Public Sans – A strong, neutral typeface for text or display

This is so interesting. These modern sites clash really hard with my mental visual of &quot;Government technology.&quot; And it led me to this, which is maybe even more interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;federalist.18f.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;federalist.18f.gov&#x2F;</a>

Before I submit a bug report-- is there a good reason that the zero isn&#x27;t dotted in this font?<p>For example, executive order numbers have both &quot;O&quot; and &quot;0&quot; appearing in them. But I&#x27;m sure there are stronger examples in various gov&#x27;t depts. where those characters can occur in sequence and create errors. Not to mention any code snippets that already appear in government web sites.<p>I suppose the extra ink could be a concern, but we should be moving away from paper printouts anyway. And as we do that, extinguishing a small dot in this great nation&#x27;s zeros would be an important symbolic first step in combating climate change.

The github page has more info <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uswds&#x2F;public-sans&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md#design-principles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uswds&#x2F;public-sans&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md#d...</a>

Why does the &quot;j&quot; have a larger dot than the &quot;i&quot;? Is there any reason for this? It just looks like an error to me.

What is the advantage of this over Open Sans? Is it less encumbered legally? Or are there other advantages? Or is it simply another alternative, which is also great.

The older I get, the more skeptical I become. Kudos to the author for releasing their project, it looks like a lot of effort went into it, so I hate to sound overly negative, but I just can&#x27;t help wonder if there is a practical reason for the US government to develop its own font?<p>Is Sans Serif Fonts the department where the US government can really make a difference, or is this just a designer who happened to get a job with the US government and designed a font because they always wanted to and now they got the opportunity?

I&#x27;ve been wondering why all these new fonts tend to have a strong focus on sans serif font (Fira has no serif variant, Source Serif Pro came later than the other Source fonts). Aren&#x27;t there a lot of situations (namely, lengthy legal documents) where you&#x27;d prefer a serif font before you want a sans serif?

Good choice to base this on Franklin Gothic. Given that IRS tax forms already use it, it&#x27;s effectively been part of the US government&#x27;s &quot;brand identity&quot; for a long time.

AUR package for easy install on Arch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;ttf-public-sans&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;ttf-public-sans&#x2F;</a>

The question neither this page nor the GitHub answers is... why? I understand a lot of corporations did their own fonts to escape font licensing. Is there fonts the government is currently licensing and trying to get out from under? Where will I see this font? Is there a reason other open source fonts weren&#x27;t already adequate?

I appreciate the tailed &#x27;l&#x27;.

Interesting that this web site uses a Let&#x27;s Encrypt certificate. I suppose it saves the maintainers from being gouged by a beltway bandit charging thousands to monitor and then update an ordinary CA-issued certificate.

I think this is really beautiful.

Interesting take: Does Public Sans&#x27; OFL-1.1 license violate the Establishment Clause?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uswds&#x2F;public-sans&#x2F;issues&#x2F;31" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;uswds&#x2F;public-sans&#x2F;issues&#x2F;31</a>

What do “strong” and “neutral” mean in this context?

You know that something that says it&#x27;s neutral is always anything but.<p>Very readable, and it screams &quot;America&quot; which makes sense given who made it.

I can only imagine the hours of meetings and deliberation that went into developing a one-size-fits-all, cross agency font. That meets all sorts of weird political and accessibility guidelines.<p>Still, it only has to be done once! I&#x27;m a huge fan of what the USWDS has done so far. I love the model of an internal tech resource for the government.

Check out the Digital Services Act, a current bill going through congress to throw some gas on efforts like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;kamala-harris-digital-services-act-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;kamala-harris-digital-services-a...</a>

I am really impressed with 18F and how the federal government has really stepped up their game on the digital&#x2F;open source front.<p>It does make me wonder though if the usage rights of these projects should be restricted to use by US taxpayers though since that is who is ultimately paying for this work.

Fantastic font. I&#x27;ve long seen Helvetica (literally meaning &quot;Swiss&quot; with one added letter) used in official US forms, communication and the like. If this becomes the &quot;US brand&quot; and replaces Helvetica as a national font, it&#x27;s a really great choice.

Just installed it as my system UI font under Linux (previously I was using B612, and before that CMU Sans). Took me by surprise how readable it is even at small sizes.<p>I just wish there was a monospaced variant&#x2F;equivalent so I can run it in my terminal&#x2F;Emacs windows.

Looks decent, but &quot;I&quot; &quot;O&quot; and &quot;0&quot; could be improved.

Is it legal for the federal government to specify a font license other than “This is released into the public domain”? They automatically give up all copyright upon publication, which ought to exhaust any licensing terms.

No FVAR version mentioned on the website? (If there isn&#x27;t one: it&#x27;s rather entirely worth converting your different masters into a single FVAR master instead)

Arial&#x27;s always looked fine to me... I don&#x27;t know why this wheel needs to keep being reinvented.

Nice lowercase L... first thing I look for in a font!<p>|Il nonsense is unacceptable, but I have to deal with it all the time.

What if the progression ends up being:<p>1. Publicly-funded font(s) created<p>2. Use on govt websites grows<p>3. Publicly-funded CDN used for said govt site assets<p>4. Other, non-govt sites use said font(s)<p>5. Govt becomes asset host for web basics across thousands of non-govt sites<p>This may be another step in CDN lifecycle of startup --&gt; megacorp --&gt; commoditization --&gt; govt service.

It is sad that any nice font looks like crap with Windows font rendering.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;fonts&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1923" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;fonts&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1923</a>

I dislike it! Especially how the curved base appears to drop below the flat base!<p>In my mind this font lacks symmetry and consistency needed to be easily readable. It hurts my eyes.

Hinting is all jacked up in Chrome on OSX.

Nice font!

Sans is overused. Please do not use (or carefully consider before using) sans fonts for long blocks of text you expect people to read.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg#t=34m53s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg#t=34m53s</a><p>&quot;I disagree, I like sans [for long prose] better&quot; comments miss the point; this is not an anecdata competition, it&#x27;s about <i>how many</i> people prefer each one (and also it would be worth considering <i>how strongly</i> they hold that preference, since mildly pissing off even a slight majority of your readers&#x2F;customers is better than <i>really</i> pissing off a smaller percentage). Even if you&#x27;re skeptical of the studies Mayer looked at, Google (literata) and Amazon (bookerly) seem to be in the serif camp. Do you think Amazon made a mistake, too?