alt.hn

4/12/2026 at 6:55:06 PM

Zed, A sans for the needs of 21st century (2024)

 https://www.typotheque.com/blog/zed-a-sans-for-the-needs-of-21century

by yurivish

4/13/2026 at 9:03:09 AM

Capital I and lowercase L are identical, not ideal, but maybe not that much of a problem for the use cases of this font.

by cornedor

4/13/2026 at 5:52:33 AM

This made me think of Recursive Sans and Recursive Mono, two fonts which are also very malleable with multiple settings, but also open source.

https://www.recursive.design/

by p4bl0

4/13/2026 at 5:02:20 AM

Zed Text, not affiliated with the Zed text editor.

by sph

4/13/2026 at 6:36:28 AM

I dislike this trend of common words being used for tools

It started with Go, then Rust, then Zed. Whatever happened to giving a unique name like Hadoop?

by thewhitetulip

4/13/2026 at 7:23:27 AM

Moreover, these new names seem to not consider the ambiguity issues in browser searches.

by linzhangrun

4/13/2026 at 8:18:46 AM

Java and Ruby were created in 1995.

Lua in 1993.

Python in 1991.

C in 1972.

Lisp in 1960.

by boobsbr

4/13/2026 at 8:41:30 AM

Big difference in using a genric name 45yrs ago vs using generic name post 2020

by thewhitetulip

4/13/2026 at 5:11:53 AM

This looks like a cool typeface in how much it can vary itself, but the price feels extremely expensive, and I don't like having to keep track of which of my library of typefaces are allowed to be used on which projects based on which license I bothered to buy for that typeface. Saying that I want to load the font onto a video server raises the price for a single variant to $1500ish, and there is no clarity on what license you need for web videos. Does that count as a movie license, or a TV license, or a web site license?

by jdboyd

4/13/2026 at 8:54:27 AM

I don't get it. When would I use Zed Text and when Zed Display?

by qznc

4/13/2026 at 9:12:26 AM

The definition of Display fonts is quite loose. Generally speaking, display fonts are made to grab attention by incorporating some more extravagant visual features (think something like Papyrus)

They are made for shorter texts that are often written in a bigger font. Again I talk about this in a very general way because it depends on the font and other factors. But usually this includes things like headings. So they would use slightly different proportions that wouldn't work that well at small sizes, but stand out more in bigger sizes compared to the "text" variant.

So in this case you would use Zed Text for all your larger text blocks and Zed Display for headings or maybe emphasized words. But to be honest, since they are pretty close visually, you can get away with using Zed Text for everything imho.

by Enpece

4/13/2026 at 9:04:53 AM

Display versions of typefaces are generally used for headings or larger type.

Text versions are used for longer text, and are usually optimised for smaller type sizes and readability.

by smashmiek

4/13/2026 at 9:23:10 AM

I like it actually, i wouldn’t mind paying for fonts or icons if they were double digit priced.

I know some startups that love burning their money are the target audience, but still…

by maipen

4/13/2026 at 9:03:41 AM

Is it just me, or is the lower-case s too tall? It sticks out like a sore thumb in the paragraphs, clearly taller than other x-height letters like e, o or r.

by brainwad