4 ms·

Those aged/distressed fonts with little nicks / chunks missing / broken bits, look fine until there are two or more of the same letter in a sentence. Then I can

Those aged/distressed fonts with little nicks / chunks missing / broken bits, look fine until there are two or more of the same letter in a sentence. Then I cant help but notice that the same letters are aged/distressed in exactly the same way.. It seems like a really obvious issue that clearly undermines the effect they are going for.

xoa 4y ago
Agreed, that's definitely the big glaring issue to me too. Normally all letters being identical is a good expected thing, but for an aged look it falls flat because aging doesn't uniformly affect every single letter across pages and books of course. And our brains are pretty good at doing pattern recognition/outline shape comparison with stuff that is side-by-side, so once you notice it niggles a bit. Now that I think about it that seems like a product which should exist, be it standalone or as a plug-in, where "aging" could be soft-applied (not talking rasterizing the text then applying filters to the pixels themselves) to any arbitrary string of text either with a certain amount of random noise or via algorithms that would simulate various kinds of environmental effects on stone/wood/papyrus/vellum/paper. It's almost certainly not worth having that kind of complexity in fonts/typesetting engines themselves though the typegeek in me thinks it'd be pretty dang fun.
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  I've seen a ton of fonts out there abuse ligatures (Chartwell, Bullshit Sans). I wonder if something like that could be done for pseudorandomness... use a different texture depending on the text on either side.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    You could in theory do just that, but the amount of work to achieve that would be staggering, automated or not. What we really need in this world is procedural/generated-on-the-fly fonts, where you setup how the font is suppose to react to X and then use that.
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      Knuth's METAFONT might help, but it never took off because font designers aren't mathematicians or programmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/the-concept-of-a-meta-font.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/...
      - robocat 4y ago
        There is also https://spectral.prototypo.io/ https://spectral.prototypo.io/ which was an unsuccessful startup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911784
- everyone 4y ago
  I would be suprised if such a thing doesnt exist in the fancy programs professional movie poster making people are using nowadays. If not, then totally sounds like a product with a clear business case, customer #1 James Cameron.

xoa 4y ago

Agreed, that's definitely the big glaring issue to me too. Normally all letters being identical is a good expected thing, but for an aged look it falls flat because aging doesn't uniformly affect every single letter across pages and books of course. And our brains are pretty good at doing pattern recognition/outline shape comparison with stuff that is side-by-side, so once you notice it niggles a bit. Now that I think about it that seems like a product which should exist, be it standalone or as a plug-in, where "aging" could be soft-applied (not talking rasterizing the text then applying filters to the pixels themselves) to any arbitrary string of text either with a certain amount of random noise or via algorithms that would simulate various kinds of environmental effects on stone/wood/papyrus/vellum/paper. It's almost certainly not worth having that kind of complexity in fonts/typesetting engines themselves though the typegeek in me thinks it'd be pretty dang fun.

capitainenemo 4y ago
I've seen a ton of fonts out there abuse ligatures (Chartwell, Bullshit Sans). I wonder if something like that could be done for pseudorandomness... use a different texture depending on the text on either side.
- capableweb 4y ago
  You could in theory do just that, but the amount of work to achieve that would be staggering, automated or not. What we really need in this world is procedural/generated-on-the-fly fonts, where you setup how the font is suppose to react to X and then use that.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    Knuth's METAFONT might help, but it never took off because font designers aren't mathematicians or programmers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/the-concept-of-a-meta-font.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/...
    - robocat 4y ago
      There is also https://spectral.prototypo.io/ https://spectral.prototypo.io/ which was an unsuccessful startup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911784
everyone 4y ago
I would be suprised if such a thing doesnt exist in the fancy programs professional movie poster making people are using nowadays. If not, then totally sounds like a product with a clear business case, customer #1 James Cameron.