[delta_p_delta_x]

All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans.

Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop.

At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs.

I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.

Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.

The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.

I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.

Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.

Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.

Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.

[ngrilly]

I also spent some time evaluating a lot of open fonts and I agree that most of them have flaws, especially when it comes to kerning. The exceptions are fonts that have been developed for and are used by very large organizations, such as Public Sans (US government), IBM Plex Sans, Source Sans (Abobe), etc. Then the quality is equivalent (or even better) than what you get from proprietary fonts.

[dvdkon]

Every time I thought about buying a font, I've been put off by the terms.

A few tens of euro for desktop use? Sure. But when that font's supposed to be part of an organisation's identity, I'll need it for web use as well, which can be 10x as expensive. And when I want to e.g. generate invoices, that's even more money again, yearly.

I only work with small clients on things like this, but I've never had anyone willing to pay the money. Free fonts might not be as good, but that's not relevant for me, because paid fonts just aren't an option.

[tmtvl]

My test is simple: does it have a monospace variant and does it support Japanese? If not, then it's worse than IBM Plex.

[delta_p_delta_x]

Oh, non-Latin type faces are an entirely different ball-game, don't even get me started. I have massive respect for CJK type designers; there are thousands of glyphs! Designing a good new typeface must take years, if not decades.

[numpad0]

This is weird to say, but it never occurred to me previously that an ISO-8859-1 font perfectly consistent with all variants of itself + CJK(by switching variants or whatever) would be massively useful. CJK speakers usually switch and mix fonts as needed to build a content than trying to pick single font for everything, and vast majority of people just don't understand multiple languages, so there are little driving forces towards a single universal font solution.

But a universal font makes sense. It's almost odd that this is so rarely said out loud.

[nisa]

I agree and I'd like to know what's your take on the Fira font family? I've configured my desktop and browser to use this font and now I can't go back. Subjectively I kind of developed a little crush on that font and I'm interested if it also has technical merit or if I'm just making things up in my mind.

[currysausage]

Fira was designed by world-class type designers, and it’s only free thanks to the funding by Mozilla and Here, so yes, definitely a different category.

Same goes for IBM Plex, by the way.

[delta_p_delta_x]

I do like Fira, and definitely one of the few exceptions. Although I wish the lowercase 'y' were a bit less busy, with the left stroke completely joining into the right descender rather than how it is now, with a little bit sticking out. Additionally I must point out that Fira itself is a derivative (I'd say 'clone') of FF Meta, which was originally commissioned by Deutsche Bundespost.

Another commenter pointed out IBM Plex which I also like, but I have a bit of an issue with the lowercase Roman 'a' glyph, where the bottom curve into the vertical is a tad bit too thin for my liking.

As a rule of thumb, if a company has paid a foundry a handsome sum of money for its corporate branding and wants to use the resultant typeface everywhere, the result is usually quite decent, and has what I call 'character without being excessively fancy'.

[replete]

I agree the keming is off in places, like the alternates.

[delta_p_delta_x]

Touché.

[codedokode]

It seems that you have included mostly old fonts as examples. And what is your opinion about free fonts like Roboto, Open Sans or Noto?

[delta_p_delta_x]

All three are quite utilitarian typefaces, nothing to really write home about. But they're all quite readable, which makes them appropriate for the use cases they're typically employed for—UIs and basic document production. Especially Open and Noto Sans; they look like wider Calibris.

[tasuki]

You seem to know a thing or two about typeface design. What do you think about Alegreya, Playfair, and Ubuntu fonts?

[delta_p_delta_x]

Alegreya seems like a Garamond derivative, but it has a very interesting character; the glyph stroke widths—especially the verticals—have an intriguing taper. I really like the lowercase italic 'g' and 'h'.

Playfair is Didone, and I feel Didones (this includes TeX's default, Computer Modern) don't really do well on displays because of the very high contrast between the ball serifs and rather thin vertical strokes. Otherwise it's a nice Didone: I'd use it, but as a printed typeface.

I'm not the biggest fan of Ubuntu. Especially the lowercase 'r', it's got a weird shape.

[tasuki]

Thank you!

Alegreya also has a much larger x-height than Garamond...