3 ms·

Counter-counterpoint (from someone who minored in typography): The purpose of a font is to be transparent as glass to the data being transmitted to your eyes. T

Counter-counterpoint (from someone who minored in typography): The purpose of a font is to be transparent as glass to the data being transmitted to your eyes. That is why if you notice a font and think it's stupid, the designer has made a mistake. Also if you notice a font because the designer left it in your default Times New Roman, that is a mistake. If a layout artist does a good job, you should never notice a font in the body of text you're reading. You should only notice a font occasionally if they really want to highlight a header or something. The font is a carrier of information - lighting on the stage, not the main actor. And it must never assume the role of an actor unless the designer specifically intends it to. If you're a coder, you understand this extremely well, implicitly: You set up your IDE fonts and colors in a way that helps you see through the code. You don't want to be looking at letter forms when you're trying to grok something. This is also the job of designers: Creating typefaces and layouts so that people see through the text, to the meaning. Leaving your website in the system standard font basically screams "I do not give a shit about what is written here" and also possibly "I run a quacky conspiracy website" and me and most people will scroll past your writing as quickly as possible. But there is no font that has no connotation. Every font has subconscious meanings to readers. Knowing what these are is important. Times New Roman screams, "I'm still using Windows 98". Whereas Comic Sans screams, "I work in a shitty real estate office". Simple examples. But the art is much deeper than that, because Optima Sans and Univers read very differently to the general public in ways that I could spend another few pages explaining. Every choice you make with type implies something that sits as a layer on top of the text that's written in that typography. But if you do your job well, you make the artisanship transparent, and allow the content to shine. This is why typography is a bit of a black art, and why it's powerful. It subtly influences people in ways they don't notice and don't understand, while they're absorbing written information. Dig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...

cout 1y ago
When I think of quirky conspiracy sites, I picture yellow-on-blue text and bright red text inside a blink element and links at the bottom to lycos and altavista.
- noduerme 1y ago
  This is the example of people trying too hard to make things "scream". Just plain Times New Roman or system font conveys a slightly different form of illiteracy...
  - dehugger 1y ago
    I love that use of "legible fonts" are a indicator of illiteracy for you.
    - noduerme 1y ago
      You can be the most literate person in the world, but if the way you present yourself is a bunch of flashing pink and purple Times New Roman on a lime green background, I'm going to assume you have nothing useful to tell me. There are a whole lotta legible fonts you can use that show you give a tiny fuck about how you come off to other people.
jbeninger 1y ago
I was with you up to "I do not give a shit" What font has been more tested for quick pass-through of data than the default system fonts? To me, this simply screams "This is the main body. You can find your information here"
- noduerme 1y ago
  No. System fonts have completely different reasons for existing than fonts you would want to use to communicate with the public. System fonts were initially created for legibility at certain screen resolutions, for dot-matrix printers, etc. But it's worse than that. What I'm trying to explain is that every typeface, even the most innocuous one gives subtle, subconscious cues to the readers. Every font. The associations can range from some childhood Disney movie to a font you saw at a hospital while you were having a really serious medical problem. But after 30 years of everyone on earth looking at system fonts, readers now get the cue when they see a system font that they are looking at a shitty MS Word document their boss just pinned to the felt board. Or else they assume the author did not bother or did not have the skill to make it look good. I'm a writer. I've written 6 novels. I love words and ideas, unencumbered by visuals. I've written at least 500k LoC on in my life, maybe double that, I don't know. That's all pure thought and logic. So I get the agitation: All I want to get across to you, my reader, my employer, is the information, my distilled ideas. That's all that's important. Read it or don't, I don't care, it's good and the logic works. I'm also trained as a designer. My first several jobs were in ad agencies, since I was 14 years old as an intern. How will people subconsciously interpret the ancillary visual aspects of this is something I learned early on: what will they construe? Because bad design can prejudice someone against a great piece of writing, and vice-versa. No visual thing you can make has zero cultural reference; everything you make that other people will see drags some bundle of pre-understood tropes into it. You can't make one without referencing some aspect of culture that affected you. The job of a designer - what makes a designer different from someone who just has aesthetic chops and can tell if a web page looks good - what constitutes the black arts of design - is to know every single cultural trope you are dragging in front of the customer's target audience and to understand how it will psychologically affect their state while they read the content, so you know how to trigger certain emotional resonances in them while they absorb the information the client is trying to get across. That's what "giving a shit" means in terms of communicating visually.
sgarland 1y ago
Rebuttal / question: what about Web1.0 sites that still exist? Is the subconscious connotation that they’re dated also carrying an air of wisdom? Or do the people using them simply not care? Personally, I feel as though I fall into the former camp, mixed with a healthy dose of nostalgia for my youth. Some examples, in no particular order: NIST’s page [0] on TIME Protocol (RFC868 [0.a]) - as an aside, TIME has to be the simplest (in terms of crude utilities; obviously there exist simpler ways to find the time) and most delightful way to find the current time that exists. See [4]. Great Britain’s National Grid Status [1] - warning, doesn’t render well on mobile. No Answers In Genesis [2] - a primer on evolution / someone’s personal vendetta against creationism. Good thing it’s Web1.0, because the latency to AUS would be horrible. Frank’s Compulsive Guide to Postal Addressss [3] - if you have any questions about the address system of any country in the world, it is answered here. An absolute treasure trove of information. 0: https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi 0.a: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc868 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc868 1: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ 2: https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/ https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/ 3: https://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/ https://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/ 4: Requires GNU coreutils for `od` and `date` - also if you get round-robined onto a server that doesn’t support TIME, try again. nc -w1 time.nist.gov 37 | od -An -tu4 -N4 --endian=big | awk '{print $1 - 2208988800}' | xargs -I{} date -d @{} # EDIT: you can further shrink this by doing everything in awk, assuming GNU awk nc -w1 time.nist.gov 37 | od -An -tu4 -N4 --endian=big | awk '{print strftime("%c", $1 - 2208988800}'
- noduerme 1y ago
  I think you can guess the boundaries of the design answer here. When you're experimenting with a new technology, everything looks very different and everything looks new. When you look at the net result of people experimenting with it 30 years later, you can see that they were all constrained by the same limitations, and in aggregate - despite many differences - everything takes on a recognizable aesthetic that was produced by the limitations of the day, the technology, the genre, whatever. These sites are all wildly different and extremely creative, yet they're all recognizably from the same decade or so. Okay. Now step back from that. Humans - you, me, everyone - have learned a very complex visual language from birth, where certain cues indicate certain things and trigger certain memories. If you show me a picture of a dude wearing bell bottoms, we're probably in the 70s. If it's a girl with a nose ring and a midriff showing it's probably 2005 - but there are smaller cues within that. 99% of people don't think about this consciously when they see an image, or a website, or whatever. They just associate it with a time or a genre. In design for the web, we've had decades of constraints come and go - we had Flash with its own weird aesthetics, Java embeds, etc. People remember a time and they associate a design style with that time, without really knowing why. So it's a question of choosing from that historical library and constructing something that makes people see what you want them to see. If you want them to associate something with the early 90s, then totally make it look like one of these pages. The thing I was taught in design school was to attempt to make design that was timeless. This is always kind of impossible - because you're limited technologically in ways you don't even realize at the time, and because you're always influenced by what's around you. But try to make something that will look, in 20 years, like it was new. Very hard to do. Why do it? Because in 20 years, you can always go and make funny vintage pastiche references to what people did 20 years ago. But it's quite hard to make anything that doesn't show its age.

cout 1y ago

When I think of quirky conspiracy sites, I picture yellow-on-blue text and bright red text inside a blink element and links at the bottom to lycos and altavista.

noduerme 1y ago
This is the example of people trying too hard to make things "scream". Just plain Times New Roman or system font conveys a slightly different form of illiteracy...
- dehugger 1y ago
  I love that use of "legible fonts" are a indicator of illiteracy for you.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    You can be the most literate person in the world, but if the way you present yourself is a bunch of flashing pink and purple Times New Roman on a lime green background, I'm going to assume you have nothing useful to tell me. There are a whole lotta legible fonts you can use that show you give a tiny fuck about how you come off to other people.

jbeninger 1y ago

I was with you up to "I do not give a shit" What font has been more tested for quick pass-through of data than the default system fonts? To me, this simply screams "This is the main body. You can find your information here"

noduerme 1y ago
No. System fonts have completely different reasons for existing than fonts you would want to use to communicate with the public. System fonts were initially created for legibility at certain screen resolutions, for dot-matrix printers, etc. But it's worse than that. What I'm trying to explain is that every typeface, even the most innocuous one gives subtle, subconscious cues to the readers. Every font. The associations can range from some childhood Disney movie to a font you saw at a hospital while you were having a really serious medical problem. But after 30 years of everyone on earth looking at system fonts, readers now get the cue when they see a system font that they are looking at a shitty MS Word document their boss just pinned to the felt board. Or else they assume the author did not bother or did not have the skill to make it look good. I'm a writer. I've written 6 novels. I love words and ideas, unencumbered by visuals. I've written at least 500k LoC on in my life, maybe double that, I don't know. That's all pure thought and logic. So I get the agitation: All I want to get across to you, my reader, my employer, is the information, my distilled ideas. That's all that's important. Read it or don't, I don't care, it's good and the logic works. I'm also trained as a designer. My first several jobs were in ad agencies, since I was 14 years old as an intern. How will people subconsciously interpret the ancillary visual aspects of this is something I learned early on: what will they construe? Because bad design can prejudice someone against a great piece of writing, and vice-versa. No visual thing you can make has zero cultural reference; everything you make that other people will see drags some bundle of pre-understood tropes into it. You can't make one without referencing some aspect of culture that affected you. The job of a designer - what makes a designer different from someone who just has aesthetic chops and can tell if a web page looks good - what constitutes the black arts of design - is to know every single cultural trope you are dragging in front of the customer's target audience and to understand how it will psychologically affect their state while they read the content, so you know how to trigger certain emotional resonances in them while they absorb the information the client is trying to get across. That's what "giving a shit" means in terms of communicating visually.

sgarland 1y ago

Rebuttal / question: what about Web1.0 sites that still exist? Is the subconscious connotation that they’re dated also carrying an air of wisdom? Or do the people using them simply not care? Personally, I feel as though I fall into the former camp, mixed with a healthy dose of nostalgia for my youth. Some examples, in no particular order: NIST’s page [0] on TIME Protocol (RFC868 [0.a]) - as an aside, TIME has to be the simplest (in terms of crude utilities; obviously there exist simpler ways to find the time) and most delightful way to find the current time that exists. See [4]. Great Britain’s National Grid Status [1] - warning, doesn’t render well on mobile. No Answers In Genesis [2] - a primer on evolution / someone’s personal vendetta against creationism. Good thing it’s Web1.0, because the latency to AUS would be horrible. Frank’s Compulsive Guide to Postal Addressss [3] - if you have any questions about the address system of any country in the world, it is answered here. An absolute treasure trove of information. 0: https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi 0.a: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc868 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc868 1: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ 2: https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/ https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/ 3: https://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/ https://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/ 4: Requires GNU coreutils for `od` and `date` - also if you get round-robined onto a server that doesn’t support TIME, try again. nc -w1 time.nist.gov 37 | od -An -tu4 -N4 --endian=big | awk '{print $1 - 2208988800}' | xargs -I{} date -d @{} # EDIT: you can further shrink this by doing everything in awk, assuming GNU awk nc -w1 time.nist.gov 37 | od -An -tu4 -N4 --endian=big | awk '{print strftime("%c", $1 - 2208988800}'

noduerme 1y ago
I think you can guess the boundaries of the design answer here. When you're experimenting with a new technology, everything looks very different and everything looks new. When you look at the net result of people experimenting with it 30 years later, you can see that they were all constrained by the same limitations, and in aggregate - despite many differences - everything takes on a recognizable aesthetic that was produced by the limitations of the day, the technology, the genre, whatever. These sites are all wildly different and extremely creative, yet they're all recognizably from the same decade or so. Okay. Now step back from that. Humans - you, me, everyone - have learned a very complex visual language from birth, where certain cues indicate certain things and trigger certain memories. If you show me a picture of a dude wearing bell bottoms, we're probably in the 70s. If it's a girl with a nose ring and a midriff showing it's probably 2005 - but there are smaller cues within that. 99% of people don't think about this consciously when they see an image, or a website, or whatever. They just associate it with a time or a genre. In design for the web, we've had decades of constraints come and go - we had Flash with its own weird aesthetics, Java embeds, etc. People remember a time and they associate a design style with that time, without really knowing why. So it's a question of choosing from that historical library and constructing something that makes people see what you want them to see. If you want them to associate something with the early 90s, then totally make it look like one of these pages. The thing I was taught in design school was to attempt to make design that was timeless. This is always kind of impossible - because you're limited technologically in ways you don't even realize at the time, and because you're always influenced by what's around you. But try to make something that will look, in 20 years, like it was new. Very hard to do. Why do it? Because in 20 years, you can always go and make funny vintage pastiche references to what people did 20 years ago. But it's quite hard to make anything that doesn't show its age.