We do everything in the open, so feel free to follow our work here: https://github.com/18F/federalist
We also implement the USWDS, which you can follow here: https://github.com/18F/federalist-uswds-jekyll
Let me know if you have any questions!
In my country, all tax-funded government works are copyrighted. It's an ongoing battle to make each department release their works under a free license, and massive bodies of government-owned digitized cultural works sadly remain accessible only to those who pay for them.
Th EU has http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/services/analytics/ but I recently discovered that I cannot access any data as a citizen. Legally, I'm convinced this data should be public domain.
If this is meant for web sites, I have a question and I ask this on HN a lot. Why does the government need to provide ANY fonts? I have a real problem with websites pushing their own fonts on users. I don't think it's their place. Users should select their preferred font in their own browser. Why would a US government site feel the need to use particular fonts?
If this is for publishing in .pdf format I can understand. If it's for web, I just don't get it.
Some of those are the worst.
Asking because I think this approach rocks but have a hard time selling it internally.
I haven’t noticed this strong of a branding in other cities I’ve lived, but would love to see examples of others.
Boston even maintains its code on github! [2] Their digital department also has a roadmap of what their initiatives are, and it’s communicated in what I think is such an easily digestible manner [3]
Bravo to their digital team!
[2] https://github.com/CityOfBoston
[3] https://www.boston.gov/departments/digital-team/digital-team...
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...
Hit me up if you're interested in getting into this space!
You can learn more about that project here, including the open source code: https://18f.gsa.gov/what-we-deliver/forest-service/ - and a few blog posts about it: https://18f.gsa.gov/tags/forest-service/
Both that Forest Service project and Federalist run on cloud.gov, which is a Platform as a Service operated by 18F.
(I work for 18F but don't officially represent it here.)
For example, executive order numbers have both "O" and "0" appearing in them. But I'm sure there are stronger examples in various gov'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.
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's zeros would be an important symbolic first step in combating climate change.
Because it isn’t a coding/monospaced font?
Most text/display typefaces don’t have dotted or slashed zeros.
The expectation is that if you have ID numbers etc where you’d need them, you would use a different typeface.
The US Web Design System 2.0 (of which Public Sans is a part) specifies Roboto Mono (which does have a slashed zero) for such purposes. See https://v2.designsystem.digital.gov/components/typography/
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?
Isn't this a pretty basic "appeal to worse problems" fallacy?
The way I understand the "appeal to worse problems" fallacy is: "Y is worse than X, so why work on X if we haven't solved Y yet?"
In this case, I see X as a solved problem (perfectly appropriate Sans Serif typefaces exist) and Y as unsolved, whereas the fallacy treats both X and Y as unsolved.
There are a plethora of established sans serif typefaces available under various licenses, as seen on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sans_serif_typefaces
These have existed well before someone said "let's create Public Sans!". It would be nice to know what the reasoning was. The Github page only goes into the details of how Public Sans is different from Libre Franklin.
Q: Who would be prepared to do their taxes with Comic Sans if taxes were lower for those who did?
Generally just using the system font is fine for most UI interfaces and the only good reasons to change it are:
1. You have a specific branding style you need to achieve (this is becoming rare) 2. Your interface has pixel perfect user created content where the difference in font to font usage between OSes / Browsers would cause actual breaks in layouts from user to user.
I run into the later often, and so we end up picking a neutral style font like this because it's the closest thing to a generic "system font" like Roboto or San Francisco that has a friendlier license.
Personally I prefer Inter UI https://rsms.me/inter/
For print sure serifs are good but again it depends. There are many highly readable sans serifs (that have big x-height).
I would imagine tech geeks and artists are generally the people who are downloading new fonts, and those poeple are probably spending most of their time using sans serif fonts or monospace.
There are multiple needs here and it seems the only action comes from the "sexy" side of things.
* https://github.com/uswds/uswds-for-designers#fonts
* https://designsystem.digital.gov/components/typography/
* https://github.com/SorkinType/Merriweather/blob/master/READM...
A typeface expresses many things, you can imagine it as different sliders along, say, 100 different dimensions, similar to songs expressing combinations of feelings.
An off-the-shelf typeface will express things that are close to exactly what you're looking for, but almost never exactly 100%. Commissioning a font gives you exactly the visual identity you're looking for, zero compromises.
Additionally, distinctiveness/uniqueness has its own value too -- corporations commission typefaces so no other brand will share the same identity. For a large nation-state, that carries the same value.
(Although, unlike a company like Microsoft or IBM, I'm not sure if the US Government can prevent any private company from using it?)
I could totally see a local government org being put through the ringer for every bit and bob of a website. If there is already an established font choice, that's one less widget they are being charged for.
The site is hosted via Federalist (https://federalist.18f.gov/) a SaaS which runs on top of sibling Platform as a Service cloud.gov (https://cloud.gov), which is based on Cloud Foundry. (Think of cloud.gov as "government-compliant and -operated Heroku" and you're not too far off.)
One of the benefits of using cloud.gov is that it automatically brokers and renews certs from Let's Encrypt... Math is math, and there's no sense spending taxpayer money where we don't have to! Here's the page about it, including a link to the broker source at the bottom: https://cloud.gov/docs/services/cdn-route/
Both are operated by 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov)... We're all feds! If anyone is interested in joining us check out https://18f.gsa.gov/join/
Different strokes (literally). I quite dislike it. In my mind this font lacks symmetry and consistency needed to be easily readable. Especially how the curved base appears to drop below the flat base! It hurts my eyes.
For example, this is a "strong" face, but it's not "neutral".
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/this-brutalist-inspired-stencil...
Also strong, and not neutral.
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/use-this-brick-of-a-typeface-wh...
Very readable, and it screams "America" which makes sense given who made it.
This, on the other hand, screams America: https://www.dafont.com/american-captain.font
Still, it only has to be done once! I'm a huge fan of what the USWDS has done so far. I love the model of an internal tech resource for the government.
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.
I don't think that 18F and US taxpayers lose out on anything by open sourcing this. It builds a lot of good will and they are probably using systems that have been contributed to by others as well.
Things generally don't have to be open source until you get to your beta assessment, as the alpha assessment is really just checking that you have a clear plan for getting to beta and they agree with your approach, so you don't fail for not being open source at this stage. The project I'm working on currently (an app to let companies wishing to perform road works see all road works being performed across the country, hopefully preventing things like two different companies digging up and resurfacing the road in a short space of time, etc.) is about to hit beta so will be open-sourced shortly
I just wish there was a monospaced variant/equivalent so I can run it in my terminal/Emacs windows.
1lO05S and other commonly-confused characters are best clearly distinguished.
And then there is the military.
Removing ambiguity and uncertainty should be the point.
My idea is being hashed out on their GitHub, though sadly I suspect they’ll need lawyers to advise them rather than HN commenters such as I: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans/issues/30
(I know this work is not GPL, but similar idea applies)
|Il nonsense is unacceptable, but I have to deal with it all the time.
1. Publicly-funded font(s) created
2. Use on govt websites grows
3. Publicly-funded CDN used for said govt site assets
4. Other, non-govt sites use said font(s)
5. Govt becomes asset host for web basics across thousands of non-govt sites
This may be another step in CDN lifecycle of startup --> megacorp --> commoditization --> govt service.
I don't see why my taxes should fund a public CDN, though.
In that case, it's also possible (probable, even) that some particularly-lazily-developed smaller sites would simply point to those same CDNs instead of hosting things themselves (much like how quite a few sites point toward CDN-hosted versions of jQuery and FontAwesome and such).
The only remaining step would then be for that taxpayer-funded CDN to cache any and all taxpayer-funded static assets.
Fonts without that manual hinting look like crap on Windows because Windows does not force through its own rendering/hinting/kerning overrides.
And all that is probably besides the point: if you're referring to how the fonts are rendered within a webpage, all the major browsers use their own custom rendering via one (finely tuned) set of parameters and interfaces for macOS/Linux/etc and another (rudimentary) for Windows. And most webfonts do not include any sort of hinting instructions in the payload, so even if the original typeface had manual hinting and would render well on a proper type engine normally, when served over the web even to a browser doing things right it'll still appear horrible.
In case you didn't know, Microsoft is really big on typography, and has commissioned a number of incredibly beautiful typefaces that render perfectly under Windows (and other operating systems).
Maybe I just haven't viewed enough fonts on recent Windows versions to have encountered the better examples, though; are there any fonts (to your knowledge) that do look especially good on Windows (and/or better than they do on macOS or a FreeType-using Unix-like OS)?
But after reading this http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h... you can only conclude that font rendering could be a lot better... I bet it isn't because of 'legacy'
you mean that big:
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/quotation-marks.ht...
not even able to provide correct quotation marks!
In my mind this font lacks symmetry and consistency needed to be easily readable. It hurts my eyes.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg#t=34m53s
"I disagree, I like sans [for long prose] better" comments miss the point; this is not an anecdata competition, it's about how many people prefer each one (and also it would be worth considering how strongly they hold that preference, since mildly pissing off even a slight majority of your readers/customers is better than really pissing off a smaller percentage). Even if you'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?
