Geist Serif | Hacker News Reader

Geist Serif

vercel.com

79 pointsZm4424 comments

I like it. I'm not generally that enthusiastic about these corporate fonts (though I know why they do it) but it's good to see some strong opinions in the serifs. It's so much better than the exaggerated anachronistic ink traps that has become such a visual cliche of the 2020s internet.

I'm into typography and I like trying out new fonts, but what's with the sudden flood of everyone making their own lately? I remember how novel and interesting it was a few years ago when, like, JetBrains Mono came out. Now it's like every code-adjacent company has their own. Is AI particularly good at font design or something?

A good part of it is simply license costs and obligations makes it attractive for certain kinds and sizes of businesses. But there are plenty good open source fonts now that could be used as a basis so that's not all of it.

The other is that people with an eye for design like fonts the way mushrooms like decaying wood. If you leave a designer unattended for too long fonts appear as if from nowhere.

Im not personally a fan of Geist, but its been around for years and it has been the default for create-next-app for a few years…

Previously it was every company that made a device, before that any company with a text-heavy app like a Word Processor. I think if you stare at fonts long enough and have a design team you eventually make your own.

As someone else mentioned, it's almost certainly licensing costs. Monotype bought up all the classic foundries, and their licensing gets very expensive, very quick. You could literally hire a top-tier type designer as a permanent full-time hire to work on your in-house fonts part time and then do whatever they want with the other 99.9% of their time and it would still be cheaper than what Monotype wants.

Sad that “crafted by hand” immediately makes me think Claude made it.

It obviously wrote the article so why not.

> Four variants, one axis

Dunno about the font, but the copy on this page is 100% Claude.

Outside-the-box big brain idea for font webpages with walls of gibberish: Make the font for the gibberish the font.

At least you can easily compare the different Geist fonts here: https://vercel.com/font?type=serif

I use Geist Sans and Mono for almost all of my projects. I'm looking forward to Fontsource/Google Fonts adding Serif to the repository.

> At Vercel, Geist Sans runs the product.

Groan.

Given Vercel’s plunge in some circles, maybe it does run the product. Might want to install some Product Manager skills on their Claudes.

Feels very Halloween-y especially with that vampire N and the sharp serifs. Not a candidate for my rotation.

I hoped it was too, with the sort of glitchy portfolio image and the words being “midnight, raven, etc”

> and it was drawn to communicate messages powerfully both in the physical world and

.. in the ethereal?

Those triangular serifs remind me of Ming script fonts.[0]

Also the indentation in the code sample near the end is quite terrible

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts#Ming

Very hard to read in small sizes. It mushes together to a big mud ball for my eyes. Large is nice.

The letterforms look good, but why is the kerning so off? It looks omitted in the graphics.

Okay, the special dot choices are pretty pretttttty nify!

This font renders like trash on my 9 year old widescreen, but I am sure it will look gorgeous on a MBP display. Guess I found my excuse to upgrade!

Pretty stylish. Thumbs up.

Sans-serif for body, serif for headlines? Unconventional choice.

> At Vercel, Geist Sans runs the product. For headlines, though, we wanted a second voice, one that belongs to the same system, instead of a stranger picked from a drop-down menu.

I hate hate hate hate hate this verbiage. I can't tell if this is AI or the kind of insipid marketroid-speak that gave AI writing its distinctive grossness, but it makes me want to barf reading this slop, which is a shame because the font itself is nice.

The article is such pure LLM slop that quoting it got your comment killed by HN's LLM comment detection. Wouldn't be surprised if Claude is responsible for most of the design choices too.

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