GitHub now using Helvetica Neue. But why?

13 points by Diastro ↗ HN
Im not to sure why but github is now using Helvetica Neue. Am I the only only that find this change a bit weird.

Example : https://github.com/Diastro/Zeek

6 comments

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Preferred Sans-Serif font of the guys who did Bootstrap, who are now working for Github (or at least Mark Dotto is).
Only for Markdown text apparently:

.markdown-body: "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,freesans,sans-serif

body: Helvetica,arial,freesans,clean,sans-serif,"Segoe UI Emoji","Segoe UI Symbol"

You don't explain why you think it's weird though? I'd imagine they assume it's a well tuned font for the platforms it's found on.

looks so much better! the other font was ultra-big and bold.
Just a guess, Helvetica Neue is the new system font of Yosemite.
What was the old font?
It wasn't just the font. They removed the borders around code blocks, added padding, made the background color lighter, changed the font-size to 16px from 15px and changed the spacing of lists.

Personally, I don't like it at all.