The WordPress News website has just gotten a beautiful new design, which was led by designer Beatriz Fialho.
My favorite thing about this redesign isn’t just the boldness of the design with that striking shade of blue, it’s that the design uses the beautiful Inter family for the body text, combined with EB Garamond for the headings.
For the last 6+ years, this site has featured typography from the house of Hoefler&Co. When I redesigned the site in 2015, I was using the beautiful Whitney typeface, but ultimately switched over to Ideal Sans a few years later. Hoefler&Co.’s Cloud.Typography service that offered web fonts was priced starting at $99/year (up to 250,000 page views a month) and came with up to 5 typefaces that you could choose from the collection. This was later upgraded to allow the entire library of fonts. I was pretty happy with the service, especially considering I was able to use beautiful fonts on my websites.
A few months ago, Hoefler&Co. was acquired by Monotype. Weirdly enough, the article linked from that tweet has been deleted from the official blog. As part of the acquisition, Jonathan Hoefler was going to step away from the company “to explore new creative endeavors.” That’s never a good sign.
Fast forward to a few days ago, I got an email from Hoefler&Co that my subscription had ended. I also noticed that the web fonts on my website had stopped loading. Wanting to fix this, I logged into my account looking to renew my subscription, but couldn’t find any option that’d let me renew it for another year. There was only the option to “Start” a new subscription at $199/year. I emailed support asking for help, but after a couple of emails, got a reply saying, “We have updated our pricing and we’re sorry to say that we wouldn’t be able to offer the subscription under the old price going forward. We ask for your understanding!”
Essentially, Monotype has raised doubled the pricing of the base plan from $99/year to $199/year and even though I emailed them within a day to renew my subscription, they want me to pay the doubled amount of the new plan to continue using the service. Ha! Needless to say, I have ditched the service.
Nuclear Bits now features the gorgeous Commissioner family designed by Kostas Bartsokas.
Commissioner is a low-contrast humanist sans-serif with almost classical proportions, conceived as a variable family. The family consists of three “voices”. The default style is a grotesque with straight stems. As the flair axis grows the straight grotesque terminals develop a swelling and become almost glyphic serifs while joints become more idiosyncratic. The volume axis transforms the glyphic serifs to wedge-like ones.
Commissioner is a variable typeface and is available for free via GitHub or Google Fonts, licensed under the SIL Open Font License.
I think it looks stunning, especially here on Nuclear bits. What do you think? Lemme know on Twitter: @preshit.
The folks at Hoefler & Co. have just announced a major change coming to Web Fonts from H&Co.
For years, Cloud.typography has included any five fonts of your choosing, and the rest available to purchase. Today we’re making things a lot simpler, a lot more flexible, and a lot more valuable: every Cloud.typography subscription now includes access to our complete library of fonts to use on the web.
This is a phenomenal value being offered at just $99/year. The fonts that Hoefler & Co. offers are some of the most remarkable fonts available today, and to have access to the entire library of fonts to include in any of your websites, is great news for any designer and developer out there.
But that’s not all, there’s more good news further down in the post.
Whether you’re a Cloud.typography subscriber or not, now you can license any of our fonts for self-hosting, and download them as both woff and woff2 files.
I like that both these options are independent of each other, and that you can even buy a perpetual license to the exact font you want to self-host.
Sally Kerrigan, writing on the Typekit blog:
In this newest batch of fonts from three of our foundry partners, we’re delighted to expand our support for Arabic, Devanagari, Hebrew, Gujarati, and Armenian. Latin script tends to be overrepresented in the typography world, and we’re eager to better represent the true range of scripts used all over the globe on Typekit.
I had no idea that Skolar Devanagari even existed. Skolar Sans is one of the nicest font I’ve used, so I’m excited to use Skolar Devanagari in production soon.
On the Gujarati side of things, Rasa and Skolar Gujarati look really good too.