Here’s a great new open source font that’s worth looking at.  It’s from Chris Simpkins and it’s completely free.

It’s modern, simple and it has that one essential element often overlooked by designers – it’s easy to read.

Here’s the description from the designer himself –

[Hack] has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and expands upon the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects. The face has been re-designed with a larger glyph set, modifications of the original glyph shapes (including distinct point styles and semi-bold punctuation weight in the regular set to make analphabetic characters less transparent), and meticulous attention to metrics (including numerous spacing adjustments to improve the rhythm of the face and the legibility of code at small text sizes). The large x-height + wide aperture + low contrast design combined with PostScript hinting/hint replacement programs and a TrueType instruction set make it highly legible at commonly used source code text sizes with a sweet spot that runs in the 8px – 12px range on modern desktop and laptop monitors. Combine it with an HD monitor and you can comfortably work at 6 or 7px sizes.

It was originally designed for rendering source code, and it certainly is very suitable where you want something that doesn’t confuse the code. It could probably be used in lots of other situations too though, anything that needs a scalable, simple font could definitely use the hack font.

It would also look very good in conjunction with presentations or perhaps as an overlay to videos like these to highlight technical issues like using proxies or fake ip addresses.