Nebula Sans

It's a little beside the point of the post, but I just want to fly a flag for Nebula: I subscribed solely to get early versions of Jet Lag: The Game, but I'm finding myself watching it more and more! It has many of the channels I would go to YouTube for, but I've also discovered several really good ones that I had never heard of. And it has a similar feel to Kagi, in the sense of "freeing" yourself from the algorithm. It happens so often on YouTube that I see a video recommended but think to myself "if I click this, am I going to get recommendations for terrible stuff for the next month? What does this tell Google about me?". Same thing with all the big streaming services.

With Nebula, no such worry. The homepage and app isn't creepily algorithmically designed to optimize my engagement with the platform, it's just a bunch of high-quality videos and channels that I can watch with no fuss. It's remarkable how nice that feels in 2026. Really highly recommended.

The differences are really, really subtle, I'd bet most people (including me) would have a really hard time telling them apart.

I agree with that one person (I can't recall when or where I read this) who said modern typography is getting so frivolous about doing personalised typographic families for startups instead of extending the existing ones to cover more languages and scripts than latin.

But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")

Waste of time and money on their part. There are more than enough typefaces in this world that look just like this one.

from https://nebula.tv/nebulasans:

> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.

You cannot be a fancy startup if you don't have your own font I guess.

I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font

> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic

Good God I am sick to the back teeth of the neutral aesthetic. If you're going to spend all that money, can we have some _opinionated_ typefaces please? Especially against the backdrop of AI making everything look and feel exactly the same everywhere, the last thing anybody needs is another neutral, characterless, soulless typeface.

I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.

Is it just me or does this look really... cheap?

A handsome font and a worthwhile contribution. Satisfying. Nebula notches yet another mark.

tldr: yet another trash font: pipe, capital i, small l are the same line

even the alternative variant inconsistent if i want not readable but designer font: the fancy 'a' and 'g' are in the default set and the tailed 'l' in the variant

You cannot be a fancy startup if you don't have your own font I guess.

I've been looking for a humanist, sustainable font

> A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic

The differences are really, really subtle, I'd bet most people (including me) would have a really hard time telling them apart.

But as they say here, "por la plata baila el perro" (something like "a dog would dance for money")

Waste of time and money on their part. There are more than enough typefaces in this world that look just like this one.

from https://nebula.tv/nebulasans:

> When Nebula found itself facing exorbitant fees to license the font it relied on for all of its branding, the company decided to find a new font that would work just as well.

I wonder when we reach the state of having a perfect font.

Is it just me or does this look really... cheap?

tldr: yet another trash font: pipe, capital i, small l are the same line

even the alternative variant inconsistent if i want not readable but designer font: the fancy 'a' and 'g' are in the default set and the tailed 'l' in the variant

I'm not sure we are looking at the same font, this one looks way crispier and more readable than any other font I have ever seen before.

“For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda

According to their website this saved them a lot of money, plus they also made a documentary about making the font which is content for Nebula.

Which they license for 30 per year?

I submit to you that I designed •the• perfect font while making one for my microgame recently: https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry

We did that with Comic Sans MS

Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.

It'll be the same day we reach the state of having the perfect programming language

That happened in 1957, but we can’t leave well enough alone.

A handsome font and a worthwhile contribution. Satisfying. Nebula notches yet another mark.

According to their website this saved them a lot of money, plus they also made a documentary about making the font which is content for Nebula.

“For the money, dances the dog” —Yoda

I'm not sure we are looking at the same font, this one looks way crispier and more readable than any other font I have ever seen before.

We did that with Comic Sans MS

Which they license for 30 per year?

It'll be the same day we reach the state of having the perfect programming language

..downvoted. OK. Perhaps I didn't say enough:

- I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts

- The use of Whitney as a target font is also interesting. I like this font a lot but a lot of nice fonts have annoying properties for web dev (looking at you Frutiger) esp around numbers. I have wasted life years fiddling with tabular number presentation.

There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)

I submit to you that I designed •the• perfect font while making one for my microgame recently: https://stan-stani.itch.io/vagaberry

Fonts are like cheesecakes. Everyone has their own favorite and there is always room for improvement.

That happened in 1957, but we can’t leave well enough alone.

And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.

..downvoted. OK. Perhaps I didn't say enough:

- I love the use of Source Sans as the base. One of the few purely good things Adobe has done in the past decade were the Source fonts

There, is that enough red meat for you, HN? :)

And then there's the cheesecake from La Viña which stands above all others.

Nebula star

Introducing

NebulaSans

A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic, designed for legibility in both digital and print applications.

Based on Source Sans by Paul D. Hunt for Adobe Fonts.

Nebula Sans is the new brand typeface for Nebula, the premium streaming service from independent creators. Based on Source Sans and designed to be a drop-in alternative to Whitney SSm, Nebula Sans is available for anyone to use under the SIL Open Font License.

Watch our short documentary film about the story behind Nebula Sans, written & directed by David Friedman.

Featuring two styles in six weights, Nebula Sans is well-suited for use in interfaces, print, and for any other graphical, digital, physical, metaphysical, metaphorical, or allegorical typeface needs.

Download View font license

Nebula Sans Light

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day

Nebula Sans Book

The “tv” in nebula.tv stands for “Taylor’s Version”

Nebula Sans Medium

Don’t use seven words when four will do

Nebula Sans Semibold

Introducing: Facts and fiction

Nebula Sans Bold

An indie streaming service

Nebula Sans Black

Nebula Sans Black Italic

Enter the Snack Zone

Nebula Sans Bold Italic

There’s no place like home

Nebula Sans Semibold Italic

Charl is the key to our success

Nebula Sans Medium Italic

We’re assembling a crew for a heist

Nebula Sans Book Italic

We believe in facts, science, and human rights

Nebula Sans Light Italic

I’ve been navigating based on cardinal directions…and vibes

Why we made this

We built our own typeface for a few key reasons:

Personalization: we can customize the fonts to align with our preferences.
Features: we can integrate advanced typography features tailored to our use cases.
Sustainability: the cost of licensing commercial typefaces increases as we grow.

Source Sans was the perfect foundation for Nebula Sans because it shares many primary characteristics with Whitney SSm, our previous brand typeface — both were designed to bridge the gap between American gothic and European humanist typefaces, with a strong emphasis on readability. The majority of the adjustments we made were to adapt the metrics of Source Sans to better match those of Whitney SSm, since Source Sans is smaller and narrower by default.

The word 'handgloves' in both fonts, overlayed on each other to show the differences.

Comparison of Nebula Sans versus Whitney SSm

Nebual Sans upright and italic examples. Text about a literal nebula, showcasing the font's capital letters and numbers. Alternate glyphs for the letters 'A', 'L', and 'G'.

Typographical Details

Punctuation

The default punctuation marks in Whitney SSm were, to our taste, too straight. Nebula Sans uses beautiful curly glyphs from Source Sans.

Curly, or smart, quotes.

Comma and period.

Colon and semicolon.

At sign.

Ampersand.

Parentheses.

Whitney SSm vs Nebula Sans

Stylistic Alternates

Nebula Sans features the same stylistic alternates as Source Sans, with the defaults aligned with those of Whitney SSm.

Single storey a

font-feature-settings: 'ss01';

Open g

font-feature-settings: 'ss02';

Tailed l

font-feature-settings: 'ss03';

Asterisk

In typography, the asterisk symbol was named as such because it resembles a star. We love stars, so how could we not put our own spin on this little glyph?

Nebula logo

An upside-down five-pointed asterisk.

Nebula Sans asterisk

Tabular Figures

The default version of Whitney SSm lacks support for tabular lining figures, so we were thrilled to be able to include them in Nebula Sans. Tabular figures (or monospaced numerals) allow us to do things like increment the timestamp in the video player while keeping the digits from jumping around as they change.

Proportional versus tabular figures. With tabular figures, every digit is the same width.

The timestamp on a Nebula video player.

Wait now it’s working

Why did it not work 5 minutes ago

Internet weather

Sent 2:57pm

@&%!$#?!*

Sent 3:06pm

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

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