
How the new open-source typeface used by GitHub and Mozilla came to be - twog
https://www.figma.com/blog/the-birth-of-inter/
======
ChuckMcM
Link to the font: [https://rsms.me/inter/](https://rsms.me/inter/)

I am not one who gets worked up over typefaces so my short take is "yet
another san-serif font" but the discussion about why he chose to do things in
certain ways was useful for me in appreciating how this font differs from
other, similar offerings.

~~~
jackfraser
I am at once awed by the level of work that goes into a really good typeface,
and also astounded that this still seems to be a difficult sort of terrain
that people are not just willing, but positively excited to summit. Why go to
the trouble when your font is only going to be seen by a small number of
people and used by even less? Are you really having any ideas that haven't
been had already in plenty of other fonts? Will your extra 0.001% tweak to
readability make life easier for 0.001% of people that read something written
in it?

~~~
cortesoft
There are font nerds just like there are nerds for a million other things.
Their passion is fonts, so yes, they will spend that amount of time on it.

------
asadkn
The most it resembles is the San Francisco font (Apple's default system font)
which itself was inspired from Helvetica and DIN.

Personally I liked this font much better than the other opensource
alternatives, especially with the number of weights it offered. I am glad it's
gotten popular.

~~~
jnwatson
Did Apple reuse the San Francisco font name? Man, they really aren’t in touch
with their roots.

The original San Francisco was designed by Susan Kare. You can see it here.
[1]

This makes me feel old.

1\.
[https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_...](https://images.fastcompany.net/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_auto:best,f_auto/wp-
cms/uploads/2019/06/i-2-90359757-apple-just-resurrected-an-original-mac-font-
for-anyone-to-download.jpg)

~~~
dmix
This comes up every time San Francisco is mentioned...

------
cosmotic
Am I the only one that wishes the article about the font "made for screens"
went into more detail about what makes this specific font better for screens?

~~~
signal11
Verdana is a great example of a font designed for low-resolution screens[1].

What’s interesting is that Ikea chose to use Verdana for many of their print &
in-store display material[2]. To me it looks a bit blocky and unfinished,
which actually is a not a bad look for Ikea.

[1]
[https://www.moma.org/collection/works/139312](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/139312)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=ikea+verdana&rlz=1CDGOYI_enG...](https://www.google.com/search?q=ikea+verdana&rlz=1CDGOYI_enGB753GB753&oq=ikea+&aqs=chrome.2.69i59l3j69i65l3.3950j0j4&hl=en-
GB&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#imgrc=6GfxrxXVJlsrRM):

~~~
manspeterson
According to a font designer that was commissioned to design a custom font for
IKEA, they decided to go with Verdana after all due to bad webfont support at
the time. (They wanted to be consistent online and in-store.)

With that said, I share your opinion on Verdana and that can definitely have
played a role in their decision.

------
meerita
Roboto is installed default on many systems, specially on phones. The speed
factor to me is key. That's why I avoid using webfonts. I use both San
Francisco for those on Mac and iOS and Roboto for the rest of the mortals,
including other san-serifs.

~~~
RobertKerans
One system (Android), not many.

~~~
meerita
Yes, but accounts my 65% of visits. I use other system fonts as a fallback.

------
Fnoord
> With a typeface, it's just this black box as to who is using some of the
> stuff, then you have no way of reaching back. You're completely reliant on
> whoever makes use of it tells you about it, which probably no one does,
> right?

I've seen multiple websites (What The Font being one of them) which analyses a
picture with text. They then try to guess the font being used. If you could
automate this process, you might be able to scrape content and figure out
who's using your typeface. I guess that is mostly interesting for a commercial
typeface looking for software piracy, though.

~~~
mark-r
What The Font does an amazing job sometimes, but it's not infallible. I'd say
it misses more often than it hits.

Web crawling seems like a great idea, but probably not worth it just to get a
list of customers. And it will never tell you who's using it in their app, or
for signage.

~~~
Fnoord
What The Font was an example. I used multiple tools to find an obscure font.
It was my first time trying to search for 2 fonts whilst I only had logo where
the 2 fonts were used. One was relatively easy, the other one not. It cost me
some time because like you say not every tool is as good as you'd expect it to
be, but I did succeed.

------
knolax
> How do you define 'core set of glyphs'? There are more than 150 different
> written scripts in the world — at least those that are well-recognized. Only
> a small portion of them are Latin-based ... Then, there's the Greek alphabet
> which is similar to Latin as well as Cyrillic. Then we have Arabic and
> Hangul

> Within the first year, before making it open source, I had something that
> covered the 200 most common Latin characters.

Seems like most of the time spent on Inter was the result of the creator not
properly limiting his scope. Later he even talks about how the Cyrillic
characters in his font seem completely wrong to actual users of Cyrillic
because he can't read Cyrillic. As someone who deals with multiple different
scripts on my computer, I always hated the fonts that try to set a uniform
style for every script when many of the designers clearly had no idea how many
of these scripts worked. It really only makes sense to try to support every
script for fallback fonts like Unifont. Rarely do typographic concepts
translate well between scripts. If you want an example, install the CJK font
"Hana Mincho" and type some English text in it: It looks atrocious.

------
daxterspeed
Took me a bit to realize that this is the same font as "Inter UI" (which I
installed right at the end of 2018). It was apparently renamed to just Inter
in February this year.

The changelog provided on Github gives some interesting insight into
development of this font
[https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases](https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases)
Not only have I found it rare to see a font with active development like this,
but it's also exciting seeing changelogs that are this detailed.

------
burtonator
What's the best way to use web fonts on a site that needs to be
internationalized.

I realize that not all web fonts support all languages but picking between the
best ones and then supporting all the languages seems like a pain.

~~~
asaph
Google's Noto fonts[0][1] will give you good coverage. You should still do
some basic smoke testing when launching a new language for your site though.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts)

[1] [https://www.google.com/get/noto/](https://www.google.com/get/noto/)

------
Skye
This font reminds me a lot of "Rail Alphabet" which is a font designed by
British Rail in the 60s which was used to railway signs and also in hospitals.
Newer fonts are starting to replace it, but there is still a lot of it around
if you know where to look.

------
asaph
Is it just me or does Inter look like a clone of Helvetica?

~~~
WorldMaker
It started as a clone of Roboto, which in turn started as a clone of Helvetica
(sort of), so that's not really a surprising reaction. Fonts are weird like
that.

~~~
snazz
It’s the slightly condensed Roboto look but I’d say it looks a lot more like
San Francisco with fewer things parallel to the baseline (not as bad as Arial
vs Helvetica, but noticeable).

