Sweden Sans

https://identity.sweden.se/en/design-elements/typography

by 2143 • 3 years ago

467 187 3 years ago

identity.sweden.se

elromulous• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/7ytlz

I think we hugged it to death.

cinntaile• 3 years ago

It's kind of sad that sweden.se can't handle a couple of thousand visitors under a short period of time.

worksonmine• 3 years ago

It is, my Pi 2 could handle 10,000 req/s and this page could easily be cached or even static. What kind of traffic does the HN frontpage generate?

arp242• 3 years ago

sweden.se is fine; it's identity.sweden.se that's having some problems. This is a really limited site with a target audience that's normally in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of developers. It's probably just running on a cheap server/VPS somewhere, which is fine almost all of the time.

jen729w2• 3 years ago

Sorry, I know HN isn’t a support forum, but am I the only one who gets “Safari couldn’t establish a secure connection” to any of the archive.xx sites? It’s been happening for ages now.

satysin2• 3 years ago

Are you using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS by any chance?

hultner• 3 years ago

I’ve been experiencing this intermittently lately as well.

Sunspark• 3 years ago

I love looking at new fonts but from the perspective of book readability, this one I feel has the letter spacing too close together, and possibly also too narrow letters.

tomalaci• 3 years ago

We just hugged Sweden to death.

intothemild• 3 years ago

Normally any kind of social interaction has the same effect... Especially eye contact over a couple seconds.

glonq• 3 years ago

Finland says hi. From 3 meters away.

TazeTSchnitzel• 3 years ago

I think this is just for some site focussed at promoting Sweden's image to foreigners? I don't think I've ever seen this font in use in normal communications from the Swedish state, living here in Sweden.

I like the Swedish Tax Agency's design language, if it can be called that. I don't think they use this Sweden Sans, but I'm not sure what they do use.

mikae1• 3 years ago

I think this is just for some site focussed at promoting Sweden's image to foreigners?

It’s run by the Swedish Institute.

The Swedish Institute is a public agency that builds interest and trust in Sweden around the world. We work with Sweden promotion, cooperation in the Baltic Sea region and global development. […] SI’s operations are financed mainly through appropriations directly through the state budget. SI has approximately 470 million Swedish government funds in four areas: international cooperation, international assistance, education and university research and business.[1]

[1] https://si.se/en/about-si/our-mission/

sakjur• 3 years ago

I believe Sweden Sans is used as title typeface on the most recent national ID-cards and passports.

astrolx3• 3 years ago

Yep

darkclouds• 3 years ago

I think this is just for some site focussed at promoting Sweden's image to foreigners?

I did think that myself, certainly a bit of space and countryside to enjoy and getting around Sweden doesnt take long if you have a motorbike...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXiIJ32kaZU

Someone on Sweden was saying the Police have to catch you on the day to prove you are the driver, but I think I will stick to the German autobahns, less moose on the loose.

ghost rider patrik fürstenhoff

ricardobayes• 3 years ago

It's definitely interesting how countries have their own PR these days. And it's working, if you think of a nordic country, chances are, Sweden is the first one that comes to mind.

tuukkah2• 3 years ago

It happens to be the biggest (excluding Greenland).

bunga-bunga2• 3 years ago

Sweden is the first one that comes to mind

Is it? Norway has been topping all the livability charts for at least the past decade so that's the one I've always considered "the best in the world." Then probably the Netherlands, if you stretch the definition of Nordic.

brnt• 3 years ago

Tbh, they're all nearly the same country in my mind. Minor differences, all in all.

RandallBrown• 3 years ago

It's called Sweden Sans, but it appears to have serifs on at least some of the letters like lowercase i and l. Am I misunderstanding what a serif is? Or am I understanding what sans means in this context?

giraffe_lady2• 3 years ago

It isn't a strict category like that. It is more like an indicator of the general font lineage the designer considers it to be in.

But plenty of sans fonts have a handful of serifs, particularly on the mistakable chars like l. And especially if they're expected to be used in technical contexts or as an "everything all the time" font like this one.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Yeah, it looks like there are some slab serifs in there. I guess you could generously say that serif and sans-serif are handles on either end of what is really a spectrum. It may be simpler to call it a sans-serif, because if you called it a serif, people would expect it to be more serify.

bobbylarrybobby• 3 years ago

The regular and bold versions probably qualify as slab serifs, but the “book” weight is a true sans. (Might be easiest to see if you just download the font and look at the OTF files.)

AtNightWeCode4• 3 years ago

What you are not understanding is how corps are selling fonts. The Font is garbage.

jdiff4• 3 years ago

Nobody's selling this font. Cynicism in regards to corporations is a good thing but this is cynicism to the point of disconnecting from the actual underlying facts.

Zetobal• 3 years ago

The right term would be Slab Serif.

themodelplumber4• 3 years ago

There's a lot of wiggle room. Sometimes a font designer will even throw in a single serif because hey--this is also an emotive art. Or maybe for a specific reason due to the project spec.

When I used to teach typography in the 2000s, sometimes students would point this out. Or as an example of a beginner's lesson, they'd use a font without really examining it, and some detail about the font would catch them out later.

It's weird but most people pick fonts without really thinking about the font itself, or even reading its name, let alone examining it. They are thinking about their design, their thoughts & feelings, their message, their amazing design opportunity, or whatever.

Skilled designers need to be trained to think about whether they're basically hallucinating the purpose of the font, as a few seconds of inspection will often make the original purpose really obvious. To people who learn how this works, it becomes just that obvious why those slab serifs might be in there.

s-xyz• 3 years ago

I think its quite good… not just the design but that they apply something governmental so thorough and modern.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

(2014)

Something new here?

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

More looks from the designer https://so-type.com/custom/sweden-sans/

EastLondonCoder• 3 years ago

Made by the design agency Söderhavet in Stockholm. More info here https://soderhavet.com/work/sweden/

jamesblonde• 3 years ago

Soderhavet are not even in Soder - they're on Brunkebergsgatan 10, near t-centralen.

nnnnnande• 3 years ago

I’d wager that it’s a reference to the old Swedish name for the Pacific Ocean and not Södermalm.

Kon5ole5• 3 years ago

I am fascinated by typography and page design and enjoy reading about it, but I have to admit I don't understand how this level of pedantry is able to survive.

The amount of documentation and attention to detail spent on typefaces and when to use them is often off the charts compared to the time spent on stuff like keeping the website running, documenting the API or even the basic functionality of the app.

It's like if someone grows oak trees for a century and slices veneer from it with a handcrafted blade and soaks it in coconut oil for a year before slapping it on a IKEA pulp honeycomb. :)

mlsu• 3 years ago

It is actually amazing how much effort is seemingly expended on things like this.

I think it's pretty simple:

- there are a lot of people out there who love obsessing over typography

- they want to obsess over typography

- so they invent a purpose for obsessing over typography

I love it, I'm here for it, and I think we should give people money for obsessing over typography.

notatoad• 3 years ago

i think it's even simpler

- there are not that many people out there who love obsessing about typography

- the few that do have figured out that they can make a viable business of selling typefaces for slightly less than the cost of licencing helvetica

- writing a document like the one linked here makes people feel a bit better about cutting a big cheque for a typeface

Kon5ole5• 3 years ago

I suspect you're on to something ;-)

It might also be that people who obsess about typography are more inclined to create pretty documents whenever they can. API authors and DB designers are maybe less interested in making pretty documents, which is why their (at the very least equally important work) is often described in a readme.txt meant to be read from the terminal in the typeface of the reader's choice.

imiric• 3 years ago

I think that's an overly cynical take for the work type designers do.

Design in general is highly detail oriented. In interior design, there are philosophies about the proper arrangement of furniture (feng shui). In visual design the balance of colors is crucial, and there are complex theories about the best ways to match and offset colors. This is highly technical work that might seem overly pedantic to outsiders, but really has an established theory about how it impacts the viewer.

So is the case with type design. There are infinite combinations of shapes and sizes of symbols, and an entire science behind how humans interpret characters to form words and communicate ideas. Think about how much design went into just this paragraph you're reading. A bad type can be tiring to read, while a good one can make the words flow off the page/screen. As readers, we take this for granted, but a type designer needs to take all this into consideration.

Consider the work it takes to design a logotype, and how it sometime seems deceptively simple, when in reality it takes a keen eye to design a brand logo. Now extrapolate that to all letters of all alphabets that a modern type should support, and it's no wonder that great type designers deserve all the praise and recognition.

So, yes, all these documents are necessary, and explain the intent of the designer, or how the user feels the type helps with transmitting their message.

MAGZine• 3 years ago

It is actually amazing how much effort is seemingly expended on things like this.

I think it's pretty simple:

- there are a lot of people out there who love obsessing over software

- they want to obsess over software

- so they invent a purpose for obsessing over software

I love it, I'm here for it, and I think we should give people money for obsessing over software.

Just because it's simple on the surface does not mean that there's a lot that goes into it, or that the details don't matter. I feel like what you've written is a little reductionist to the hard work people put into designing frameworks for communications like this, and how much it can help to give voice and unify messaging in intra- and inter-institution communication. How do you keep two government agencies on the same page wrt to design language? or is it ok that one agency likes to produce communications in comic sans while the other uses sans and the third uses helvetica?

It's one of those 99% invisible things.

agloe_dreams2• 3 years ago

Typographic documentation is for designers generally, but there is a world where this can actually help everyone. Designers should make consistent designs. By doing this Developers can create functional designs systems that have sane default behaviors. Once you can get to that point, the system serves to reduce the load from the dev, not increase.

I have created a tailwind-based design system interpretation like this in the education space at a rather large scale. Our designs and our tailwind-config comes from the same spec.

Doing this removes the engineer from thought by reducing options and possibilities. It also serves as check and balance. Paddings, font-weights, all of it are consistent. Designs that deviate from line-height, padding, weights, colors, etc are incorrect mocks and our configured values will make it obvious to the dev. Code that deviates from the spec is incorrect. This requires a good communication flow between Eng and UX but actually works in practice.

In a functioning system, it is a weight off your shoulders as you end up knowing the defaults just by looking at something.

Might I also remind you, the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end. An app with amazing backend practices but fails at matching designs or specs is just a failure and is noticeable by customers.

blowski2• 3 years ago

I agree with much of your comment, but take umbrage with:

the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end

It’s a phoney argument. Once can just as easily say “the whole point of a front end is to provide simple access to the backend, rather than doing it via APIs”.

The whole system is important.

Some backends have appalling frontends and are still popular. The opposite is also true.

Kon5ole5• 3 years ago

Good points which I generally agree with, but I still think it's common to see a remarkable level of time and effort spent on typography compared to even other parts of the frontend. Not always, but surprisingly often.

Many companies have these style guides around typography. Beautiful, thoughtful, very well made things for sure, yet when some backend dev makes a typo so the custom font drops to arial or whatever, it can be days before someone notices and the ones who notice are the font nerds from marketing. Nobody else seems to mind much.

Compare that with what happens if someone misunderstands the 20 year old SQL schema and writes the wrong magic string to a table. Instant crash, everybody notices immediately. Yet database schemas for internal applications tend not to be documented in Porsche-brochure-like sites like this Sweden Sans is.

How did the typography guys get a voice so strong? Note that I don't mind it, I like to see well made things in general, but it's puzzling. It's like there is a secret society of typography nerds that have spread to all major organisations.

Might I also remind you, the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end. An app with amazing backend practices but fails at matching designs or specs is just a failure and is noticeable by customers.

Just checked my notes and it turns out that frontend is just a temporary fashion-dictated skin over the actually important features of the backend! ;-)

phatskat• 3 years ago

Do you have any good recommendations for designing the design system? I’m currently in a position where our designs don’t always “fit” the spec that in theory exists. I’d like to get us on tailwind but widths and paddings and margins at times have weird divisions (I tried getting a rem to fit the px from the design and 1.24444…was close enough. It’s 1.25 and I won’t be bothered to fix it)

indigochill• 3 years ago

Our designs and our tailwind-config comes from the same spec.

Is this the design system you created, or is this something others can use (or both)? As someone who's avoided frontend work primarily because I find CSS tedious, having a system over top of it that speaks design language sounds interesting.

Admittedly, looking at Tailwind now, looks like it's worth just trying that to start with.

themodelplumber4• 3 years ago

This type of guideline can be extremely helpful in a number of ways. People at various levels and with various levels of training tend to love to be creative at the expense of huge brand campaigns, so the branding design team has to find ways to reign in those passions. Technical access is generally much more limited for such people than is access to de facto brand representation through graphical presentation.

If it's a differential comparison vs. tech then that differential should be treated as its own issue, not an issue of design guidelines deserving a label like pedantry just because something else isn't as well-planned or documented.

WorldMaker• 3 years ago

It is generally different roles of people working on design guides like this versus working on documenting an API or other "basic functionality". It's not necessarily a zero sum effort (and probably often is entirely not) to produce design guides and work on other technical requirements at the same time.

Also, design, including and sometimes especially typography, is accessibility and is often worth that sort of attention to detail for exactly that reason, keeping designs accessible to all users. Defining contrasts and visual hierarchy hugely influences how accessible something using a design might be.

One specific example I see is the callout in this particular example for using much less UPPERCASE text moving forward from whatever their previous design language was. This is something I know that I've fought designers I've worked with over as an accessibility problem they've missed. (It's also something that Microsoft went through a huge accidental blow up in very public with early "Metro" designs that they had to apologize for and then walk back in consequent "Fluent" designs.) In general people read word shapes more than individual letters, uppercase forms a lot of very similar looking "rectangles" and even for readers with no other obvious dyslexia uppercase words are the visual equivalent of "speed bumps" in a roadway. They slow reading, sometimes to a crawl, and generally just get in the way, for all readers. (For dyslexic readers I've known they sometimes are even more "walls" than simply "speed bumps" and text entirely in uppercase will completely upset them, if not make the content 100% inaccessible to them and they will nope out entirely.)

That's an important thing about typography that is easy to miss. I've seen so many designs use all uppercase text in places simply because it "looks nice" (those "all words create about the same sort of rectangular shape" that makes a dyslexic viewpoint absolutely hate seeing all uppercase text add a regularity and "cleanliness" to design shapes that some designers find they love; one person's massive accessibility bug is another's aesthetic feature).

at-fates-hands• 3 years ago

> I am fascinated by typography and page design and enjoy reading about it

You should check out the Netflix series:

Abstract: The Art of Design Episode: Jonathan Hoefler: Typeface Design

The guy has some of the most important typefaces. The episode does an amazing job detailing his career and how they develop new typefaces. His work is literally everywhere and its super fascinating some of the misconceptions about type.

chrstphrknwtn• 3 years ago

Also check out Tobias Frere-Jones [1], Johnathon Hoefler's partner who was allegedly screwed out his share of their partnership. [2]

1. https://frerejones.com

2. https://nymag.com/news/features/jonathan-hoefler-tobias-frer...

jw1224• 3 years ago

CONTRIBUTING.md

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

From the website running and dev side, I'd argue time spent on typography and page design guidelines have super high ROI.

First, it's basically one shot: once you have a type face and yhe guideline, only small tweaks are needed down the line. Changing it willy nilly has too much impact that it's just not an option either way. So you better spend time having it right.

Then it will be referred to in millions of places. Every single site made by the Swedish government will have to look at this guideline and decide where to use Sweden sans and when to use Noto. For their own project it wil be a small decision, but in aggregate the better the guideline is the lesser time needs to be spent bikeshedding on which font to use and if Times New Roman is acceptable.

wildpeaks• 3 years ago

Craftmanship is its own reward (and a lot of Web 1.0 websites were this kind of passionate people sharing their niche knowledge).

hoosieree• 3 years ago

Fractionated coconut oil or gtfo.

mediascreen• 3 years ago

Well, this is is not guidelines for an app or a website. This is guidelines for how the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, the Ministry of Culture, the Swedish Institute, Business Sweden and Visit Sweden and the different agencies they use, should use typography when representing Sweden abroad.

I don't think the type section is unusually large, but I worked at a company for two years that exclusively made design manuals, and the well made ones tend to look like this.

makstaks• 3 years ago

The documentation is pretty standard, it allows users of this typeface to build out a design system that scales.

Someone• 3 years ago

The amount of documentation and attention to detail spent on code layout and API design (example: whether array sizes should be signed to unsigned integers, whether to use (start, length) or (start, end) to specify ranges) is often off the charts, too, and those are things the users will never see.

As in those cases, the investment in these kinds of guidelines should be worth it because less time gets spent on such discussions later and consistency of products is improved.

joduplessis2• 3 years ago

For a lot of the sections (esp. the Tone of motion section) - I have to ask: why?

themodelplumber4• 3 years ago

Makes a lot of sense to me if you look at the examples, and think of all the wacky things people will try to do with video because they think they know that branding means "stick the logo in the video somewhere".

It's adding consistency to the presentation and harmonizing with any accompanying non-motion graphic styles, as you might see in a cultural presentation environment with both packaging/signage and video or interactive elements for example.

joduplessis2• 3 years ago

I did and, in my opinion, they are far too generic to offer any semblance of value in terms of video composition. I'm no expert though, so maybe a videographer can chime in - but it feels slightly pedantic.

rickreynoldssf• 3 years ago

Having lived in Sweden, this font makes me hungry for lingonberry and bacon.

bjoli• 3 years ago

Cloudberry jam and vanilla ice cream!

roughly• 3 years ago

Part of me desperately wishes they’d picked a serif font.

DaveFlater2• 3 years ago

Sweden Sans logically implies America Bold and Italy Italic

blowski2• 3 years ago

Not Bolivia Bold?

microtherion• 3 years ago

Bolivia Underlined

DaveFlater2• 3 years ago

We can make it America All Caps, Bolivia Bold, Italy Roman

Telemakhos• 3 years ago

America Bold

Sadly, it's Calibri. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/politics/state-departm...

runlaszlorun• 3 years ago

America… puttin’ the comic back into Comic Sans…

pmontra2• 3 years ago

Italy has the italics of every font, kind of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_type

The name comes from the fact that calligraphy-inspired typefaces were first designed in Italy, to replace documents traditionally written in a handwriting style called chancery hand. Aldus Manutius and Ludovico Arrighi (both between the 15th and 16th centuries) were the main type designers involved in this process at the time.
The first use in a complete volume was a 1501 edition of Virgil dedicated to Italy [...]
Italic type rapidly became very popular and was widely (and inaccurately) imitated. The Venetian Senate gave Aldus exclusive right to its use, a patent confirmed by three successive Popes, but it was widely counterfeited as early as 1502

ComputerGuru• 3 years ago

Site is barely loading (probably due to being on HN). Here's an archive copy: https://archive.is/7ytlz

askonomm• 3 years ago

Not to take away from Sweden, but Estonia also has something like this: https://brand.estonia.ee/guidelines/typography/?lang=en

davee5• 3 years ago

Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all, but the Swedish work is largely quite pretty and readable where the Estonian guidelines are an excellent of what designers do when they can get away with it or the client is too compliant / eager to be different. (source: am designer)

The intro claims the character of the Estonia brand is "nordic, surprising, smart" but the Aino font in particular seems way too focused on being surprising at the expense of legibility, which certainly diminishes expression of the smart element.

noizejoy• 3 years ago

Agreed. But also understandable? i.e. If you don’t get attention any other way, being surprising isn’t entirely irrational.

The Estonia font looks useful for designing fluorescent lighting, though. :-)

astrolx3• 3 years ago

More recently I found about Finlandica for Finland, quite nice too. https://toolbox.finland.fi/brand-identity-and-guidelines/fin...

smlacy• 3 years ago

Wow, this is really nice looking. Almost monospaced, and could easily be tweaked into a really nice looking font for programming.

richdougherty• 3 years ago

I agree, would love a mono version!

jskherman• 3 years ago

Oh, no wonder some glyphs look tall for their respective characters. The Euro seems especially quirky.

acjohnson55• 3 years ago

I don't like the thing on the upper case A. It might be cool used sparingly, like only in headings. But it's distracting to see it for every A.

stevage2• 3 years ago

The tail on the lower case "a" is even worse imho. Really hurts readability because it barely looks like an "a" any more - more like an upside down "e".

astrolx3• 3 years ago

Yes, would be nice if they had a regular A, and that one as stylistic alternate. Removing the bit on the A to turn it into a regular one takes only a few clicks on Fontforge or another font-editing software, and the license allows modification and redistribution ;) [https://github.com/HelsinkiTypeStudio/Finlandica/blob/master...].

pmontra2• 3 years ago

The # & and @ are horrible. The A and the G are strange, two characters with a grace in a sans font. But i and j have that too. However I is designed to look different from l, which is not the case in many fonts.

etiennemarcel• 3 years ago

France also has its own design system and font (Marianne): https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/elements-d-interface/f...

nicbou• 3 years ago

Berlin has Berlin Type

https://wir.berlin/kampagnen/die-typo

fmajid• 3 years ago

The UK has GDS Transport, which can only be used on gov.uk websites, not even internal UK government websites.

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/styles/typography/

The British government may be an omnishambles, but their websites are remarkably clear and readable, specially for an aging population with worsening eyesight.

cocodill• 3 years ago

die Bundesregierung has their own fonts too.

https://styleguide.bundesregierung.de/sg-de/basiselemente/sc...

tuukkah2• 3 years ago

The focus is very different though as the Swedish one is a brand guide for country marketing purposes while this is for developing government services.

The_Double• 3 years ago

To add to the list: The Netherlands has "rijksoverheid" (government) in sans and serif. https://www.rijkshuisstijl.nl/publiek/modules/product/Digita...

armchairhacker• 3 years ago

DIN is used in a lot of public signs and it's from Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_1451

pbowyer• 3 years ago

Tourist boards are a great source of this. Here's one from 2019 for Northern Ireland that I particularly like:

https://fonts.tourismni.com/

Their website is a nightmare to find content on, so here's the design guidelines: https://www.visiteuropewithskal.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...

mrintegrity• 3 years ago

There are quite a few grammatical errors on that page which is surprising, as much because of the sites subject as the fact that Swedes excel at English

kdmccormick• 3 years ago

site's

sib• 3 years ago

"page, which"

rav• 3 years ago

Sweden using Ø for 0 is so insensitive towards their fellow Scandic neighbors to the west! Such a Swedish thing to do.

flurdy• 3 years ago

Yeah I know Sweden uses Ö but when two of their neighbors uses Ø it seems so ignorant. I get annoyed at and confused but can forgive fonts made in primarily English speaking people when they don't have a normal zero but I would have expected more from a fellow Scandinavian country.

mongol2• 3 years ago

Inspired by the old signages system in Sweden

I am interested in this part. Which signage system does it refer to? It does not immediately ring a bell for me.

jffry• 3 years ago

I found a Guardian article [1] which quotes one of the people involved:

  "We started to think about how it would work with different typefaces, then started mood boards with different fonts and pictures – especially of old Swedish signs we'd seen from the 1940s and 50s," said Jesper Robinell, Söderhavet’s head of design.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/14/sweden-sans-de...

mongol2• 3 years ago

I was originally thinking of the old Stockholm subway signage typeface. But it does not look similar

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esseltub

https://fontsgeek.com/fonts/Esseltub-Regular

ShadowBanThis01• 3 years ago

Crossbars on the capital "i": CHECK

Zero distinguished from capital "o"? CHECK

APPROVED

jankovicsandras• 3 years ago

"Zero distinguished from capital "o"? CHECK"

Sorry, I have to disagree. In fact, that was the first thing I saw and decided I "disapprove" this typeface.

Why? Because it looks too similar to norwegian Ø.

It's a very good idea to clearly distinguish zero 0 from capital O, but it should not look like Ø ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98 ) either, because there are many swedish businesses, websites, etc. operating in Norway. I know swedish alphabet uses Ö ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96 ), but still.

bjourne2• 3 years ago

I am Swedish and I've never heard of the Sweden Sans font before. The font doesn't look very "Swedish" to me and is completely different from the font used on road signage, for example. For running text the font doesn't work at all imo.

giraffe_lady2• 3 years ago

Road signage is actually a very specific and typographically demanding use case with its own whole world of constraints and consequences. It's everywhere so very mundane to us, but it's not surprising at all that a general-purpose font isn't usable for it.

asdfv09s9d80fu92• 3 years ago

You find the font on the national ID cards.

bjourne2• 3 years ago

True, though it appears to be a recent change. The font is not on my id card from 2021 but apparently on id cards from 2023.

fnord77• 3 years ago

ultimately derived from Switzerland, the font (Helvetica)

antipaul• 3 years ago

No italic

omoikane• 3 years ago

I find it funny that they used 能登さん (Noto-san) in the example text for Noto Sans. I wonder if that's a reference to 能登麻美子 (Noto Mamiko)?

michaelmior• 3 years ago

I can't be the only one who finds that the headings are far too close to the body text.

fprog• 3 years ago

In the USA, we have Public Sans! https://public-sans.digital.gov/

presbyterian• 3 years ago

And like always, Sweden's is much nicer...

rafram• 3 years ago

I think Public is pretty nice, honestly. It feels official while still looking friendly and modern. Sweden’s is cool, but I don’t see what it actually does better on a practical level.

throwawaymobule• 3 years ago

This gets me wondering if Switzerland has an equivalent font, and what they'd call it since 'Helvetica' is already taken.

tomrod2• 3 years ago

What is the licensing on this? Could I use it for my personal or professional projects?

Kye• 3 years ago

I assume the overall branding terms cover this.

https://identity.sweden.se/en/about-this-site#abouttermsandu...

tomrod2• 3 years ago

Sweet. I didn't see it when looking initially, appreciate the pointer.

Definitely limited use in scope :) Back to Noto Sans!

remram2• 3 years ago

It really doesn't matter how much attention you spend on typeface and design if the way you greet visitors is with an obnoxious "are you sure you don't want our tracking cookies?" where I have to click two tiny checkboxes, followed by a user-hostile trick bold "accept all" button next to the faded "accepted selected" option.

If you really wanted to improve UX, one of those things is more worthy of attention.

shmoe• 3 years ago

GDPR is great in theory, mostly in practice.

remram2• 3 years ago

That is such a silly take. GDPR doesn't force you to keep using unsafe tracking methods on your not-even-commercial website. GDPR doesn't require you try and trick me with the two "accept" buttons.

Collect metrics in a lawful way and GDPR doesn't hurt your UX.

asdfv09s9d80fu92• 3 years ago

Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

jerojero• 3 years ago

I appreciate when governments make an effort to build proper style guidelines for their national brand.

I think the UK has done a great job with their government website and their digital platforms. So it's good to see more governments getting into it as well.

zagrebian• 3 years ago

Why does this website require JavaScript?

GrazeMor• 3 years ago

This used to be called Tratex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tratex

CharlesW• 3 years ago

I’m surprised that a country would choose/create a typeface with only four weights and no italics for their design system. I’d understand if it was primarily a display font, but it seems intended for body copy as well.

xeonmc• 3 years ago

Well, it is Sweden Sans not Italy Sans.

stevage2• 3 years ago

It may be well designed etc etc etc...but I actually found it a bit hard to read. Maybe the letter spacing is too wide? So it's fractionally too hard to distinguish spaces from intra-word spacing.

Also...look under "Type usage" - they are using an image of a table instead of a table? Good lord.

unixhero• 3 years ago

Beautiful , clean and definately a complete body of work. However I cannot say I like it. It reminds me of the text governments use on informing rules and regulations, visa rules, duty free information and so on.

For publication, Garamond Premier Pro is my favorite of them all: https://fontsgeek.com/fonts/Garamond-Premier-Pro-Regular

vanderZwan• 3 years ago

However I cannot say I like it. It reminds me of the text governments use on informing rules and regulations, visa rules, duty free information and so on.

Well, that seems to be its primary use-case so I guess it works as intended, no?

extragood• 3 years ago

I haven't read a physical newspaper in years, but if I were to read one again, I hope it's using that font

ThePowerOfFuet• 3 years ago

Tracking cookies enabled by default? Terrible first impression.

pyrophoenix• 3 years ago

On the contrary, Norway money font are based on 2 Swiss Fonts

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/29444/norwegian-banknotes-2014-2...

pragmatick• 3 years ago

I think your comment is missing some context.

pallas_athena• 3 years ago

Berlin Type: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36489860

alexander_wall• 3 years ago

Nice font and all, but I’m not sure how I feel about my tax money being spent developing a font to promote Sweden.

ecmascript• 3 years ago

Awesome, so where can I download and use this font?

Oh, you can't. So they just spent a lot of my tax money in order to create a font to promote sweden on social media. Great.

Also note that they use their social media to spread highly political content in which does not resonate with many swedes.

Jaxan• 3 years ago

In the Netherlands we have Rijksoverheid sans https://www.rijkshuisstijl.nl/publiek/modules/product/Digita...

_sky-captain_• 3 years ago

This is an old thread, but I'm a little puzzled by developers wondering why the tools we use should not be well-specified. I work on backend systems that rely heavily on high-specialized RFCs for DNS and domain name registrars. If they weren't painstakingly detailed, we'd be toast. But a new executive (no longer with us) once told us to simplify our representation of top-level domains because she thought it was too complicated, as though we could ignore the RFCs.

Are we playing with an idea that has similar dangers here? Ask the opposite question: what would happen if typeface designers didn't go to all this detail? Would we just want to know that "Arial is the round-ish one and Times New Roman has little footsy things?"

Font selection is a big deal to brand identity and marketing. They like to have lots of choices. We even design our own fonts sometimes. How many developers have, as I have, changed fonts in our code editors, looking for the one that's "just right?"

For whatever reasons, the demand for distinct fonts is high, and if there are lots of fonts, they need to be completely specified, so that they can be created and rendered correctly.

bone_frequency• 3 years ago

That sure is a lot of pompous talk for a Helvetica knockoff

Sweden Sans

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