From the designer's website (<a href="https://anti.as/optiker-k" rel="nofollow">https://anti.as/optiker-k</a>) it seems that this was commissioned by ANTI Hamar for the rebranding project for Optiker-K, a Norwegian optician and optometrists store.<p>This is fantastic! More custom fonts like this should be open sourced.<p>To me the font looks pretty legible. Worth noting that the font is from 2018, so it's not really a new font, but it is still one of my favorites.
I like how one of the testimonials is someone at Adobe basically quoting the copy at the top of the page.<p>"OPTICIAN SANS: A free font based on the historical eye charts and optotypes used by opticians world wide." - top copy<p>“A free typeface based on opticians’ eye charts” -Khoi Vinh, Principal designer, Adobe
I think all the testimonials are fake, if this wasn't clear to everyone. I thought they might be real at first but none of them exist. I actually thought that was kind of shitty to do, since they use real companies and media outlets.<p>(I don't really follow fonts but I do know there is a subculture crazy about them, so I thought it could be theoretically possible that people would write reviews of them).
I clicked the Fast Company one because the quote seemed most fake to me and it was a real article. I learned that the underlying problem here is that eye charts only have like 10 letters on them, and this font attempts to guess the rest so you have a full alphabet.
You can click them, they link to their sources.
I work for Khoi. I should ask him if he really gave this quote.
Nice font. Could have done without the dude's tinder profile pic though.
That main image makes my astigmatic eyes very unhappy.<p><a href="https://optician-sans.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Comp-3.gif" rel="nofollow">https://optician-sans.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Comp-3....</a>
Why did they animate it to add a blur?
OMG I kept thinking my glasses (progressive lenses) were causing that. I didn't realize it was animating.
probably to evoke the feeling of undergoing an eye exam.
Can't you clearly see why?
That's horrible, the full page blur is less bad since it's so obvious. But man, you should never be intentionally gaslighting the user by making them second-guess their own vision.
The full page blur is horrendous. Every navigation to the page triggers it, so if you click and link and hit back, here's a blurry page for 2s.
It also nearly triggers headaches for me, so clearly the webdesigner should not be hired for anything serious...
This reminds me of the eye chart used in some countries, because it isn't based on reading letters, but on a direction.<p>For example [0], you should indicate the direction where the E points to.<p>[0]: <a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61MRfRwHwWL._SL1235_.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61MRfRwHwWL._SL1235_.jpg</a>
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_chart" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_chart</a>
This is for kids.
I remember this from when I was a child. Was maybe 4-5 and had not learned the letters yet. But I could turn my hand.
Too many Red Ramages driving submarines I suppose.
that C is annoyingly O-ish, and the blurring... feels almost like its made by an anti-optician
it was derived from eye charts that are explicitly designed to find defects in your eyes - it is not a coincidence the O and C look similar.
Yes I don't understand how they can claim it's optimized for legibility when the base font does the inverse.
And there are also alternative versions of many letters as shown further down on the page.
There's an alternative, more squarish C; about half the letters have alternative glyphs. If you're using macOS Font Book, scroll down to the bottom of the repertoire to see the alt glyphs.
Nah<p>Atkinson Hyperlegible from the Braille institute is the way if we're going for fonts from vision experts
There's a mono version of the font too! <a href="https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Mono" rel="nofollow">https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Mono</a>
You're confusing a font inspired by letter forms intended to test vision with a font designed to be forgiving of vision deficits.
For those that now find themselves inspired to type the Snellen E, the internet provides an OFL typeface that scratches your itch here¹ (this unclearly licensed modification² even comes with some cute but barely readable lowercase versions of the letters)<p>1] <a href="https://radagast.ca/snellen/snellen.html" rel="nofollow">https://radagast.ca/snellen/snellen.html</a>
2] <a href="https://mk.bcgsc.ca/snellen-optotype-font/" rel="nofollow">https://mk.bcgsc.ca/snellen-optotype-font/</a>
Huh, so I'm only just learning that the Snellen chart isn't the common one! I wouldn't have known the name of it, but if someone asked me to doodle an eye chart from memory, I would've drawn that blocky E with the serifs! I've most likely been tested with the sans-serif Sloan chart I assume, but the letter forms just aren't distinct enough to stick in my brain I guess. A bit of a shame this font doesn't have a "Optician Serif" variant to look like the Snellen letters.
Always amusing to see spelling errors on painstakingly put together design websites. Unless NRK did indeed mean 'Let us all behave like opticians!'
Previously seen on HN in 2018: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665595">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665595</a><p>They made a Medium post as well: <a href="https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typeface-that-was-started-decades-ago-a9c977c9cf08" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typef...</a>
I didn't notice until my last visit but they also make eye charts for kids who don't know letters yet.
The Dropbox link in the footer is dead:<p>```
This link has been deleted
The owner of this link has deleted or disabled this link. You can not access it at this time.
```
The loading animation made me feel in need of a visit to my optician
I am looking for a very readable font and I like it. I am not in anyway qualified to compare it to Source Sans Pro or Opensans which I believe are considered very read friendly.
Really like this typeface. It hits that rare sweet spot between experimental and functional. Big thanks to the ANTI Hamar team.
Nice font, I wish it had lower case letters as well. It looks like it could be a great fixed width font for coding.
The round G <i>strongly</i> resembles the Google logo.
I love this so much! I sent it to my Dad, who's an ophthalmologist. Hopefully he gets a kick out of it.
So its also monospace?
My default blank document Font settings in MSWord is Liberation Sans, Bold, 14 px.<p>But my cataract problem is getting worse, and I may have to bump the size up yet again. I have yet to find another font I like as well.
Fake testimonials.
Is it just me or does it look eerily similar to the font Anthropic uses?
upon entering, it reminds me to go to the Optometrist