3 ms·

I love typography - Choosing typefaces (a few guidelines)

8 points by rantfoil 19y ago

rms 19y ago
+1 for the design
hussong 19y ago
I share your love of typography. At some point, we might even see more aural typography (sound fonts) in screen readers. Imagine the difference between a text read out loud by Christopher Walken vs. Audrey Hepburn...
herdrick 19y ago
Important topic, worthless post.
- tptacek 19y ago
  Because?
  - jcl 19y ago
    The article basically says: "Typography is subjective. There are no rules -- especially regarding serif and sans-serif fonts. Look at your design on the screen and on paper. If it looks bad, change it." This advice seems self-evident and unhelpful to me. Here are the three points in the article that I think are genuinely helpful: - Times New Roman works better in narrow columns than wide columns. - Some fonts look good on screen and bad on paper, and vice versa. - Lighter fonts work better with small margins, blacker fonts work better with large margins. The article seems quite long for relatively little content.
    - tptacek 19y ago
      Consider that you aren't his audience; his is a blog constellation that includes mostly young and amateur designers, where the notion of whether there are hard-and-fast rules for setting in serif or sans is in dispute. Lots of good programming posts are similarly unintelligible to people who don't code. Consider also that the notion of typesetting that he's discussing is different than yours: if you're a typical Hacker News reader, you want to know how to make a good looking web app template. A designer often gets many weeks for a single project, during which they may be working with the final content, and may very well print out several roughs and tack them to the wall to look at. The post quotes Bringhurst, and if you haven't already, you should go buy that book immediately. It's one of those rare books that manages to marry craft and science with evocative writing; compare, favorably, to Graham's "coiled up" functional programs stretched painfully into imperative code from On Lisp.

8 points by rantfoil 19y ago

rms 19y ago

+1 for the design

I share your love of typography. At some point, we might even see more aural typography (sound fonts) in screen readers. Imagine the difference between a text read out loud by Christopher Walken vs. Audrey Hepburn...

herdrick 19y ago

Important topic, worthless post.

tptacek 19y ago
Because?
- jcl 19y ago
  The article basically says: "Typography is subjective. There are no rules -- especially regarding serif and sans-serif fonts. Look at your design on the screen and on paper. If it looks bad, change it." This advice seems self-evident and unhelpful to me. Here are the three points in the article that I think are genuinely helpful: - Times New Roman works better in narrow columns than wide columns. - Some fonts look good on screen and bad on paper, and vice versa. - Lighter fonts work better with small margins, blacker fonts work better with large margins. The article seems quite long for relatively little content.
  - tptacek 19y ago
    Consider that you aren't his audience; his is a blog constellation that includes mostly young and amateur designers, where the notion of whether there are hard-and-fast rules for setting in serif or sans is in dispute. Lots of good programming posts are similarly unintelligible to people who don't code. Consider also that the notion of typesetting that he's discussing is different than yours: if you're a typical Hacker News reader, you want to know how to make a good looking web app template. A designer often gets many weeks for a single project, during which they may be working with the final content, and may very well print out several roughs and tack them to the wall to look at. The post quotes Bringhurst, and if you haven't already, you should go buy that book immediately. It's one of those rare books that manages to marry craft and science with evocative writing; compare, favorably, to Graham's "coiled up" functional programs stretched painfully into imperative code from On Lisp.