From the designer's website (https://anti.as/optiker-k) it seems that this was commissioned by ANTI Hamar for the rebranding project for Optiker-K, a Norwegian optician and optometrists store.
This is fantastic! More custom fonts like this should be open sourced.
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 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.
(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.
It indeed looks like a real quote then, but not much of a testimonial. It may as well be rephrased, "Optician Sans is a thing that I acknowledge exists." Nowadays I suppose that's good enough reason to put up the logo of a company on the landing page.
It's probably just me being a huge introvert, but I dislike saying "I am not sure do it again" more than twice and am always left a bit discontent wondering if the prescription is as good as it should be.
I wish I could book 30 minutes alone with the machine and just dial it in perfectly myself.
It's worth finding an optometrist that you have a good rapport with for that reason. I got lucky and get along really well with the person that I see; the results are worth speaking up for.
(I had two somewhat persistent problems before I started seeing her... One was that my prescription was focused a little before infinity because the sign is 20 feet away and not infinity feet away. We tweaked some stuff and fixed that problem. The other was that if I'm tired and it's pretty low contrast outside, I always see double. We added some extra prism for that and it's helped a lot. I've had the same prism prescription for 30 years but adding more was a noticeable improvement.)
Once I felt like I'll be really attentive and answer confidently, and in the end I got overminused. The hesitation is part of the signal. If it's 1% sharper, even if you can tell which one is 1% sharper, you gotta say hmmm number 1 is a bit better but just a little.
Adding -0.5 to the diopter will often make the distance noticeably sharper in appearance while not really giving you more lines you can read, it's a sensation of sharpness but not really more info. And for that you a price because near vision will require straining your eye muscles to accommodate, and that will often cause headaches and tiredness after reading or working at a monitor.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
From the designer's website (https://anti.as/optiker-k) it seems that this was commissioned by ANTI Hamar for the rebranding project for Optiker-K, a Norwegian optician and optometrists store.
This is fantastic! More custom fonts like this should be open sourced.
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.
A deeper dive from the agency: https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typef...
I like how one of the testimonials is someone at Adobe basically quoting the copy at the top of the page.
"OPTICIAN SANS: A free font based on the historical eye charts and optotypes used by opticians world wide." - top copy
“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.
(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.
> "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else."
- the link under discussion
Link rot is alive and well... unlike their links. https://web.archive.org/web/20190430201350/https://twitter.c...
It indeed looks like a real quote then, but not much of a testimonial. It may as well be rephrased, "Optician Sans is a thing that I acknowledge exists." Nowadays I suppose that's good enough reason to put up the logo of a company on the landing page.
Same energy as:
>I Heartily Endorse This Event Or Product
I'm Commander Sheppard, and this is my favorite store on the Citadel.
I work for Khoi. I should ask him if he really gave this quote.
It links to a tweet. I get a "not found" error there but that's, like, 78% of the Xitter links I click on ever since Musk went full Nazi.
Nice font. Could have done without the dude's tinder profile pic though.
You know you swiped right.
I had the same odd sentiment about the use of the images as well. It does nothing for me about wanting to use the font.
:-) Not my target market, but I'd be interested to hear how it worked out for him.
That’s how Nordic people look like <grin>
That main image makes my astigmatic eyes very unhappy.
https://optician-sans.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Comp-3....
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.
I can hear the tech asking "number 1 or number 2"
It's probably just me being a huge introvert, but I dislike saying "I am not sure do it again" more than twice and am always left a bit discontent wondering if the prescription is as good as it should be.
I wish I could book 30 minutes alone with the machine and just dial it in perfectly myself.
It's worth finding an optometrist that you have a good rapport with for that reason. I got lucky and get along really well with the person that I see; the results are worth speaking up for.
(I had two somewhat persistent problems before I started seeing her... One was that my prescription was focused a little before infinity because the sign is 20 feet away and not infinity feet away. We tweaked some stuff and fixed that problem. The other was that if I'm tired and it's pretty low contrast outside, I always see double. We added some extra prism for that and it's helped a lot. I've had the same prism prescription for 30 years but adding more was a noticeable improvement.)
Once I felt like I'll be really attentive and answer confidently, and in the end I got overminused. The hesitation is part of the signal. If it's 1% sharper, even if you can tell which one is 1% sharper, you gotta say hmmm number 1 is a bit better but just a little.
Adding -0.5 to the diopter will often make the distance noticeably sharper in appearance while not really giving you more lines you can read, it's a sensation of sharpness but not really more info. And for that you a price because near vision will require straining your eye muscles to accommodate, and that will often cause headaches and tiredness after reading or working at a monitor.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250730205400/https://nerocam.c...
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.
For example [0], you should indicate the direction where the E points to.
[0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61MRfRwHwWL._SL1235_.jpg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_chart
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
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! https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Atkinson+Hyperlegible+Mono
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)
1] https://radagast.ca/snellen/snellen.html 2] https://mk.bcgsc.ca/snellen-optotype-font/
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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665595
They made a Medium post as well: https://medium.com/anewtypeofinterference/completing-a-typef...
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.
The Dropbox link in the footer is dead:
``` This link has been deleted The owner of this link has deleted or disabled this link. You can not access it at this time. ```
I didn't notice until my last visit but they also make eye charts for kids who don't know letters yet.
The round G strongly resembles the Google logo.
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.
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?
Doesn't look like it. https://github.com/anewtypeofinterference/Optician-Sans/issu...
upon entering, it reminds me to go to the Optometrist
Fake testimonials.
My default blank document Font settings in MSWord is Liberation Sans, Bold, 14 px.
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.
Liberation Sans is indeed great, but I'm so intrigued: how did you end up preferring a libre font but a proprietary word processor?
Is it just me or does it look eerily similar to the font Anthropic uses?
The font is around 6 years old and free, so I wouldn't be suprised