🔤 Enabling people without Futura license

[ttalbot]

Getting Futura is a very recurring topic.
Unfortunately it is often a blocker because the font is licensed, we cannot provide it.

Today we have fallbacks on the code meaning if Futura is not loaded it will get the next available font and so on...

$primary-font: 'Roboto, roboto, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif';
$secondary-font: '"Futura EF", "futura-pt", "Futura", "Hind", "Verdana", "Arial Black", sans-serif';

The experience for designer is a bit more deceptive.
If you don't have Futura installed you'll end up with warnings in your design app and you'll have to choose a replacement by yourself, it's not automated.

One option is to start the other way around.
What if we could all start with open fonts? Being inclusive from the beginning.
Then decorating your ui-kit or your angular-theme with Futura if you have a license.
That the progressive enhancement approach.

Now I don't have solution on how to decorate the UI-kit,
please bring your ideas to the discussion ✌️

[julisyda]

Here is an article about Futura open font alternatives.
Nunito Sans could be one 👍

[rayah]

Should we give it a try? I also looked at alternatives and prefer Nunito so far.

[ttalbot]

Your voice count!

[ttalbot]

#385

[ttalbot]

Including uppercase and lowercase

[ttalbot]

Summary

After votes the top 2 open fonts of choice are:

• Nunito sans
• Spartan

Pixel fidelity score

Futura: 100%

Nunito sans: 93.3%

Spartan: 96.7%

Spartan is an excellent alternative for Futura
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Spartan

[rayah]

Great! Indeed, most of the letters look closer to Futura than Nunito and the letter spacings look good too.