago [-]
The differences are really, really subtle, I'd bet most people (including me) would have a really hard time telling them apart.
I agree with that one person (I can't recall when or where I read this) who said modern typography is getting so frivolous about doing personalised typographic families for startups instead of extending the existing ones to cover more languages and scripts than latin.
But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")
bonoboTP 29 minutes ago [-]
Typography is just a nice geeky topic. Happy for the people who could make Nebula pay them for fussing around with a font. It's clearly bikeshedding and irrelevant though. If their previous font was too expensive, they should have switched to an existing free font. Their priority should be the streaming offerings. When the business isn't working, it's not the furniture that you have to replace.
I one subscribed to CuriosityStream and Nebula in a combo deal, but didn't end up watching it much. I find them to be overproduced edutainment that's often too plastic for my taste. A kind of Netflix but for IFL science redditor types. I rather prefer low production quality YouTube videos from oddball makers who just show something cool, explain something obscure with a simple slideshow etc.
mock-possum 1 hours ago [-]
“For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda
kissgyorgy 56 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure we are looking at the same font, this one looks way crispier and more readable than any other font I have ever seen before.
bearjaws 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
brokencode 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
runarberg 7 minutes ago [-]
They could have, but they didn’t. Another way to look at this is they could design their own font, and they did.
> 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.
kwanbix 1 hours ago [-]
Which they license for 30 per year?
EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.
Aurornis 33 minutes ago [-]
I like this font and the license it comes with:
> The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works.
Very nice. I’ve paid for fonts for personal use in the past but I was always nervous about accidentally putting a screenshot or other incidental capture somewhere that might get distributed and violate the license.
CharlesW 12 minutes ago [-]
I don't believe they had a choice, since it's a derivative of Adobe's OTF-licensed Source Sans.
hakfoo 33 minutes ago [-]
It's interesting to see their intent to make an explicit drop-in replacement.
I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".
You cannot be a fancy startup if you don't have your own font I guess.
elAhmo 28 minutes ago [-]
Oh man, I wish I had free time and money to spend designing and releasing a new font.
frantzmiccoli 36 minutes ago [-]
Really enjoyed the video! That kind of thing is a great way to build branding!
dmackerman 54 minutes ago [-]
Looks nice. I've personally been obsessed with Atkinson Hyperlegible. Not sure what it is about it but it's just so pleasing.
gralab 1 hours ago [-]
Waste of time and money on their part. There are more than enough typefaces in this world that look just like this one.
t098i3 1 hours ago [-]
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.
celsoazevedo 11 minutes ago [-]
Where did the savings come from? Maybe they were licensing a paid font? I doubt saved them more money than using a free font.
petesergeant 37 minutes ago [-]
I just bought a Nebula subscription, and hadn't heard of it before, so there's some value there
etchalon 21 minutes ago [-]
"Why bother doing something original when there's something generic that's good enough" is certainly one way to approach things.
fredley 1 hours ago [-]
> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic
Good God I am sick to the back teeth of the neutral aesthetic. If you're going to spend all that money, can we have some _opinionated_ typefaces please? Especially against the backdrop of AI making everything look and feel exactly the same everywhere, the last thing anybody needs is another neutral, characterless, soulless typeface.
kixiQu 27 minutes ago [-]
I definitely agree with your sentiment in general. However, I'll note that I find this sans serif to have a nicer feel than many I see these days (even among humanist ones) and it's cool that they've managed to achieve that while being acceptably inoffensive for mainstream use
Daiz 50 minutes ago [-]
Having your own font is nice and all, but I wish Nebula would spend at least as much time on their subtitle rendering as they've spent on this marketing site... The subtitle rendering on Nebula is worse than what Youtube offers, and Youtube isn't exactly some pinnacle of subtitle rendering either. I'd really expect better from a premium service.
varispeed 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.
dguest 42 minutes ago [-]
There are people who don't want a perfect font, they want a new one every few years.
The rest of us just don't want it to be distracting.
swiftcoder 29 minutes ago [-]
> I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.
"Perfect font" can only happen when we stop developing new display technologies, and print dies out completely. If "perfect" is not subjective in the first place, it is definitely context-dependent. Fonts designed to work on budget smartphone displays don't necessarily look good on 6K desktop displays, and so on...
crazygringo 29 minutes ago [-]
That's like reaching the state of having a perfect button-down shirt.
Styles change (like collar size, slim vs roomy), and what looks good on one torso doesn't look best on another. What fits well for one company/product/book doesn't fit well for another company/product/book.
mihaelm 1 hours ago [-]
We did that with Comic Sans MS
limaoscarjuliet 1 hours ago [-]
Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.
dkdbejwi383 1 hours ago [-]
And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.
swiftcoder 28 minutes ago [-]
I've been making the Basque burnt cheesecake every year lately, it really is a delight
I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font
reaperducer 18 minutes ago [-]
I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font
I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.
delta_p_delta_x 52 minutes ago [-]
I posted this comment[1] in the previous discussion. Reposting here, because I don't like slightly-derivative typefaces that are just FontForge tweaks of a typeface that was designed from the ground up, even less if they have given it an entirely new name.
All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans.
Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop.
At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs.
I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.
Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.
The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.
I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.
Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.
Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.
Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.
A handsome font and a worthwhile contribution. Satisfying. Nebula notches yet another mark.
1attice 1 hours ago [-]
..downvoted. OK. Perhaps I didn't say enough:
- I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts
- The use of Whitney as a target font is also interesting. I like this font a lot but a lot of nice fonts have annoying properties for web dev (looking at you Frutiger) esp around numbers. I have wasted life years fiddling with tabular number presentation.
There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)
etdznots 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
azatom 59 minutes ago [-]
tldr: yet another trash font: pipe, capital i, small l are the same line
even the alternative variant inconsistent if i want not readable but designer font: the fancy 'a' and 'g' are in the default set and the tailed 'l' in the variant
dbbk 1 hours ago [-]
Is it just me or does this look really... cheap?
fishgoesblub 46 minutes ago [-]
It's always interesting to see companies spend time, money, and make a big deal (websites even, apparently) solely for a Sans Serif font. One that, at least on my system, is blocked by uBlock Origin and gets converted into Noto Sans (which should be default, screw your fonts, respect my browser's font please!)
With Nebula, no such worry. The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform, it's just a bunch of high-quality videos and channels that I can watch with no fuss. It's remarkable how nice that feels in 2026. Really highly recommended.
You can remove videos from your watch history. Or you can open the link in a private/incognito window. Google may still be able to connect it but I don't think it will impact your recommendations that way.
Maybe it will enshittify like most everything else, but it hasn't so far, and for now I'm a very happy customer.
I agree with that one person (I can't recall when or where I read this) who said modern typography is getting so frivolous about doing personalised typographic families for startups instead of extending the existing ones to cover more languages and scripts than latin.
But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")
I one subscribed to CuriosityStream and Nebula in a combo deal, but didn't end up watching it much. I find them to be overproduced edutainment that's often too plastic for my taste. A kind of Netflix but for IFL science redditor types. I rather prefer low production quality YouTube videos from oddball makers who just show something cool, explain something obscure with a simple slideshow etc.
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.
This doesn’t seem like an extravagant expense to me. And it sounds like it saves money on commercial font licensing.
Companies are allowed to make fun things.
> 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.
EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.
> The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and/or sold with any software provided that any reserved names are not used by derivative works.
Very nice. I’ve paid for fonts for personal use in the past but I was always nervous about accidentally putting a screenshot or other incidental capture somewhere that might get distributed and violate the license.
I'm surprised there aren't really high-quality drop-ins for most of the classic "name brand" commercial fonts at this point, built solely out of the commercial motivation. "We could contract out someone to build it for less than we're paying a commercial foundry to license it for N years, and then forever every designer is using BrandCo Sans instead of Futura/Univers/etc so we get the free brand recognition".
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591225
Good God I am sick to the back teeth of the neutral aesthetic. If you're going to spend all that money, can we have some _opinionated_ typefaces please? Especially against the backdrop of AI making everything look and feel exactly the same everywhere, the last thing anybody needs is another neutral, characterless, soulless typeface.
The rest of us just don't want it to be distracting.
"Perfect font" can only happen when we stop developing new display technologies, and print dies out completely. If "perfect" is not subjective in the first place, it is definitely context-dependent. Fonts designed to work on budget smartphone displays don't necessarily look good on 6K desktop displays, and so on...
Styles change (like collar size, slim vs roomy), and what looks good on one torso doesn't look best on another. What fits well for one company/product/book doesn't fit well for another company/product/book.
- read? mostly coders
- sell? mostly marketing
- fraud? rn.com vs m.com mostly designers
I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.
All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans. Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop.
At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs.
I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.
Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.
The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.
I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.
Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.
Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.
Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591662
- I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts
- The use of Whitney as a target font is also interesting. I like this font a lot but a lot of nice fonts have annoying properties for web dev (looking at you Frutiger) esp around numbers. I have wasted life years fiddling with tabular number presentation.
There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)
even the alternative variant inconsistent if i want not readable but designer font: the fancy 'a' and 'g' are in the default set and the tailed 'l' in the variant