The license was written by idiots. E.g.:<p>b. The User may not use the Licensed Font Software in any “open source” or other code that would create any obligation for Goldman Sachs to: (i) grant to any third party any intellectual property or other proprietary rights; (ii) disclose or make any source code or any part or derivative work thereof available to third parties under any circumstances; or (iii) otherwise subject Goldman Sachs to any obligations not expressly set forth in this License.<p>Ambiguous legal language grounded in a likely misunderstanding of what "open source" means. And of course, you have to flip through a dozen screens to make it to the download page to find the license.<p>This is a project to make a positive impression which fails to do that. So close -- we need more good open types -- and yet clueless.
Why anyone who isn't employed at Goldman Sachs would ever use this is beyond me, and yet they offer it up for public download. The license forbids creating or even modifying derivative works with it, or bundling/embedding it.<p>There are so many good, free typefaces out there. I really can't be bothered with yet another license-crippled vanity project from another huge corporation that had a marketing budget left to spend. IBM did the same thing with "Plex", which is arguably even worse quality-wise, but at least has an open license (SIL).
I'm interested in the Typeface itself.
- The diagonal/emphasis on "5" is a great improvement to differentiate it from "S". Roboto tried something similar, but execution is better here imo.<p>- Reducing the standard width deviation between letters will also be of great help for mobile, number driven usage - without going full monospace.<p>- The "u" simply being an inverted "n", the "m" using the same shoulders and stems as the "n are things that go against the premise of a fully legible font. I would revise this.<p>What do you think?
Ugh, all that clicking for the next page. Why not put it all on one page or a pdf for that matter? Reminds me of click bait factory design: Take up the whole page, each nugget of meaning is a separate page, draw it out as long as possible for the clicks.
Companies do a font fork to stop paying for the royalties for the most famous ones. Millions of pages for an unlimited amount of time adds up to more than the cost to create a shiny new font i.e. $50k. This is probably one of the first cost hacks technology companies figured out before big finance.<p>Who wants to bet Barclay, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank do not have their own font by 2030?
What is the reason for extremely large font size trends, especially ticking up after 2015?<p>Huge typography is obnoxious, from marketing philosophy standpoint - it screams insecurity. From a technical standpoint, it is inappropriate for the screen size. Yet designers today love choosing HUGE typography to be bold and daring. From Dropbox to IBM, from GS to Apple - this whole trendy huge font thing bothers me.<p>I understand that they're using huge font sizes to show off to the world their new typeface. Make no mistake, it will be used in huge sizes as it is the current trend - a cool thing to do as a designer is to employ massive bold typography today.
> You're using an incompatible browser.<p>> We've engineered Marquee to leverage the latest technologies. Please upgrade to one of the following browsers:<p>Reading through the other comments, I’m shocked that this is simply a page describing a font, and yet it somehow needs “the latest technologies”.<p>(I’m currently using Firefox on iOS)
Nice.<p>Let's see Paul Allen's card.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISYzA36-ZY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISYzA36-ZY</a>
Ugh, the font itself seems okay I guess, but I don't understand why, in a font ostensibly designed for legibility, you would choose an open zero in lieu of a slashed or dotted zero.
As someone who used to make pitch books in investment banking (not GS), I'll tell you some of the awesome things I saw from a user perspective.<p>-- Funny when they mentioned fitting in a lot of text in a small space. I've never used so much 8-pt font in my life before or since. A lot of the time you are very space constrained in things like detailed footnotes, so you are almost tweet speaking to fit it all in there<p>-- The number section blew me away, the fact that you are getting fixed width number performance (and capital letter tickers too) in a "normal" font is incredible. There is a lot of focus on perfect number alignment (the dreaded #,##0_);(#,##0) number format in Excel).<p>Also to address some of the comments why they didn't put a slash through the 0. The audience is financial professionals and the slashed 0 is not used, and would be very distracting and especially so for large round numbers ie<p><pre><code> 1,000,000</code></pre>
Ah The Goldman Sack. Reminded me of this for whatever reason:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k</a>
I think they probably get this font in addition to all of the rebranding. Assuming that they could license Helvetica and that they have one app (Marcus) and putting in 33 thousand users (employee count) you can get to around ~$50k.<p>Used the calculator here: <a href="https://www.myfonts.com/licenses?type=sku&id=631501&cl=false" rel="nofollow">https://www.myfonts.com/licenses?type=sku&id=631501&cl=false</a>
Why do big companies insist on making their own font and then putting on a parade to celebrate its debut? Arial, Helvetica, and countless other fonts are a better option since I already have them installed, don't need a special license, and are battle tested and highly refined. If they felt strongly in paying a typographer, they should have contracted one to fix the hinting in macos so type wasn't a blurry mess.
It looks really good, but also reminds me a lot of IBM's similar new typeface Plex [1, 2] from a year and a half ago.<p>They have their differences of course, but they're both very modern sans-serifs with a tall x-height and a slight bit of squarishness to their round parts.<p>Seeing as they're both trying to project the image "we have history and trustworthiness, but we're also modern and hip", it makes sense they'd end up with such similar results. (I'm not saying those descriptions are <i>true</i>, just that they want to <i>project</i> that!)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ibm.com/plex/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibm.com/plex/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Plex" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Plex</a>
Kinda ironic that they talk about the legibility of the numbers but the page they are presented in is quite hard to read: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/DItuHiL.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/DItuHiL.png</a>
Interesting font. The presentation of this page looks pretty bad on a window that is ~1000px wide. Not sure why it was designed in a way that forced a single ratio.
I mean, I'm not sure the world needs more font faces when the existing set of many many options seems to do a pretty good job for all purposes (who ever thinks, "boy this job would be much easier with a font more appropriately suited to the task, but alas, no such font exists"?)<p>However, I did really enjoy the introduction slides, some great design work there for sure.
Thanks to Mr. Tonsky's post mandating me to upgrade to a 4K monitor for sharply rendered fonts, this is awesome. The text is bleeding-edge sharp.<p>I got the least expensive 27" 4K@60Hz monitor I could (Sceptre U279W-4000R, $200), and it arrived with no dead pixels. I had to find a color calibration profile, but now it's a beaut. Thanks to Mr. Tonsky.
You could be forgiven for mistaking this for just about anything Erik Spiekermann has designed. I find this style of squashed humanist sans-serif to be so uninteresting. You’d think there would be more variation in character to be found in that space, but something about making a condensed sans-serif in this style makes everything look... cautious and indistinguishable.<p>Fitting for an organization like Goldman Sachs, I suppose.
I don't really understand this trend. They're not the only firm I'm aware of that's invented their own font and/or standardized on some obscure one.<p>I'm sure there's an already popular font that has these attributes.