8 ms·

Fonts for Complex Data

323 points by privong 8y ago

saintPirelli 8y ago
There is actually regulation in the EU (and I suppose other countries) that requires a minimum height of the letters in the ingredient list. The wider typeface would not satisfy these regulations. http://www.foodlabels.co.uk/food_information_regulations_2014.html http://www.foodlabels.co.uk/food_information_regulations_201...
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  That document doesn’t look to make any mention of the width of the letters. That seems a rather substantial omission! For the wider-but-not-quite-so-tall typeface is much easier to read.
- tcfunk 8y ago
  I love examples of laws like this which, while well intentioned, actually do harm to their own objective.
  - saintPirelli 8y ago
    I work in public pointless bureaucracy. Believe me there are more of those than laws that work as intended.
ggg9990 8y ago
This is written by Jonathan Hoefler. Not reading it on principle.
- jgtrosh 8y ago
  I chose to stop reading after the first example document with tasteful light gray text on delicate light gray background
  - Numberwang 8y ago
    I agree. When will this madness end?
  - m_eiman 8y ago
    Do you mean this image? https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/designing-captions.png https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/des... It's only the lower part of the image that's of interest as an example; to use low contrast on the (mostly irrelevant) upper part of the image makes it easier to focus on the part that's discussed in the text. IMHO.
    - jgtrosh 8y ago
      You might be right. Nevertheless it seems distracting on a typography focused article, while the same focus could have been drawn without affecting the look of the document. Also the actual first image bothers me in a similar way: the colors seem to blend into the background. I concede it might not be a very valid reason to give up on the article but since it seems to be an ad for a set of products I find it fitting to judge it on appearance.
- jenskanis 8y ago
  For those who might not know everyone in the industry: why not?
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoefler_%26_Co.#Conflict_between_Hoefler_and_Frere-Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoefler_%26_Co.#Conflict_betwe... What was perceived by one partner and onlookers (perhaps based on the name) as a 50/50 partnership turned out to be anything but.
  - panic 8y ago
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-15/font-war-inside-the-design-worlds-20-million-divorce https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-15/font-war-...
  - lstamour 8y ago
    And https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=ydQwzs4EZjDkplRrBmkkwA==&system=prod https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet... While the lawsuit seems very one-sided, there are plently of lessons to be learned here... and I’m not sure how any of it applies to a single article.
- yani 8y ago
  Yes, who is this person and why would you not read it. It seems quite informative on first read.
- turboturbo 8y ago
  I can see why your comment is being downvoted — the lack of explanation makes it seem more provocative — but I agree with your sentiment. Although a settlement was reached in the H&FJ lawsuit, which probably involved Tobias Frere-Jones receiving payment of some sorts, it’s hard to see Hoefler profiting from work that he (morally, at least) stole.
mrmondo 8y ago
Im fairly sure it was typography.com is notorious for tracking your movements around the Internet, obviously this is common behaviour from web font providers but I seem to remember this group being especially intertwined with ad tracking *citation needed but currently walking and typing!
- lstamour 8y ago
  Their privacy policy implies it does https://www.typography.com/home/privacy.php https://www.typography.com/home/privacy.php but their marketing claims otherwise https://www.typography.com/cloud/the-network/ https://www.typography.com/cloud/the-network/ I haven’t personally investigated... and I’m not sure how one would go about it, given how, at least without GDPR, I suspect more and more confirmation of analytics data between parties will happen server-side for performance reasons. Of all third-party content, SaaS and font networks would already have to track everyone with unique IDs if invoicing based on usage, but it’s damning if your paid service provider says it collects and shares data (presumably about your users) with advertising companies in the privacy policy. As if they aren’t making enough money from you? Or maybe it’s to support tiers of service?
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I dig the article (mostly about small fonts, a lot of GDPR and cookie warnings and such are written as notes / small fonts and are hard to read for example), but at the same time I noticed the top logo, which read "Fontsby Hoefler&Co.". Who's Fontsby? Bit of an odd name, bit posh. oh wait, there's a space there.
- lozf 8y ago
  It's a keming issue.
firmgently 8y ago
Wow their side menu (Apps, Branding, Choosing Fonts) has such horribly low contrast (1.5 - 2, depending on where you measure the text colour; it's small type so due to antialiasing there isn't really a single predominant colour when you zoom in to a screen grab) it's almost unreadable. Legibility is the most important part of typography. I'm not suggesting this should detract from the article as the writer is probably not the person who made that design decision (EDIT: I think the article's very good actually), but it's pretty weak coming from a site called typography.com.
- Hnrobert42 8y ago
  How do you measure the contrast? With a tool or by eye? Whst is considered an acceptable amount?
  - camdenreslink 8y ago
    This is a good tool: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ 4.5:1 is considered good for body text.
  - sbr464 8y ago
    I've been using an app called Contrast for a while now, it's really convenient. https://usecontrast.com/ https://usecontrast.com/ If anyone ends up using it, be sure to check the support page, there are some useful power tips https://usecontrast.com/support https://usecontrast.com/support
  - rootlocus 8y ago
    The Google Chrome color picker for `color` CSS rules also displays the contrast ratio of the text in relation with the background color.
  - a_e_k 8y ago
    Here's the objective criteria that W3C recommends for measuring it: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G18.html#G18-procedure https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G18.html#G18-procedure
ktpsns 8y ago
I enjoy typography and design, but I don't like the blind realisation of obviously bad design decisions. Take https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/designing-ingredients-3.png https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/des... -- the ingredient list is sick itself, it should not be an unformatted block of text but at least a proper list. They are designers, why don't they invent an informative way to display ingredients? My feeling is that they have to support the attempt of their client to hide information. I would not want to do such a designers job, supporting bad intentions.
- stuntkite 8y ago
  Not that someone won't always be there to do it, but about six years ago I decided as a designer / engineer, that I'm accountable and won't purposefully implement dark UX patterns after being asked to add a feature to a deposition platform that I was working on to score "truthfulness" of statements based off "microtremmor lie detection". A totally bullshit science. I fell out with my cofounders over that and left the company. Also no weapons or oil and gas. If we all just said we wouldn't do shit like that, I think we can make changes. I mean someone's still going to design discount toilet paper rolls that are 5 sheets but look like a full roll, and I guess cram the text together on bathroom cleaners so you don't know how you're poisoning yourself or that two almost identical looking cleaners contain ammonia vs. bleach so you mustard gas your roommate. Design matters! Refuse to make crap!
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    http://www.designishistory.com/1960/first-things-first/ http://www.designishistory.com/1960/first-things-first/
  - hypertexthero 8y ago
    Thank you for your decision. From Milton Glaser’s essay, Ambiguity & Truth: > Let me read you the road to hell, a series of questions that become more difficulty the deeper you go. the first couple are easy, would you— > 1. Design a package to look larger on the shelf? > 2. Do an ad for a slow-moving, boring film to make it seem like a lighthearted comedy? > 3. Design a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it’s been in business for a long time? > 4. Design a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repellent? > 5. Design an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring? > 6. Design a package for a cereal aimed at children, which has low nutritional value and high sugar content? > 7. Design a line of t-shirts for a manufacturer who employs child labor? > 8. Design a promotion for a diet product that you know doesn’t work? > 9. Design an ad for a political candidate whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public? > 10. Design a brochure piece for an SuV that turned over more frequently than average in emergency conditions and caused the death of 150 people? > 11. Design an ad for a product whose continued use might cause the user’s death? > When i gave this test to students between the ages of 21 to 28, i discovered that in a group of 20, 3 or 4 of them were willing to go all the way—that is, participate in advertising a product whose use might cause the user’s death. these were generally idealistic young people as yet seemingly uncorrupted by money or professional life. However, they drew the line at harming their family, friends or neighbors. https://www.miltonglaser.com/files/Essays-Ambiguity-8192.pdf https://www.miltonglaser.com/files/Essays-Ambiguity-8192.pdf
hestefisk 8y ago
Death to all pie charts!
- phosfox 8y ago
  Why?
TimMurnaghan 8y ago
Not really that much in the article except for some OK advice on sizes and superscripts. Overall I was left with an impression of how American it looked. It was like a plastic woodgrain dashboard. I guess that shows how much design aesthetics come into it - but that's OK if you know you want to look American.
- MalcolmPF 8y ago
  Interesting! I don't immediately perceive anything distinctly American about it, but I'm definitely biased. Could you provide any examples of what you'd consider non-american data design, if only for my personal design curiosity. :)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
z3t4 8y ago
Most dash-boards are not that useful, but damn they sell, so go with as much eye-candy as possible. Use futuristic, 3d, moving, real time graphs, etc. If it's something serious though, concentrate on formatting and spacing, and pick a boring simple font. Make it neat and stylish, but don't add distractions. Give focus on the content and what is important. Use spacing instead of contrast.
mmjaa 8y ago
Shades of FF Chartwell, which is one of those amazing things you just think to yourself "well, this is going to take over the world of design and GUI's and so on", only .. for some reason, it doesn't: https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ "FF Chartwell is a set of three fonts* that together create a remarkable set of tools for creating bar, line, and pie charts. It uses OpenType ligatures to perform its magic – a series of numbers can be transformed into clean, perfectly rendered graphs, as you type." Having used Chartwell for a few projects, I'm fairly convinced that this ligature trick is the way all GUI's should be done. In fact I've got this hypothesis going, that every GUI toolkit/method is eventually just going to re-invent ligatures and type... ;)
- taeric 8y ago
  Why? That seemed a trick in search of a problem. I mean, I get having a small dsl for describing charts. That is why we have quite a plethora of them. They usually have more complexity than you'd hope, because it is a complex problem. But spark lines, you might protest. Of ridiculous niche value and really need to be super high resolution. The point is to pack a ton of density. If you are just showing a few numbers, consider just showing the numbers. And if you haven't used the likes of metapost, graphviz, etc., Give them a try.
  - mmjaa 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm quite familiar with these toolkits. (Been at it 30 years, yo.) The thing about the ligature trick, and fonts in general, and more specifically the packing of known functional GUI elements into a broader ligature description, is that its human readable/comprehendible without also requiring a great deal of 'programming'. Well, in fact Chartwell "is" programming, or at least coding (not Turing..) of information in a reproducible way - and the fact that we use the language of glyphs as a GUI metaphor, is also appealing. My affinity for this approach is that it is tied to human symbol-making in an intrinsic, self-describing way; whereas a technical GUI system might consists of a multi-variate collection of abstractions, putting it all into glyphs and ligatures ties it into our most basic of operational agilities, reading and writing. Not, compiling, hacking, code, transmogrifying, mutating, extending, abstraction, tool-pushing, etc., but rather "describe this in glyphs/ligatures like every language ever, or GTFO>.." I mean, WIMP has its thing, and touch and mobile too, but I do wonder if there isn't something to a pure graphemes and symbols based mode of interaction... which I would argue is where we are heading, with our multiple-gigabyte OS updates, anyway .. when we could nevertheless be doing it in <128k.
baldfat 8y ago
Legal status of fonts and typefaces is INSANE. The cost of some of these fonts in $199 https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview/ https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview/ And well you can kind of have a strange position in copyright law in the US and internationally. The cost of these fonts are up in the hundreds of dollars. Yet in US we have a mixed bag. Officially it is: > Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer). The idea that typefaces (rather than fonts, which are computer software) cannot be copyrighted in the United States is black letter law. 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e). Under U.S. law, typefaces and their letter forms or glyphs are considered utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in protecting their creative elements. BUT we have cases where judgement has been awarded to Adobe and Target is a defendant in a lawsuit for their use of a unlicensed font in a video. I am conflicted. I love having fonts and I love open source, BUT I also appreciate the technical and artistic achievement these fonts produce. The BEST font for me has been Cardo and it has had the best license ever http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html I studied several "ancient languages" and a font Cardo saved my academic life by making an awesome unicode font for my languages. One font for English, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and others. Before that I had to write my papers in Latex just to cover the languages or transliterate them (ugh). Here is a font author that I have used and even purchased fonts from. She now has a donation based price model. https://www.dafont.com/kimberly-geswein.d1468 https://www.dafont.com/kimberly-geswein.d1468 Hoping she has success with this model and switches more to this model and it works for everyone. Microsoft's Font FAQ - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
- tptacek 8y ago
  It is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, highly-skilled work to create typefaces in the ranges of weights at the scale discussed in this article. At the same time, literally nobody _needs_ an fancy custom typeface; you can accomplish any expressive task you have, competently, with the fonts accompanying your OS. Expensive typefaces are a form of fashion. If they light you up (they do for me!), pay for them. Otherwise, use free fonts. There's really no insanity here. People pay through the nose for mechanical watches, handbags, shoes, furniture, orchids, and chefs knives, despite perfectly satisficing alternatives at minimal cost. It would be weird to complain about the insanity of regulations that allows Sakai to charge $5,000 for a knife when equivalently functional knives are available for $100. We all understand what's happening when people buy them. Same with typefaces.
tracker1 8y ago
Many of the fonts mentioned seem to be commercial. There are plenty of free/floss fonts that have similar features. Montserrat, Roboto, Noto and Open Sans are particularly good.

323 points by privong 8y ago

There is actually regulation in the EU (and I suppose other countries) that requires a minimum height of the letters in the ingredient list. The wider typeface would not satisfy these regulations. http://www.foodlabels.co.uk/food_information_regulations_2014.html http://www.foodlabels.co.uk/food_information_regulations_201...

chrismorgan 8y ago
That document doesn’t look to make any mention of the width of the letters. That seems a rather substantial omission! For the wider-but-not-quite-so-tall typeface is much easier to read.
tcfunk 8y ago
I love examples of laws like this which, while well intentioned, actually do harm to their own objective.
- saintPirelli 8y ago
  I work in public pointless bureaucracy. Believe me there are more of those than laws that work as intended.

ggg9990 8y ago

This is written by Jonathan Hoefler. Not reading it on principle.

jgtrosh 8y ago
I chose to stop reading after the first example document with tasteful light gray text on delicate light gray background
- Numberwang 8y ago
  I agree. When will this madness end?
- m_eiman 8y ago
  Do you mean this image? https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/designing-captions.png https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/des... It's only the lower part of the image that's of interest as an example; to use low contrast on the (mostly irrelevant) upper part of the image makes it easier to focus on the part that's discussed in the text. IMHO.
  - jgtrosh 8y ago
    You might be right. Nevertheless it seems distracting on a typography focused article, while the same focus could have been drawn without affecting the look of the document. Also the actual first image bothers me in a similar way: the colors seem to blend into the background. I concede it might not be a very valid reason to give up on the article but since it seems to be an ad for a set of products I find it fitting to judge it on appearance.
jenskanis 8y ago
For those who might not know everyone in the industry: why not?
- robin_reala 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoefler_%26_Co.#Conflict_between_Hoefler_and_Frere-Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoefler_%26_Co.#Conflict_betwe... What was perceived by one partner and onlookers (perhaps based on the name) as a 50/50 partnership turned out to be anything but.
- panic 8y ago
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-15/font-war-inside-the-design-worlds-20-million-divorce https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-15/font-war-...
- lstamour 8y ago
  And https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet?documentId=ydQwzs4EZjDkplRrBmkkwA==&system=prod https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet... While the lawsuit seems very one-sided, there are plently of lessons to be learned here... and I’m not sure how any of it applies to a single article.
yani 8y ago
Yes, who is this person and why would you not read it. It seems quite informative on first read.
turboturbo 8y ago
I can see why your comment is being downvoted — the lack of explanation makes it seem more provocative — but I agree with your sentiment. Although a settlement was reached in the H&FJ lawsuit, which probably involved Tobias Frere-Jones receiving payment of some sorts, it’s hard to see Hoefler profiting from work that he (morally, at least) stole.

mrmondo 8y ago

Im fairly sure it was typography.com is notorious for tracking your movements around the Internet, obviously this is common behaviour from web font providers but I seem to remember this group being especially intertwined with ad tracking *citation needed but currently walking and typing!

lstamour 8y ago
Their privacy policy implies it does https://www.typography.com/home/privacy.php https://www.typography.com/home/privacy.php but their marketing claims otherwise https://www.typography.com/cloud/the-network/ https://www.typography.com/cloud/the-network/ I haven’t personally investigated... and I’m not sure how one would go about it, given how, at least without GDPR, I suspect more and more confirmation of analytics data between parties will happen server-side for performance reasons. Of all third-party content, SaaS and font networks would already have to track everyone with unique IDs if invoicing based on usage, but it’s damning if your paid service provider says it collects and shares data (presumably about your users) with advertising companies in the privacy policy. As if they aren’t making enough money from you? Or maybe it’s to support tiers of service?

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

I dig the article (mostly about small fonts, a lot of GDPR and cookie warnings and such are written as notes / small fonts and are hard to read for example), but at the same time I noticed the top logo, which read "Fontsby Hoefler&Co.". Who's Fontsby? Bit of an odd name, bit posh. oh wait, there's a space there.

lozf 8y ago
It's a keming issue.

firmgently 8y ago

Wow their side menu (Apps, Branding, Choosing Fonts) has such horribly low contrast (1.5 - 2, depending on where you measure the text colour; it's small type so due to antialiasing there isn't really a single predominant colour when you zoom in to a screen grab) it's almost unreadable. Legibility is the most important part of typography. I'm not suggesting this should detract from the article as the writer is probably not the person who made that design decision (EDIT: I think the article's very good actually), but it's pretty weak coming from a site called typography.com.

Hnrobert42 8y ago
How do you measure the contrast? With a tool or by eye? Whst is considered an acceptable amount?
- camdenreslink 8y ago
  This is a good tool: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ 4.5:1 is considered good for body text.
- sbr464 8y ago
  I've been using an app called Contrast for a while now, it's really convenient. https://usecontrast.com/ https://usecontrast.com/ If anyone ends up using it, be sure to check the support page, there are some useful power tips https://usecontrast.com/support https://usecontrast.com/support
- rootlocus 8y ago
  The Google Chrome color picker for `color` CSS rules also displays the contrast ratio of the text in relation with the background color.
- a_e_k 8y ago
  Here's the objective criteria that W3C recommends for measuring it: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G18.html#G18-procedure https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G18.html#G18-procedure

ktpsns 8y ago

I enjoy typography and design, but I don't like the blind realisation of obviously bad design decisions. Take https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/designing-ingredients-3.png https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/des... -- the ingredient list is sick itself, it should not be an unformatted block of text but at least a proper list. They are designers, why don't they invent an informative way to display ingredients? My feeling is that they have to support the attempt of their client to hide information. I would not want to do such a designers job, supporting bad intentions.

stuntkite 8y ago
Not that someone won't always be there to do it, but about six years ago I decided as a designer / engineer, that I'm accountable and won't purposefully implement dark UX patterns after being asked to add a feature to a deposition platform that I was working on to score "truthfulness" of statements based off "microtremmor lie detection". A totally bullshit science. I fell out with my cofounders over that and left the company. Also no weapons or oil and gas. If we all just said we wouldn't do shit like that, I think we can make changes. I mean someone's still going to design discount toilet paper rolls that are 5 sheets but look like a full roll, and I guess cram the text together on bathroom cleaners so you don't know how you're poisoning yourself or that two almost identical looking cleaners contain ammonia vs. bleach so you mustard gas your roommate. Design matters! Refuse to make crap!
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  http://www.designishistory.com/1960/first-things-first/ http://www.designishistory.com/1960/first-things-first/
- hypertexthero 8y ago
  Thank you for your decision. From Milton Glaser’s essay, Ambiguity & Truth: > Let me read you the road to hell, a series of questions that become more difficulty the deeper you go. the first couple are easy, would you— > 1. Design a package to look larger on the shelf? > 2. Do an ad for a slow-moving, boring film to make it seem like a lighthearted comedy? > 3. Design a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it’s been in business for a long time? > 4. Design a jacket for a book whose sexual content you find personally repellent? > 5. Design an advertising campaign for a company with a history of known discrimination in minority hiring? > 6. Design a package for a cereal aimed at children, which has low nutritional value and high sugar content? > 7. Design a line of t-shirts for a manufacturer who employs child labor? > 8. Design a promotion for a diet product that you know doesn’t work? > 9. Design an ad for a political candidate whose policies you believe would be harmful to the general public? > 10. Design a brochure piece for an SuV that turned over more frequently than average in emergency conditions and caused the death of 150 people? > 11. Design an ad for a product whose continued use might cause the user’s death? > When i gave this test to students between the ages of 21 to 28, i discovered that in a group of 20, 3 or 4 of them were willing to go all the way—that is, participate in advertising a product whose use might cause the user’s death. these were generally idealistic young people as yet seemingly uncorrupted by money or professional life. However, they drew the line at harming their family, friends or neighbors. https://www.miltonglaser.com/files/Essays-Ambiguity-8192.pdf https://www.miltonglaser.com/files/Essays-Ambiguity-8192.pdf

hestefisk 8y ago

Death to all pie charts!

phosfox 8y ago
Why?

TimMurnaghan 8y ago

Not really that much in the article except for some OK advice on sizes and superscripts. Overall I was left with an impression of how American it looked. It was like a plastic woodgrain dashboard. I guess that shows how much design aesthetics come into it - but that's OK if you know you want to look American.

MalcolmPF 8y ago
Interesting! I don't immediately perceive anything distinctly American about it, but I'm definitely biased. Could you provide any examples of what you'd consider non-american data design, if only for my personal design curiosity. :)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

z3t4 8y ago

Most dash-boards are not that useful, but damn they sell, so go with as much eye-candy as possible. Use futuristic, 3d, moving, real time graphs, etc. If it's something serious though, concentrate on formatting and spacing, and pick a boring simple font. Make it neat and stylish, but don't add distractions. Give focus on the content and what is important. Use spacing instead of contrast.

mmjaa 8y ago

Shades of FF Chartwell, which is one of those amazing things you just think to yourself "well, this is going to take over the world of design and GUI's and so on", only .. for some reason, it doesn't: https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ "FF Chartwell is a set of three fonts* that together create a remarkable set of tools for creating bar, line, and pie charts. It uses OpenType ligatures to perform its magic – a series of numbers can be transformed into clean, perfectly rendered graphs, as you type." Having used Chartwell for a few projects, I'm fairly convinced that this ligature trick is the way all GUI's should be done. In fact I've got this hypothesis going, that every GUI toolkit/method is eventually just going to re-invent ligatures and type... ;)

taeric 8y ago
Why? That seemed a trick in search of a problem. I mean, I get having a small dsl for describing charts. That is why we have quite a plethora of them. They usually have more complexity than you'd hope, because it is a complex problem. But spark lines, you might protest. Of ridiculous niche value and really need to be super high resolution. The point is to pack a ton of density. If you are just showing a few numbers, consider just showing the numbers. And if you haven't used the likes of metapost, graphviz, etc., Give them a try.
- mmjaa 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm quite familiar with these toolkits. (Been at it 30 years, yo.) The thing about the ligature trick, and fonts in general, and more specifically the packing of known functional GUI elements into a broader ligature description, is that its human readable/comprehendible without also requiring a great deal of 'programming'. Well, in fact Chartwell "is" programming, or at least coding (not Turing..) of information in a reproducible way - and the fact that we use the language of glyphs as a GUI metaphor, is also appealing. My affinity for this approach is that it is tied to human symbol-making in an intrinsic, self-describing way; whereas a technical GUI system might consists of a multi-variate collection of abstractions, putting it all into glyphs and ligatures ties it into our most basic of operational agilities, reading and writing. Not, compiling, hacking, code, transmogrifying, mutating, extending, abstraction, tool-pushing, etc., but rather "describe this in glyphs/ligatures like every language ever, or GTFO>.." I mean, WIMP has its thing, and touch and mobile too, but I do wonder if there isn't something to a pure graphemes and symbols based mode of interaction... which I would argue is where we are heading, with our multiple-gigabyte OS updates, anyway .. when we could nevertheless be doing it in <128k.

baldfat 8y ago

Legal status of fonts and typefaces is INSANE. The cost of some of these fonts in $199 https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview/ https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview/ And well you can kind of have a strange position in copyright law in the US and internationally. The cost of these fonts are up in the hundreds of dollars. Yet in US we have a mixed bag. Officially it is: > Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer). The idea that typefaces (rather than fonts, which are computer software) cannot be copyrighted in the United States is black letter law. 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e). Under U.S. law, typefaces and their letter forms or glyphs are considered utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in protecting their creative elements. BUT we have cases where judgement has been awarded to Adobe and Target is a defendant in a lawsuit for their use of a unlicensed font in a video. I am conflicted. I love having fonts and I love open source, BUT I also appreciate the technical and artistic achievement these fonts produce. The BEST font for me has been Cardo and it has had the best license ever http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html I studied several "ancient languages" and a font Cardo saved my academic life by making an awesome unicode font for my languages. One font for English, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and others. Before that I had to write my papers in Latex just to cover the languages or transliterate them (ugh). Here is a font author that I have used and even purchased fonts from. She now has a donation based price model. https://www.dafont.com/kimberly-geswein.d1468 https://www.dafont.com/kimberly-geswein.d1468 Hoping she has success with this model and switches more to this model and it works for everyone. Microsoft's Font FAQ - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/font-faq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

tptacek 8y ago
It is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, highly-skilled work to create typefaces in the ranges of weights at the scale discussed in this article. At the same time, literally nobody _needs_ an fancy custom typeface; you can accomplish any expressive task you have, competently, with the fonts accompanying your OS. Expensive typefaces are a form of fashion. If they light you up (they do for me!), pay for them. Otherwise, use free fonts. There's really no insanity here. People pay through the nose for mechanical watches, handbags, shoes, furniture, orchids, and chefs knives, despite perfectly satisficing alternatives at minimal cost. It would be weird to complain about the insanity of regulations that allows Sakai to charge $5,000 for a knife when equivalently functional knives are available for $100. We all understand what's happening when people buy them. Same with typefaces.

tracker1 8y ago

Many of the fonts mentioned seem to be commercial. There are plenty of free/floss fonts that have similar features. Montserrat, Roboto, Noto and Open Sans are particularly good.