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National Park Typeface (2019)
- dang 5y agoDiscussed at the time: National Park Typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20096120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20096120 - June 2019 (84 comments)
- duxup 5y agoI don’t really respond to typefaces like other do. Someone will point out Roboto or some other typeface and talk about how they like it , and I probably couldn’t tell it from any other. But typefaces with associations like this one actually get a response from me. Almost like there is something subliminal.
- mcast 5y agoI feel the same with Helvetica and NYC subway signs.
- npilk 5y agoI love the look, but the kerning seems to be a little off, especially for initial caps. Try typing “Testing” into the test box. Although I guess you’d mostly use all caps anyways if you wanted the full “park sign” effect.
- pimlottc 5y agoThere’s kerning issues in the capitals too, try “WAVE” or “HILLTOP”
- dylan604 5y agoIt seems to be okay in the Regular weight, but are definitely off for the other 3. It's these kinds of things that drive me bonkers. I recently went through months of trying out fonts for a brand, and the font ultimately chosen has a very similar issue. The font contains so many ligatures that get replaced automatically when certain character combinations are used, yet the basic spacing between letters is odd.
- giarc 5y agoYou are right, the space between the T and e definitely look off. And I typed in "Testing" without recalling what kerning meant.
- brewdad 5y agoTo me, the kerning issues are fine if you remember that this is meant to mimic a wooden sign carved with a router. For a typeface on a screen, it's all wrong but it does reflect the original use quite well.
- jarcane 5y ago> Editing your Cargo site is not yet supported for this browser; please use a recent version of Chrome or Safari. Yes, that certainly was surprising.
- cirrus3 5y ago(2019) https://www.theparkcatalog.com/blog/national-park-typeface-font/ https://www.theparkcatalog.com/blog/national-park-typeface-f...
- dang 5y agoYear added above. Thanks!
- alanbernstein 5y agoFor anyone who is interested in fonts that are literally intended to be used with router bits, there is an old font format called SHX (not the GIS thing) for this. I had been looking for such a thing for some time, and then I stumbled upon this post: https://forum.lightburnsoftware.com/t/shx-font-collection/25298 https://forum.lightburnsoftware.com/t/shx-font-collection/25.... It's useful for CNC tasks where you really want to minimize the total path length of a given string. This National Park typeface is kind of funny to me, because it originates from a similar practical constraint, but adapting it to the finite-width OTF format eliminates the practical aspect of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that; I realize it's still useful.
- hpoe 5y agoTook me several moments and a visit to the article to realize that this was not talking about a font that was somehow more efficient to be routed around network paths but was instead about a router tool and the bit on a router that makes impressions in wood.
- junon 5y agoI never realized the overlap in terminology before, that's quite interesting. "Router bits" and "shortest path".
- afandian 5y agoI believe the etymology of 'router' (sending network packets along a route) and 'router' (cutting wood) are different. They are pronounced differently in British English, at least. Rout, via Old English 'wrotan' https://www.etymonline.com/word/router https://www.etymonline.com/word/router Route, via Old French 'rute' https://www.etymonline.com/word/route https://www.etymonline.com/word/route
- mgdlbp 5y agoAlso 'router table' vs 'routing table'.
- 5y ago
- artificialLimbs 5y agoI don’t know anything about fonts. (Aside from irl routing…) Why do people use fonts with which you can’t tell I from l (and sometimes 1!)?
- freddie_mercury 5y agoBecause they're designed for use cases where that is never a problem.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoLook at the photos on the page to see actual usage in the real world--it's primarily on wooden trail markers in parks. You see them pointing the way and sometimes distance along a trail. You never see paragraphs of text or exposition.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoWell for certain cultures 1 and I were literally the same. That same culture also I believe didn't have lower case. Some brief searching brings me to some articles that show Latin lowercase came from monks/scholars under early French King Charlemagne. I guess if you're a monk manually recopying texts, simpler forms are better, even if some forms look like other forms. And it's definitely simpler/quicker to rout out a single stroke for I rather than give it the top and bottom lines.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoIf chosen well, it doesn't matter because context clues usually will eliminate confusion. You're likely to know that the lake path isn't I.4 miles long and that there's no 1 in 'Ranger Station'. In cases where there likely is to be confusion, spelling numbers out can make the intention known. But of course not everyone is so careful. There was a computer magazine back in the 80s that used a typeface for program listings that used the exact same glyph for 1 and l, which often could not be determined which one was correct strictly by context. Those were frustrating to try to debug.
- a9h74j 5y agoSemi-related: IIRC, Hershey vector fonts were used in HP Basic, as for HP plotters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts
- CleanCoder 5y agoI want to ask "does this really need its own domain" but can't figure out which of my multiple personalities is behind it.
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoYeah fairplay, it's actually a trend in recent years for typeface launches to have little marketing one off sites rather than have everything buried in catalog pages etc I suppose, demo on a larger/sharable scale etc.
- PostOnce 5y agoOne of my favorites: https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/ https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago(2019) Any reason for the share?