4 ms·

What is it about fonts/typography that engenders such wankery? I say this with love.

x0 11y ago
You can say that about anything really. You may not really get the fascination behind type, a type designer may not understand the fascination behind node.js or zfs, an embedded systems programmer may not understand my love for high gsm paper, etc. Additionally it's a very self aware sort of wankery in my experience :)
coldtea 11y ago
Compared to what? People talking about their favorite programming editors? Discussions of brace style? Functional vs OO vs ... programming?
akkartik 11y ago
Seriously. To my sibling comments: show me an article about how great lisp or vim is that takes 2.5k words to get to its position statement. That's an introduction that's 50% of the length of the article! I don't mind long articles, but ill-proportioned intros seem like a bad idea. Incidentally, that position statement is ridiculously vague and anodyne: Principles of the New Web Typography 1. We must prioritise the text over the font, or semantics over style. 2. We ought to use and/or make tools that reveal the consequences of typographic decisions. 3. We should acknowledge that web typography is only as strong as its weakest point. Who's going to disagree with these? As best I can tell, these translate to: 1. Don't be afraid to show sub-optimal typography until your nicer font loads. Physical books never had to worry about load times. 2. Write better tools and share them. For now use Tachyons or Basscss, as a modern equivalent of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_case. 3. Try to keep your CSS selectors about the same length[1]. Read and internalize http://csswizardry.com/2014/10/the-specificity-graph http://csswizardry.com/2014/10/the-specificity-graph. Like parent, I say all this with love. If it got me to read it all (albeit over the course of a day), it's doing something right. [1] I'm not sure about this, since http://cssguidelin.es/#specificity http://cssguidelin.es/#specificity seems to suggest that specificity is the number of tags in your html that are selected by a selector. But that doesn't seem to be quite what OP means, unless I misunderstand. And it seems fuzzy to ask people to prefer flatter curves in a logarithmic graph.
mbrock 11y ago
I'm a little reluctant to admit that I asked myself the same question... and I've written a bunch of wanky essays myself. I was pretty confused about the text, so I thought, I'll reread the blurb at the top to see what the author is trying to accomplish. > We can trace a nervous path through the links and hearts that occupy our timelines. In search of answers, we’ve peeked under the covers of Material Design and examined hundreds of pattern libraries, since one of them might be secretly withholding the principles of good design within. But why are we obsessed with typographic rules? And if we were to make guidelines for setting text on the web, what form should those rules take? What's a nervous path? What timelines, specifically? And "Material Design" isn't mentioned once in the text. What is a pattern library? There are interesting points in the essay, but it makes it obvious that aside from New Web Typographers... we also need New Web Editors. By the way, the author's website causes a font change flash on every navigation; you get the feeling that the web fonts aren't being cached. From the source, it looks like there's a script at the very end of the HTML that injects another script that then changes the font. Could this be done at an earlier stage in the page load to prevent the problem? Or, why not just use ordinary @font-face URLs linking directly to the .woff files?
bb101 11y ago
The typeface is the voice of the text. It also marries the frivolous world of design with the serious world of content, lending design the validity it craves.
dclowd9901 11y ago
Would you ever have spoken that sentence out loud in a normal conversation? Not trying to call you out, just making a point that we all participate in a bit of wankery when it suits us.

x0 11y ago

You can say that about anything really. You may not really get the fascination behind type, a type designer may not understand the fascination behind node.js or zfs, an embedded systems programmer may not understand my love for high gsm paper, etc. Additionally it's a very self aware sort of wankery in my experience :)

coldtea 11y ago

Compared to what? People talking about their favorite programming editors? Discussions of brace style? Functional vs OO vs ... programming?

akkartik 11y ago

Seriously. To my sibling comments: show me an article about how great lisp or vim is that takes 2.5k words to get to its position statement. That's an introduction that's 50% of the length of the article! I don't mind long articles, but ill-proportioned intros seem like a bad idea. Incidentally, that position statement is ridiculously vague and anodyne: Principles of the New Web Typography 1. We must prioritise the text over the font, or semantics over style. 2. We ought to use and/or make tools that reveal the consequences of typographic decisions. 3. We should acknowledge that web typography is only as strong as its weakest point. Who's going to disagree with these? As best I can tell, these translate to: 1. Don't be afraid to show sub-optimal typography until your nicer font loads. Physical books never had to worry about load times. 2. Write better tools and share them. For now use Tachyons or Basscss, as a modern equivalent of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_case. 3. Try to keep your CSS selectors about the same length[1]. Read and internalize http://csswizardry.com/2014/10/the-specificity-graph http://csswizardry.com/2014/10/the-specificity-graph. Like parent, I say all this with love. If it got me to read it all (albeit over the course of a day), it's doing something right. [1] I'm not sure about this, since http://cssguidelin.es/#specificity http://cssguidelin.es/#specificity seems to suggest that specificity is the number of tags in your html that are selected by a selector. But that doesn't seem to be quite what OP means, unless I misunderstand. And it seems fuzzy to ask people to prefer flatter curves in a logarithmic graph.

mbrock 11y ago

I'm a little reluctant to admit that I asked myself the same question... and I've written a bunch of wanky essays myself. I was pretty confused about the text, so I thought, I'll reread the blurb at the top to see what the author is trying to accomplish. > We can trace a nervous path through the links and hearts that occupy our timelines. In search of answers, we’ve peeked under the covers of Material Design and examined hundreds of pattern libraries, since one of them might be secretly withholding the principles of good design within. But why are we obsessed with typographic rules? And if we were to make guidelines for setting text on the web, what form should those rules take? What's a nervous path? What timelines, specifically? And "Material Design" isn't mentioned once in the text. What is a pattern library? There are interesting points in the essay, but it makes it obvious that aside from New Web Typographers... we also need New Web Editors. By the way, the author's website causes a font change flash on every navigation; you get the feeling that the web fonts aren't being cached. From the source, it looks like there's a script at the very end of the HTML that injects another script that then changes the font. Could this be done at an earlier stage in the page load to prevent the problem? Or, why not just use ordinary @font-face URLs linking directly to the .woff files?

bb101 11y ago

The typeface is the voice of the text. It also marries the frivolous world of design with the serious world of content, lending design the validity it craves.

dclowd9901 11y ago

Would you ever have spoken that sentence out loud in a normal conversation? Not trying to call you out, just making a point that we all participate in a bit of wankery when it suits us.