It's called Sweden Sans, but it appears to have serifs on at least some of the letters like lowercase i and l. Am I misunderstanding what a serif is? Or am I understanding what sans means in this context?
There's a lot of wiggle room. Sometimes a font designer will even throw in a single serif because hey--this is also an emotive art. Or maybe for a specific reason due to the project spec.
When I used to teach typography in the 2000s, sometimes students would point this out. Or as an example of a beginner's lesson, they'd use a font without really examining it, and some detail about the font would catch them out later.
It's weird but most people pick fonts without really thinking about the font itself, or even reading its name, let alone examining it. They are thinking about their design, their thoughts & feelings, their message, their amazing design opportunity, or whatever.
Skilled designers need to be trained to think about whether they're basically hallucinating the purpose of the font, as a few seconds of inspection will often make the original purpose really obvious. To people who learn how this works, it becomes just that obvious why those slab serifs might be in there.
It isn't a strict category like that. It is more like an indicator of the general font lineage the designer considers it to be in.
But plenty of sans fonts have a handful of serifs, particularly on the mistakable chars like l. And especially if they're expected to be used in technical contexts or as an "everything all the time" font like this one.
The regular and bold versions probably qualify as slab serifs, but the “book” weight is a true sans. (Might be easiest to see if you just download the font and look at the OTF files.)
Yeah, it looks like there are some slab serifs in there. I guess you could generously say that serif and sans-serif are handles on either end of what is really a spectrum. It may be simpler to call it a sans-serif, because if you called it a serif, people would expect it to be more serify.
Nobody's selling this font. Cynicism in regards to corporations is a good thing but this is cynicism to the point of disconnecting from the actual underlying facts.
Not what I said. Do you think they got the font for free? They used tax payers money to hire probably a brand corp that created this font as a part of the brand.
That's one sale. Governments need design, too, and those designers deserve to be paid. Designers choosing to blur the line on sans vs serif doesn't make it a bad typeface, or some sort of corporate scam to make one sale.
None are to be found here. No more shenanigans than are found in nearly every monospaced typeface in existence that sinfully mixes the exact same slab serifs and sans on the same glyphs.
The typeface is not monospaced. It is a garbage sans serif clone with some stupid sans-letters like lower case i and l that looks just ridiculous. Sweden used to use Helvetica (or some typeface very close to that). They should revert to that.
A "sans serif clone"? That phrase is utterly meaningless. I also wasn't calling it monospaced, just pointing out that there's precedent for the choices made here. It's a fine typeface, not my cup of tea, not even close to what I think of when I think of Swiss typography, but regardless of your obnoxious and unfounded opinionated take on it, regardless of my feelings on it, it's still a fine typeface. You can't even communicate what you don't like about it, just rant about corporations for some also unintelligible reason.
