> Product teams eagerly adopted Google Sans and Google Sans Text but soon highlighted a new issue: Billions of people around the globe use non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese, ... The effort was monumental. It meant meticulously crafting hundreds of thousands of new ... from the flowing curves of Arabic to the complex strokes of Japanese and the distinct ...

What I know about CJK font is that one does not simply make a CJK font: they're nearly always made by modifying something existing. Even Google's previous attempt at it was made by a joint multi-year project with Adobe and bunch of experts from various companies tasked to fix what are locally sticks out for each relevant regions without breaking overall theme to make a total of 4-5 language specific fonts with major bugfixes happening for few times over couple years.

That above quoted part reads to me like "oh and there's of course the fusion version of this micro nuclear because that's important", which makes little sense, so I searched around a bit just in case, and there doesn't seem to be non-Latin versions of Google Sans. The credit section does not mention obvious source of easily licensable CJK font other than "U+ Type", either.

My assumption would be that either they made an assumption that a font in CJK can't take that long relative to font in Latin, or they couldn't get one in favorable terms and the full version is proprietary. Or is it really coming later? That would be interesting if that's the case.

Other than changing my mouse cursor to a circle that just makes it unintuitive to use can someone explain the point of a circle in the right upper corner that expands automatically into two icons: search and a hamburger menu? The "saved" space is not used for anything anyway. Isn't it just a bad design that makes navigation harder for no reason?

Clickable elements seem to be underlined with the exception of one: the Google Design logo in the left upper corner. It seems inconsistent and confusing.

Are those new principles of designing things - making it more confusing and more difficult to find (and then click) for 0 gain?

EDIT: also scrolling all the way down is difficult because random stuff block the page, gets loaded. There is "Privacy & Terms" link at the bottom that is impossible to reach because of it. The design is just terrible, wtf Google?

I wish I had the luxury of spending probably dozens of millions on a meaningless effort like this. Any similar font like this one would do the trick, without the need to have a fancy series of blog posts trying to convince users this font is awesome.

I find the whole “corporate blogging about fonts” subculture really funny

There is something about the page that makes me dizzy on mobile. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle animation but I get the feeling of things moving/deforming while I read.

To declare "open source", you have to provide a way for the public to get access to the source code. But there seems to be none at least for the time being.

I never saw the cursor changing size to fit the button you are hovering on, it's pretty cool, I don't know if it's better but it's cool.

having spent a lot of time on finding the right monospace fonts, one of the things i've noticed, that's particularly important in the context of coding is a visual symmetry.

some fonts individually have beautiful glyps or characters but when you preview them with blocks and blocks of code, there's a quirkiness that throws of that symmetry.

I'll give a few examples:

- Mono Lisa font https://www.monolisa.dev/ (truly gorgeous font)

- Recursive https://www.recursive.design/ (particularly note the casual axis)

I bring this up because Google Sans Code, is super quirky; preview a few characters individually and they look good; put it all together in real code, and it's just not as smooth visually.

It's a really pretty, humanist font, and those tend to be my favourite fonts. I was never the biggest fan of the grotesk-style Roboto/Inter/Univers, especially in the context of a user interface, which should feel a little bit friendlier imo.

I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive.

This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.