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What's up with these typophiles? They walk around thinking they're the most important member of the club. The truth is, design is complicated because it is not

What's up with these typophiles? They walk around thinking they're the most important member of the club. The truth is, design is complicated because it is not (yet) a science. Typography is important, but it is not king. What we really need to do is get inside the user's head and model their thought process. This is probably impossible, so we should do the next best thing: learn empathy. Be the user. Not some one-trick pony.

qq66 16y ago
Seriously. I think typography is the subject with the highest ratio of (stuff written about it on the Internet):(importance).
defen 16y ago
I also find typophiles annoying. I've given some thought to the matter and I think that it's a combination of two factors: 1) Fundamentally typophiles are geeks, and "typophilia" is no different than any of the myriad other intellectual obsessions that geeks will develop. 2) Designers are accorded much more respect than traditional geeks, in part because it's much easier for the layperson to appreciate their work. (designers also tend to be better dressed, better looking, and more sociable than other geeks). So in a certain sense it comes down to jealousy - here are people doing the same basic thing I do, but they're perceived as cool whereas I'm perceived as perhaps a little odd. That said, it doesn't help when they refer refer to my people as "flash boys and neck beards".
- iuguy 16y ago
  I wouldn't class designers as geeks to be honest. They use a particular subset of computing technologies to achieve a goal but are hardly limited to the digital medium. To call them geeks is to tar them with the same brush. Sure, some designers may be computer savvy and may in themselves be designers who are also geeks, but being a designer neither requires the traditional qualities of a geek.
  - chrischen 16y ago
    I don't think geeks necessarily mean computer geeks.
    - sudont 16y ago
      I am compelled to link to Dorothy Gambrell's tidy comic detailing the difference between geek, nerd and dork. http://catandgirl.com/?p=1341 http://catandgirl.com/?p=1341
oloolo 16y ago
1. Typohiles are megalomanics 2. We should read minds, but that would be megalomaniac 3. Let's just be a user then No. Users are people with an opinion. User experience designers are those who deal with all those user opinions and try to find the best compromise. User experience designers are engineers. http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/can-experience-be-designed-2/ http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/can-experience-be-des... But that's not what the article is about.
potatolicious 16y ago
Typography is precise, but slow in terms of comprehension. That's actually one of the things that worries me about Windows Phone 7's UI - it's very heavily text-based, which facilitates first-time usage (no getting things wrong there, unless your text really sucks), but punishes expert/frequent users. Text takes up a disproportionate amount of screen real estate compared to, say, iconography. They are also harder to scan, their location harder to keep consistent (due to document flow), and given that most people's memories are visual first and linguistic second, harder to remember and make an impression upon. On small devices, loading your page up with text is generally a bad idea. Obviously unavoidable in certain circumstances (say: reading an article), but there are a lot of things out there in the design world that isn't typography.
- ciniglio 16y ago
  I actually think that text has a fairly high information density rate compared to iconography. The perfect example of this is the command line. Power users tend to prefer a terminal because it is more concise than clicking around in a gui. I think that the problem lies in the fact that we have very few universal icons, especially for something like a phone interface. This means that while an icon for 'unread mail' would be smaller than the text describing it, no one would know what it meant without a description. Since there is no real limit to the actions we want our phones or computers to perform, text seems to be the way to go. Of course, some actions (e.g. save, cut, paste) have icons that have been in use for so long that it might be fair to call them universal. You can see an example of what I mean in most mac os x applications, where the buttons generally have icons with labels. Disclaimer: I work for microsoft, but nowhere related to the phone team. Edit: My point is more about interfaces than design. I know nothing about typography.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    I suspect that writing text to convey information to the computer (command line) has very different trade-offs than programs presenting information textually to users, and lumping them together probably misses important details. Also, textual interfaces usually make it easy to say, "now group that set of operations and give it a convenient name" (scripting), while graphically interfaces usually don't, and users are stuck with whatever individual actions the UI designers added to menus. Neither tendency is inherent in using text or graphics, but it usually works out that way. I've wondered about this for a while, but text vs. graphic interface discussions ("keyboard vs. mouse", which often overlap) usually miss that distinction, much like they do "approachable to new users" vs. "efficient for committed long-term users".

qq66 16y ago

Seriously. I think typography is the subject with the highest ratio of (stuff written about it on the Internet):(importance).

defen 16y ago

I also find typophiles annoying. I've given some thought to the matter and I think that it's a combination of two factors: 1) Fundamentally typophiles are geeks, and "typophilia" is no different than any of the myriad other intellectual obsessions that geeks will develop. 2) Designers are accorded much more respect than traditional geeks, in part because it's much easier for the layperson to appreciate their work. (designers also tend to be better dressed, better looking, and more sociable than other geeks). So in a certain sense it comes down to jealousy - here are people doing the same basic thing I do, but they're perceived as cool whereas I'm perceived as perhaps a little odd. That said, it doesn't help when they refer refer to my people as "flash boys and neck beards".

iuguy 16y ago
I wouldn't class designers as geeks to be honest. They use a particular subset of computing technologies to achieve a goal but are hardly limited to the digital medium. To call them geeks is to tar them with the same brush. Sure, some designers may be computer savvy and may in themselves be designers who are also geeks, but being a designer neither requires the traditional qualities of a geek.
- chrischen 16y ago
  I don't think geeks necessarily mean computer geeks.
  - sudont 16y ago
    I am compelled to link to Dorothy Gambrell's tidy comic detailing the difference between geek, nerd and dork. http://catandgirl.com/?p=1341 http://catandgirl.com/?p=1341

oloolo 16y ago

1. Typohiles are megalomanics 2. We should read minds, but that would be megalomaniac 3. Let's just be a user then No. Users are people with an opinion. User experience designers are those who deal with all those user opinions and try to find the best compromise. User experience designers are engineers. http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/can-experience-be-designed-2/ http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/can-experience-be-des... But that's not what the article is about.

potatolicious 16y ago

Typography is precise, but slow in terms of comprehension. That's actually one of the things that worries me about Windows Phone 7's UI - it's very heavily text-based, which facilitates first-time usage (no getting things wrong there, unless your text really sucks), but punishes expert/frequent users. Text takes up a disproportionate amount of screen real estate compared to, say, iconography. They are also harder to scan, their location harder to keep consistent (due to document flow), and given that most people's memories are visual first and linguistic second, harder to remember and make an impression upon. On small devices, loading your page up with text is generally a bad idea. Obviously unavoidable in certain circumstances (say: reading an article), but there are a lot of things out there in the design world that isn't typography.

ciniglio 16y ago
I actually think that text has a fairly high information density rate compared to iconography. The perfect example of this is the command line. Power users tend to prefer a terminal because it is more concise than clicking around in a gui. I think that the problem lies in the fact that we have very few universal icons, especially for something like a phone interface. This means that while an icon for 'unread mail' would be smaller than the text describing it, no one would know what it meant without a description. Since there is no real limit to the actions we want our phones or computers to perform, text seems to be the way to go. Of course, some actions (e.g. save, cut, paste) have icons that have been in use for so long that it might be fair to call them universal. You can see an example of what I mean in most mac os x applications, where the buttons generally have icons with labels. Disclaimer: I work for microsoft, but nowhere related to the phone team. Edit: My point is more about interfaces than design. I know nothing about typography.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  I suspect that writing text to convey information to the computer (command line) has very different trade-offs than programs presenting information textually to users, and lumping them together probably misses important details. Also, textual interfaces usually make it easy to say, "now group that set of operations and give it a convenient name" (scripting), while graphically interfaces usually don't, and users are stuck with whatever individual actions the UI designers added to menus. Neither tendency is inherent in using text or graphics, but it usually works out that way. I've wondered about this for a while, but text vs. graphic interface discussions ("keyboard vs. mouse", which often overlap) usually miss that distinction, much like they do "approachable to new users" vs. "efficient for committed long-term users".