The problem is that ad-blocking makes youtube the best value proposition for users. You get almost all the content of nebula, plus tons more, for free, no ads.

Don't get me wrong, Nebula is great (although yt actually has a better profit share believe it or not), but the internet needs to look in the mirror before services like it can actually compete with yt.

Seconding this. I've been subscribed to Nebula for a couple years, as I watch a lot of video essayists on Youtube and like half of them are on Nebula. In addition to ad-free viewing, you also get:

* No in-video sponsor segments

* Exclusive videos (including some creators and series that upload primarily to Nebula)

* Early access to some videos

* Uncensored videos, as Nebula does not have the automatic content or copyright enforcement systems that Youtube has

* A decent TV app (at least on Roku), so I can watch ad-free on the TV without paying for Youtube premium

All for a much cheaper price then Youtube Premium ($60 annually vs $160, with frequent promo offers). If you already watch a lot of Youtube channels that are on Nebula, I'd highly recommend it.

> 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.

Unfortunately for me it went the other way. I was an early Nebula subscriber but in my experience the content got super stale and I found myself struggling to find anything interesting to watch after a few months. After a few years of using it maybe once a quarter, I pulled the plug. I hope it's temporary and I am an avid Kagi user so I am 100% willing to pay for add free content. I wish Nebula had a pay-per-view option so I could pay for the content I use.

For the past day or so I’ve been baffled why this font has lingered on HN’s front page. And I read this comment several times and I kept wondering what is he talking about, it’s just a font. A very good font that I actually think is nice and my friend who is a designer is quite taken by, but still it’s a font.

Today, I finally search for nebula streaming and found the actual site his comment is referring to so here it is: https://nebula.tv/

Side note: it’s a minor nit that HN seems to have a very frequent problem with threads getting hijacked with unrelated comment threads, often the top comment(s). I wish there was a way to split the comments off with a new title that clearly explained that this is not related to the original post.

I absolutely love the idea behind Nebula, but to this day there isn't a single creator there that I'm interested in actively following...

A big part of it is just my hobbies being different, but a no small part is that the videos are still the same YouTube videos that are first and foremost built to satisfy the algorithm. And since these are all people who are successful on YouTube, the concentration of such videos is higher than on actual YouTube.

This is interesting, I didn't know about Nebula. Anything to support less intrusive platforms and stop being followed for months by horrible content because you clicked on the wrong video.

Nebula is very much my cup of tea in theory but the android app is So Bad that I unsubbed. Watching a long video and need to stop? Better luck next time, we're not about to save your spot. Didn't remember the exact name of something? Good luck finding it again. Not at all interested in a certain creator? Too bad! You're going to see them whenever they produce.

I guess Nebula is better for video watching, but without recommendations and video comments, it feels dead. I did pay for it for a year and then gave up. Is the problem me?

I signed up for Nebula, it is a lot more for HD quality, which I though was sneeky.

In the end I never got in the habit of opening Nebula to watch the content.

I pay for Premium YouTube and have noticed when there's an in video ad you can skip through to the end of the ad, YouTube have set that up.

I tend to watch 2 minute of several videos on rotation, I guess I should just put the Apple TV out of reach and I can't keep channel twitching

> The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform

A simple fix for YouTube is bookmarking the subscriptions page and making that your entrypoint: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

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.

I bought a lifetime subscription originally for Legal Eagle videos (both for the Nebula-exclusive videos and the Nebula-exclusive extras at the end of the videos), but I've also enjoyed Not Just Bikes and Tom Scott's England series.

I would absolutely love to subscribe to Nebula but they don't have an Xbox app which is where I watch almost all my TV/Youtube/streaming. I hope they have the resources to do it at some point.

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.

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.

oh no, an indie company is having fun instead of increasing the shareholder’s value!

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.

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!

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.

10% seems incredibly generous. I'd be shocked if it's 1%.

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/

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.

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.

The differences are even subtler if you compare it to Source Sans (which it is derived from) rather than Whitney (which it is replacing). I posted this comparison last time Nebula Sans were on the HN front page: https://imgur.com/JPwgYkj

“For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda

para la plata baila el mono -- Wilfrido Vargas 1994

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.

The SIL Open Font License is pretty much the standard for freely releasing fonts. Poke around on Google Fonts or other places that have freely-licensed fonts and you'll find the vast majority use OFL.

Adobe's Source (the basis for this one), Google's Roboto and Google Sans, the very common Inter, Lato and Open Sans, coding/monospace fonts like Iosevka, JetBrains Mono... chances are that a free font you're aware of uses the OFL, particularly if it's even vaguely recent.

I don't believe they had a choice, since it's a derivative of Adobe's OTF-licensed Source Sans.

Erik Spiekermann is a genius. He made Fira Sans to be a total antithesis to Helvetica. Now, I like Helvetica, but I also love the pure character of Fira Sans and it’s my go-to sans serif.

Here’s a better link for Fira Sans: https://carrois.com/fira/

Also, if you have Fira Sans installed on your computer, you can use it in Slack with `/slackfont Fira Sans’

Which they license for 30 per year?

EDIT: Now I realize the 30 per year is for a video service.

Ah, so you are one of the many to blame for InDesign’s many, and I mean MANY, annoyances, weirdness, quirkiness, failures to follow other Adobe app standards and general fuck ups? Good to know.

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.

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

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

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

Same, and I'd like a browser extension to tell me automatically if the same or a better version of the video on YT is on Nebula.

Free fonts always do free advertising for paid fonts made by actual professionals

There's something so ... bland about this typeface. I get no feeling from it whatsoever. It's like the textual embodiment of the AI conversational style.

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

I think that was intentional so the font would fit into all the places they were previously using the paid font without reflowing all the content.

How did you do that? I noticed the spacing was very wide between leters,it bothered me.

Atkinson Hyperlegible, like Nebula Sans (or, if you will, Source Sans) is an open source font available under the OFL license.

There are many sans-serif fonts that distinguish the lower-l and upper-i. For some reason they aren't as popular as the ones that do not. Perhaps the popularity of Helvetica (and other neo-grotesque typefaces) caused this.

You can apply that argument to almost everything in capitalism. But in this case here: who gets hurt and maybe they enjoyed creating it.

I was wondering the same..and got no answer. I _could_ ask an LLM but I prefer no to. On the other hand..this is the kind of question that is really hard to google..even if one got 2016 google. The word "book" and "font" in one query will yield stupid results that are not what i asked for.

So I went the way of lowest resistance, and to paraphrase, the LLM said, and it might be entirely wrong that Book is something between Light and Medium, a text weight that is supposed to be better readable for longer texts. So Something around 350/400 weight. Some fonts just use "Regular"

With my new "knowledge" I went about and googled and found this: https://gist.github.com/lukaszgrolik/5849599

So Strangers whos name is just a hex number, the LLM seems to be right. And that is your answer.

Maybe if you spent less time being snarky on topics you clearly have no understanding of you’d get your wish.

The implication that this is an effort entirely devoid of value is so ridiculous it borders on stupidity.

it's inverted asterisk. https://jmgbb.com/i/i4kTG25WrF

For good reason. Typefaces often have fascinating beginnings and design processes.

A font that takes some characteristics from certain kinds of renaissance-era handwriting. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Humanist_sans-serif_t... .

Not an expert, but I believe humanist would be somewhat antithetical to brutalist. Where brutalism has hard edges/corners and are "cold" humanist designs have fewer right angles and are more warm/inviting.

Are there any good paid fonts that you can just buy and use without having to worry about what websites you put them on and how many people view those websites?

> The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux.

GTK4 doesn't even support subpixel rendering any more, and with OLED market share increasing I'd anticipate Windows moving away from it at some point too.

If you’re a startup but you don’t have a blog post with some wishy washy doodah showcasing your own personal font, its cute glyphs, its heritage in 1800’s Europe and some translucent overlays showing how it’s definitely different but not really compared to your initial bog standard font, are you really a startup?

What?

I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font

I'm holding out for a free-range, gluten-free paleo font.

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.

We did that with Comic Sans MS

Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.

I submit to you that I designed •the• perfect font while making one for my microgame recently: https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry

> 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...

I've just been collecting monospace fonts, and have a bit of elisp to cycle through the collection when I'm bored with the current one. (Sometimes that's enough to conclude that no, really, the original was fine and I go back to it :-)

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.

It'll be the same day we reach the state of having the perfect programming language

that reminds me of the time there was one particular combination of my laptop dpi, screen resolution, and windows 2000 font renderer that made lucida sans typewriter look perfect, but when I switched to linux the same font seemed less crisp and clean, and I ended up using bitstream vera instead. I still try lucida sans typewriter out every now and then but whatever sweet spot it hit on that machine never happened again.

That happened in 1957, but we can’t leave well enough alone.

define perfect!

- read? mostly coders

- sell? mostly marketing

- fraud? rn.com vs m.com mostly designers

https://tosche.net/fonts/comic-code

..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? :)

Great! Sounds like you might need some assistance, just let me know if you want to tackle that weekend project you’ve been thinking shoot, practice a new skill, or just chat, I’m right here and happy to help.

I don't have the same animosity against web fonts but yes I realized I could just do that on Firefox and I appreciate relying on the same font across web pages. I don't feel like I am missing out on much and aesthetically I like the idea of reusing what I already have instead of downloading a new font on every page

I’ll never understand why you lot pretend like graphic design doesn’t matter. Thats so childish and narrow minded it borders on pathetic. C’mon now. Let’s act like the grown ups we all (hopefully) are.