Nebula Sans

2 months ago 4

Introducing

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.

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.

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?

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.