b. The User may not use the Licensed Font Software in any “open source” or other code that would create any obligation for Goldman Sachs to: (i) grant to any third party any intellectual property or other proprietary rights; (ii) disclose or make any source code or any part or derivative work thereof available to third parties under any circumstances; or (iii) otherwise subject Goldman Sachs to any obligations not expressly set forth in this License.
Ambiguous legal language grounded in a likely misunderstanding of what "open source" means. And of course, you have to flip through a dozen screens to make it to the download page to find the license.
This is a project to make a positive impression which fails to do that. So close -- we need more good open types -- and yet clueless.
It imagines a model of open source wherein I can take some Goldman Sachs code (the font), use it in my project, then start making legal demands of Goldman Sachs because I used their code. I would be quite surprised if such a license existed, because it would be a legal absurdity.
Why anyone who isn't employed at Goldman Sachs would ever use this is beyond me, and yet they offer it up for public download. The license forbids creating or even modifying derivative works with it, or bundling/embedding it.
There are so many good, free typefaces out there. I really can't be bothered with yet another license-crippled vanity project from another huge corporation that had a marketing budget left to spend. IBM did the same thing with "Plex", which is arguably even worse quality-wise, but at least has an open license (SIL).
My best guess is that this is a recruitment tool. GS has historically relied on a roster of digital agencies to do any sort of consumer-facing design. They've been trying to grow their in-house practice with mixed results. It's the same trend as the last recession. They can lure talent by offering a lot of money, but no with a creative itch is going to spend their career at a bank.
Yup, they're basically screaming to UX and visual designers "Hey, we're not your stale old bank! We have a design system and a Sketch library, come work for us!" You can also tell that this is career focused as the third link in the header is "Careers". Interestingly enough, I knew someone who worked in their design team. Lasted 2 years I think before heading back to the West Coast.
I frequently build/work on apps that need to show numerical outputs in a clean, easy-to read way, and many "consumer" fonts ignore or underweight the legibility of numeric data, especially at small sizes. So I would absolutely consider using this font, which I think also looks very nice, in apps I build.
I think Plex is great. It features a nice mix of rounded and sharp edges to not look boring, yet is not too funky to be inconvenient to read. It looks good both on screens and printed with toner. I usually put a \usepackage{plex-otf} in my documents which handles all font variant selection for me.
I'm interested in the Typeface itself.
- The diagonal/emphasis on "5" is a great improvement to differentiate it from "S". Roboto tried something similar, but execution is better here imo.
- Reducing the standard width deviation between letters will also be of great help for mobile, number driven usage - without going full monospace.
- The "u" simply being an inverted "n", the "m" using the same shoulders and stems as the "n are things that go against the premise of a fully legible font. I would revise this.
Ugh, all that clicking for the next page. Why not put it all on one page or a pdf for that matter? Reminds me of click bait factory design: Take up the whole page, each nugget of meaning is a separate page, draw it out as long as possible for the clicks.
On my pretty standard-resolution 1920x1080 screen, the "next" arrow requires scrolling to see. ...So they made it so you can't scroll through, but have to scroll a bit on each panel to get to the next one. It's inherently horrifying that this site exists.
I get why companies want in-house fonts that define their brand and avoid licensing fees, but I always find designers' blog posts about how they designed a font to be insanely and incredibly self-congratulatory while focusing on things that almost no human on earth will ever notice.
Also I got an extra horizontal scroll bar that had no room left to scroll (...if that makes sense the the scrollbar was visible but you could not scroll left or right) on Firefox.
Kinda disappointing for a "design-ery" focused thing to have some really bad design requiring scrolling, as well as screwed up sizing that triggers pointless scrollbars.
Companies do a font fork to stop paying for the royalties for the most famous ones. Millions of pages for an unlimited amount of time adds up to more than the cost to create a shiny new font i.e. $50k. This is probably one of the first cost hacks technology companies figured out before big finance.
Who wants to bet Barclay, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank do not have their own font by 2030?
>Companies do a font fork to stop paying for the royalties for the most famous ones. Millions of pages for an unlimited amount of time adds up to more than the cost to create a shiny new font
I would be willing to bet Goldman spent way more than $50k creating this font. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if just the website showcasing the font cost more than that.
I worked at GS back in the day, and the "standard" font was Univers. AFAICT there was a global corporate license for it which was highly unlikely to be cheap.
I agree, a typeface for numerical use should pay attention to that! I like the typeface used in new versions of JetBrains IDEs like Pycharm. There's special attention paid to disambiguating 0 from O and also ; from : and many other details!
What is the reason for extremely large font size trends, especially ticking up after 2015?
Huge typography is obnoxious, from marketing philosophy standpoint - it screams insecurity. From a technical standpoint, it is inappropriate for the screen size. Yet designers today love choosing HUGE typography to be bold and daring. From Dropbox to IBM, from GS to Apple - this whole trendy huge font thing bothers me.
I understand that they're using huge font sizes to show off to the world their new typeface. Make no mistake, it will be used in huge sizes as it is the current trend - a cool thing to do as a designer is to employ massive bold typography today.
What's that have to do with Font licenses? I am talking about the size of the font taking up almost half of my screen.
> It's far cheaper to take something like Helvetica
Helvetica costs $$$ if you want to use it for commercial use. No more than any other font. Also, you cannot modify Helvetica, especially if you get it from Monotype (previously Linotype): https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/helvetica/
Well, body text in browsers now tends to be set in larger than the long-held default of 16px mostly because so many people have not only larger screens but denser screens than we did twenty years ago. I tend to land around 18 or 19px for body type, although that depends on the typeface and use case. (A lot of what I'm "typesetting" for the web is long-form fiction and it turns out that going a little bit bigger than "standard" often increases readability, although just a little.)
But I don't know that this is really a "trend"; Apple.com's body font size, for instance, appears to be 17px. If you actually look around the Goldman Sachs Design web site, they're actually using a surprising amount of 14px text as body text -- if anything, I think their design standards are for text that's too small, not too large.
(And, no, I really don't think Hacker News's default 12px body font is reasonable; I view this site zoomed to 115% or 125% normally.)
Firefox on iOS is just Safari with different chrome (oh how ironic a word, but I mean the browser UI) since Apple doesn't allow third parties to JIT (which is essentially required for JS, so everyone uses iOS' builtin webview)
Readit News
b. The User may not use the Licensed Font Software in any “open source” or other code that would create any obligation for Goldman Sachs to: (i) grant to any third party any intellectual property or other proprietary rights; (ii) disclose or make any source code or any part or derivative work thereof available to third parties under any circumstances; or (iii) otherwise subject Goldman Sachs to any obligations not expressly set forth in this License.
Ambiguous legal language grounded in a likely misunderstanding of what "open source" means. And of course, you have to flip through a dozen screens to make it to the download page to find the license.
This is a project to make a positive impression which fails to do that. So close -- we need more good open types -- and yet clueless.
Deleted Comment
but yes, a swing and a miss for this dumb reason.
It’s to protect against copy left obligations.
It imagines a model of open source wherein I can take some Goldman Sachs code (the font), use it in my project, then start making legal demands of Goldman Sachs because I used their code. I would be quite surprised if such a license existed, because it would be a legal absurdity.
There are so many good, free typefaces out there. I really can't be bothered with yet another license-crippled vanity project from another huge corporation that had a marketing budget left to spend. IBM did the same thing with "Plex", which is arguably even worse quality-wise, but at least has an open license (SIL).
Unless that wasn't clear enough from my comment, you're not allowed to.
- Reducing the standard width deviation between letters will also be of great help for mobile, number driven usage - without going full monospace.
- The "u" simply being an inverted "n", the "m" using the same shoulders and stems as the "n are things that go against the premise of a fully legible font. I would revise this.
What do you think?
Goldman Sachs is trying to distract us from something. I wonder what... Something else they are doing, right now? or something they just did?
I get why companies want in-house fonts that define their brand and avoid licensing fees, but I always find designers' blog posts about how they designed a font to be insanely and incredibly self-congratulatory while focusing on things that almost no human on earth will ever notice.
Also I got an extra horizontal scroll bar that had no room left to scroll (...if that makes sense the the scrollbar was visible but you could not scroll left or right) on Firefox.
Kinda disappointing for a "design-ery" focused thing to have some really bad design requiring scrolling, as well as screwed up sizing that triggers pointless scrollbars.
Who wants to bet Barclay, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank do not have their own font by 2030?
1: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20040803005135/en/Agf...
It's cheaper to make a new font than it is to get a perpetual license for an existing font? This (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23618289) seems more plausible to me.
https://www.linotype.com/111515/credit-suisse-type-family.ht...
See for yourself - I flipped a 0 and an O on this image, can you tell where? https://imgur.com/a/3hcg3zH
A slash or dot for disambiguating zeroes would add a lot of noise visually especially in dense displays. Perhaps that's why.
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/
Huge typography is obnoxious, from marketing philosophy standpoint - it screams insecurity. From a technical standpoint, it is inappropriate for the screen size. Yet designers today love choosing HUGE typography to be bold and daring. From Dropbox to IBM, from GS to Apple - this whole trendy huge font thing bothers me.
I understand that they're using huge font sizes to show off to the world their new typeface. Make no mistake, it will be used in huge sizes as it is the current trend - a cool thing to do as a designer is to employ massive bold typography today.
For context, I used to work on Google Fonts.
> It's far cheaper to take something like Helvetica
Helvetica costs $$$ if you want to use it for commercial use. No more than any other font. Also, you cannot modify Helvetica, especially if you get it from Monotype (previously Linotype): https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/helvetica/
But I don't know that this is really a "trend"; Apple.com's body font size, for instance, appears to be 17px. If you actually look around the Goldman Sachs Design web site, they're actually using a surprising amount of 14px text as body text -- if anything, I think their design standards are for text that's too small, not too large.
(And, no, I really don't think Hacker News's default 12px body font is reasonable; I view this site zoomed to 115% or 125% normally.)
> We've engineered Marquee to leverage the latest technologies. Please upgrade to one of the following browsers:
Reading through the other comments, I’m shocked that this is simply a page describing a font, and yet it somehow needs “the latest technologies”.
(I’m currently using Firefox on iOS)
> Building products that put clients first.
I was hoping it would be at least a little longer before I needed to upgrade my PC again to run the 'latest technologies' on the web...
Also their page is missing a whitepaper.