There's an issue with the editable / interactive section on Firefox, might be what you're seeing. Otherwise mono is slightly rounder than hubot (look at the "t")
- Time spent on making font: 3 hours
- Time spent on making website with cute CG robots to promote font: 5 months, $700,000 in graphic design and engineering labor
Sorry, but getting a versatile and properly balanced font family to work takes far more than 3 hours; months, years even. If anything those relationships are flipped - surely there are teams at GitHub capable of putting together a website like that in 3 hours.
I don't disagree that variable fonts require a lot of effort to create but there are hundreds of open source variable fonts available: https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true
Interesting. A bit of Google and it seems that although this is technically true, the digital representation of a typeface (ie the font file itself) is copywritable (it is treated like software).
> Licensed under OFL (basically, use it on your site or in your app and credit GitHub—read the full license)
Requiring only attribution and nothing else is very generous and only fair. Would be a serious dick move if someone fails to do even this, more so if it's for a commercial product.
Where can we find a similar such thing for the sources repurposed and/or redistributed for or through Copilot, anyway?
Just a quick note - the "body" text on the page uses Alliance, also designed by the same studio I think (https://degarism.com/Alliance). The two fonts themselves are catered more towards headers / titles.
Might be wrong, but looks like the body text is just using the mono font. They've named the fonts Alliance1 (mono) and Alliance2 (hubot) in the stylesheet.
The font matrix is actually interactive. Now about UX: I had a brain-something when I first scrolled past it... it seemed some fonts changed weight... but I couldn't understand - is it my eyes going wonkey when some char is closer to monitor upper edge rather than lower or what? I scrolled again and again and again, trying to parse whether my eyes are OK or my eyes don't like that font and kind of didn't notice anything... then few more times, by spending at least half a minute trying to figure it out. I figured: they are being changed automatically! I thought: It would have been better to design some kind of carousel, so I can switch between modes.
I revisited that page after reading HN comments and then noticed that mouse pointer is actually changing weight and width... doh.
Perhaps I'm misreading your question, are you asking why they invest in fonts?
If so, the answer is that fonts are a major underpinning of how an organization or a product is presented to the world.
To make an analogy that the hn crowd might understand, the value of a typeface for a design system is like the value a cryptographic primitive or a library like openssl to a functioning security system.
Nobody (aside from designers and typographers) will think "oh wow that font is so great they must have invested a lot into it", but it underlies every written visual interaction between the brand/product/company and its audience.
That said, are there many other fonts available that fall into the appropriate style, usage, licensing terms, etc that GitHub need? Perhaps. But uniqueness is a value in itself, and having a decision about a set of fonts that the company uses is a pretty important thing.
It's like the 3 spaces or 4 spaces vs tabs discussion. Some people use one, other people use another. But in a company, having an approved typeface that is recognized internally as the typeface to use (of course, you can have different typefaces for different scenarios/uses) - is just as important as determining which one to use.
In other words, marketing budget big and needed to be used up or else shrunk next fiscal cycle.
/s
Realistically, this is probably very cost efficient as it’s a relatively low effort project compared to a fully fledged feature, and something that can make someone say “hey, that y reminds me of GitHub”.
Fine, but are there any good reasons to spend resources on fonts?
Maybe if they spent less resources on achievements, fonts, etc. and more on reliability they could improve their downtime, which seems to be happening more and more often.
The time/investment they spent on their two brand identity typefaces is one side of the equation, the other side is the many, many minutes spent on font decisions in each and every little project in their company if employees are allowed (or maybe even encouraged, it can be quite motivating) to dabble a bit in "visual project identity". And on font licencing awareness training, because those engineer doodles will likely be public. And a Microsoft subsidiary will be an extremely juicy target for licence vultures, github simply can't afford any mistakes in that field.
This is where the wide parameterization of the fonts comes into play: "use one of those two fonts, feel free to go wild with the parameters" is much more likely to actually be followed than "use one of those n fonts, no exceptions", for almost any value of n. And better for morale as well.
You're saying it's better for morale, but do you have any proof? My personal experience says the contrary, the company I work at did the same (albeit it's much smaller than GitHub) and I asked some coworkers what they thought about it, about three of them considered it was a waste of resources, I only remember one saying it was OK, so overall morale went down.
Standards make sense but it how many san serif fonts do we really need as a species? It was someone’s job here to set out and reinvent the wheel, and that seems like a waste of effort to me.
It's pocket change for GitHub but fantastic branding. Lots of people absolutely love JetBrains Mono, for example, even people who don't use their products.. but they won't forget who JetBrains are. If I were in marketing at a tech company with a huge marketing budget, I'd certainly be considering a typeface in the outreach mix.
To save money on licensing existing fonts. Own the font, do what you want with it, independent of whatever license changes a third-party might impose years down the line.
