The website is fantastic. Font looks great and samples are an eye candy, so tried it just now.
Windows, 1920 x 1200 @ 96 dpi, Visual Studio, light-on-dark theme. I like 'em small to fit more on the screen and at 8px this font looks janky. It is blurry with uneven thickness and requires an eye strain to read. It doesn't seem to be hinted at all even though it is a TTF version.
I have the same issue. Things look blurry at any font size below 12pt, which affects pretty much all of my use cases since I live in the terminal, sized at 10pt. This is especially bad with the bold version of the font.
I really like the look of the font, but the hinting needs to be fixed before I'd purchase it. It's currently unusable for me.
I'm used to use DejaVu Sans Mono. Under X (Linux) it works beautifully and stays relatively readable down to 7pt; I usually set it to 11pt.
Under Windows 10, on the same screen with same DPI, I could not make it look reasonably in native programs like Notepad++; it stays blurry up until ridiculously large sizes. Emacs, which of course brings its own rendering to Windows, is able to render it somehow more crisply.
Conversely, Consolas looks wonderful under Windows, crisp and sharp. I could not make it render equally well under Linux.
And macOS is another land; it refuses to make fonts crisp if matching the pixel grid would change their shape even slightly. The only recourse is retina displays.
This is one of the reasons why I'm hoping to sometime this year upgrade my main monitor to something with high pixel density that is practical to run with integer scaling: super crisp text with any size and font. Text doesn't look terrible on my current 27" 2560x1440 monitor with a font that's designed for it, but it's a far cry from the same text on my MBP screen.
I’m waiting for a 27" 4K monitor with better-than-IPS contrast (i.e. VA or OLED) to use at 200% DPI, to replace a 1920x1200. With WQHD (2560x1440) I have the problem that 1-pixel stems are too thin for my eyes, 2-pixel stems are too big (font gets too large relative to screen size), and everything in between is blurry.
None with the parameters I mentioned. To my knowledge currently only one JOLED panel (as used in the LG 27EP950) matches those specs, but it has poor availability, as they have yield issues (there are rumors JOLED may close shop), and it’s rather expensive. On the VA side, Samsung recently announced the M80C, which could fit the bill. LG announced the 27UQ850 with “IPS Black” technology, which I may take a look at, but the nominal contrast of 2000:1 is still less than VA, and in the past I couldn’t get used to IPS glow.
Yes, that’s the LG 27EP950 that I was mentioning. The other LGs are just variants with colorimeters and such. The models from the other brands have been announced, but aren’t available (yet?). They are all based on the same JOLED panel that apparently has issues with production yield.
1920x1200? 96 DPI?! Both those fonts look like absolute garbage, and how could they not? Only, in my opinion, Berkeley Mono actually looks more passable of the two. Something about the one on the right makes it look ethereal. Like it's behind the display. But don't let that detract from the fact that looking at code at 96 dpi is absolute garbage. Perhaps you're broke, in which case I retract my stupid comment. But if not: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/
It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens.
It would be ok if the vast majority of screens were high dpi. But they are not. It’s not a question of being broke or not.
Affordable high-dpi screens are pretty much a recent thing. It keeps being rare (and expensive) on every laptop that isn’t a Mac.
Most companies bought hundreds of 1920*1080 screens in the last decade and they have no real incentive to throw them out of the window neither they feel the need to go 4K even when they buy new screens.
Good hi-dpi+multiscreen support on windows is no more recent than Windows 10 1703. On Linux it’s still garbage.
Millions of people are stuck working with low-dpi screens. It’s not like you have that much power over your employer to ask for a better screen without him changing the whole fleet because all your coworkers now wants one.
So I agree with you. In an ideal world, low-dpi should be something from the past. But it isn’t. And in our real world, the real shame is that designers (including font designers) stopped caring for the vast majority of people who don’t use a hi-dpi screen to work.
> It’s only in the last decade that font designers stoped to care about low-dpi screens. Same for UI designers. It all started when those designers started to work on Retina screens.
A good designer would think about how his creation will be used in the Real World IMHO.
You are right. And those good designers, they exist. I know some of them. And I think they are pretty rare.
I'm not criticizing the people themselves but what we expect from them. Most companies will hire their designers looking at some portfolio that the recruiter barely liked. You'd better have colorful big margin mockups to show on your Retina screen rather than showing that you truly care about the fact that your end users are forced to use garbage screens with blur everywhere because they are still using VGA connectors.
I'll pass on the fact that everyone seems to agree that any single app will be used in fullscreen and that it's ok to expect enormous visual real estate. Even task management software like Jira or Todoist just never had the realization that allowing their window and the contained information to be presented in a compact way should be a basic feature.
Just for fun I tried to run Todoist on a 1440x900 resolution (which, sadly, is pretty common for non technical workers). In full screen, you cannot see more than 12 single line tasks. 12 ! On the same screen i can display a 16*39 spreadsheet at 100% zoom. Why do a modern software artificially limit you to 12 units of information and everybody looks do be fine with it ?
And if you want to resize the app for it to be tinier, you are limited to a minimal size that is barely 1/3 of the screen that shows you 7,5 tasks.
I'm not complaining about Todoist especially. If I have it installed it's for good reasons. But it's the same with barely any modern software : you'll struggle to use it if you don't happen to have the same screen as the designers.
And the designers almost always acts like the software they are working on is anyway at the center of your workflow and that it gives them the "right" to use all of your screen real estate when in fact this is super rare : I don't do my work with Todoist or Jira, they are just here to help me quickly get some information. The only software that deserves all of my pixels is the one I'm actually doing my work with (for me it's my IDE but it could be Photoshop, or Excel, or any production app ...).
So, I'll correct myself : when I say "designers don't care", i would rather say "companies don't care". What is important is that the product is visually appealing enough to ease the work of the sales department.
Windows, 1920 x 1200 @ 96 dpi, Visual Studio, light-on-dark theme. I like 'em small to fit more on the screen and at 8px this font looks janky. It is blurry with uneven thickness and requires an eye strain to read. It doesn't seem to be hinted at all even though it is a TTF version.
Here's Berkley Mono on the left and Mensch on the right - https://i.imgur.com/CM27hVV.png
At 9px characters somehow retain their width but just get taller.
At 10px it starts looking better, but glyphs still look kinda feeble and aren't terribly pleasant to look at.
Just 2c. The character design is very nice still.