NebulaSans

Why we made this

We built our own typeface for a few key reasons:

1. Personalization: we can customize the fonts to align with our preferences.
2. Features: we can integrate advanced typography features tailored to our use cases.
3. 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.

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.

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.