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The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)
- brudgers 2mo agoSome past comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053419
- babelfish 2mo agoCool to flip through their master copy typeface reference: https://archive.org/details/gorton-master-copy-type-for-all-pantograph-machines/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/gorton-master-copy-type-for-all-...
- ggm 2mo agoThe site is killing my brave browser. Maybe long thin transoceanic paths, or phase of the moon. So many partially loaded images. But definitely worth the wait. A great read. I liked the almost mimetic quality of "which slightly broken font plate is being reused to make the broken "3" I keep seeing" which is a classic detective novel trope, e.g. Lord Peter Whimsey in "strong poison" and a typewriter glitch he recognises.
- kylestanfield 2mo agoThere's 600 photos and one 500 MB video. It seems like they are being served directly from the owner's Apache server from response headers. Server could be overloaded?
- ggm 2mo agoCould be. And they're high quality images and movie clips.
- ReactiveJelly 2mo agoIt is definitely a "Macbook Pro on a wooden table at a coffee shop, owner with tattoos and stylish facial hair" kind of website
- ggm 2mo agoYea, but if I bought coffee table books and this was printed by Taschen, I'd buy it. That typeface is so familiar. One imagines a great big red "reset" up in the clouds, benevolent creator pondering pressing, this is definitely the font on the button. I can smell machine oil, hear 50hz hum just looking at these labels.
- rubberpoliceman 2mo ago> hear 50hz 100Hz, actually…
- gpvos 2mo agoOn Fennec on Android, no images appear to load at all. Edit: they do, it just takes ages. Could be the slow connection.
- jrrv 2mo agoI think my ad blocker was the problem. Disabling it didn't turn it into the fastest website in the world—the images loaded in about 15 seconds—but that was a lot better than the never loading I was getting before disabling it.
- keyle 2mo agoIt's a pretty font and gives that instant retro look on keyboards for example. I've tried it on the computer with "Gorton Digital" and that's just terrible, I can't recommend it. The spacing/kerning is all wrong. Hoping someone takes on the project of making a nice digital font, potentially a mono-spaced one too.
- meghanto 2mo agoI'm using National Park Typeface for my site and I kinda like it
- avallach 2mo agoList of digitized versions: https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/ https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/
- keyle 2mo agoNice one, thanks!
- Kwpolska 2mo agoThe author is selling "Gorton Perfected" for $20: https://shifthappens.site/store/ https://shifthappens.site/store/
- mvdtnz 2mo ago[flagged]
- gpvos 2mo agoFonts are a side interest for a very large number of hackers. In fact this page has been submitted before and got 857 points and 122 comments.
- mfru 2mo agoCounterpoint: I give a shit about this because I love typefaces / fonts, how they are made and what the history behind them is.
- jimmaswell 2mo agoI can appreciate the aesthetics of a font but I found the author's disadulation of the letters excessive and totally unrelatable. They look nice while clear and functional for their use case to me.
- jason_s 2mo ago> Of course you will see it, the same way you saw a lot of Arial in the 1990s, or Calibri today. Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.
- ReactiveJelly 2mo ago> Carve something into plastic, on the other hand, and it can survive decades. Substitute plastic for metal, and you just turned decades into centuries. "I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
- ErroneousBosh 2mo agoI've been saying for years that future archaeologists will wonder at these mysterious emblems they dig up, generally associated with a large deposit of what was once highly refined iron, aluminium and copper. About half a metre wide and 11cm high, made of incredibly durable plastic obviously intended to last for centuries, if not millenia. And they'll puzzle over the inscriptions, "G809 BGG", "R420 BRL", "RFS 131Y", "SJ12 EXW", "RE51 CUE" - this on some huge chunk of steel, easily three times as big as the rest, and so many others. What could they mean?
- setopt 2mo agoAs a non-American, I don’t even understand today what that means. (And the website linked to isn’t loading, so I don’t have the context from that.)
- msdz 2mo agoI believe those are car license plate numbers.
- xnorswap 2mo agoBritish ones of various vintage, with RFS 131Y the oldest of those, from 1983.
- ErroneousBosh 2mo agoMy old Volvo 340GLE 1.4, first car after I passed my driving test. Awesome things, engine at front, gearbox at back, 50/50 weight distribution, enough torque to break traction if provoked, inoffensive enough not to freak out your girlfriend's dad. Perfect car for a 20-year-old.
- Firehawke 2mo agoI started reading the article with a feeling of "I don't recognize this at all" from the first few images that slowly loaded. Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it." A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.
- fsargent 2mo agoAnd on the pedestal these words appear (in Gorton): "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains.
- rantingdemon 2mo agoVery few of the images are loading for me.
- ucyo 2mo agoMore like "The hardest website your browser will work on" ... will come back once it loads
- sixtyj 2mo ago600 images in the page takes time to load.
- Shorel 2mo agoNah, it is only using 90MB of RAM in my PC. At the same time, Gmail is using 244MB. My average tab opened is about 30MB, so the difference is only 3 times the memory. Probably only the network connection struggles for a few seconds in my phone, and that's it.
- mewens 2mo ago[flagged]
- cl3misch 2mo agohttps://archive.ph/mYRQX https://archive.ph/mYRQX (the site seems to eagerly load lots of large images, and a 500MB video)
- jrrv 2mo agoFunny, I'd actually noticed that this font was knocking around in various places, particularly in American media, without giving it too much conscious thought. Although I had decided that I liked it. It's very 60s, mechanical, tactile, and almost cute in its ignorance of typography rules that would come to be unquestionable. It's nice to put a name to the font.
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoIt's funny reading an article about kerning mistakes in font usage while the author doesn't even bother to implement lazy loading of images.
- claiir 2mo agoThe Gorton machines being initially developed by a lens manufacturer made a lot of sense given the 1920s brochure material the author included earlier. That material (unlike the later versions presented) focused on the machine's ability to do circular engravings (exactly the speciality the lens text presumably needed)
- ChrisRR 2mo agoJesus, who thought loading hundred of MB of images in a single page was a good idea? Normally I hate the pointless use of javascript in basic text and image websites, but lazy image loading would probably stop this server having been hugged to death
- kingkongjaffa 2mo agoI love this article, it's been posted here several times before. The first time I read it I had been in New York and was waiting in JFK to fly home, so naturally it resonated. In some ways it's THE perfect hacker news article. It's about design sensibilities and typography, and as we know all HN readers have great taste, so it tickles that part of the brain. It's mechanical and analogue, so it harkens back to a time when engineers built things with their hands and their work had a physical manifestation in the real world. So for the former 'physical' engineers who turned to tech for better career prospect (like me) it tickles that part of the brain too! It has an air of Americana in that New York is its most iconic city and this article is drenched in 'look how good we used to make things', and then it delightfully leads us back to old blighty for the Anglophiles. For an article romantic about a font, it's perfection. Catnip for nerds.
- Shorel 2mo agoNow I read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_lettering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_lettering ... and I find it distracting by how wrong it is. It should say "Single stroke Gothic", or even better: mention Gorton directly. Instead, it says: "a Gothic sans-serif script", even if it mentions Leroy a few paragraphs later :)
- FrameworkFred 2mo agoThat was a fun read. I was a draftsman as a teenager in the late 80s and I did my best to make my handwriting look like those letters. Then, as a CAD operator, I put that font on everything I produced. It never once occurred to me that it looked like that because it was designed to be legibly engraved.
- mech998877 2mo agoGorton does strike me as very similar to Century Gothic which is the default font for a lot of CAD software I've used (Creo, maybe others).
- culebron21 2mo agoGreat read. I wish it loaded faster, without the retina resolution images.
- Nemi 2mo agoI love this. As nerdy as it is, it is also an interesting historical look on how certain things in society/culture have a life that is hidden in plain view and quietly goes on. It is an interesting reflection on many things in life.
- dreamcompiler 2mo agoI started reading this article and thought to myself "Author is just talking about Leroy and calling it Gorton for some reason." Sure enough. I learned a lot of history from this wonderful piece. And I still have the Leroy device I used in the 70s.
- NichoPaolucci 2mo agoUnrelated to the article, but I'm a big trackpad user and, man... I sure hate it when websites hijack my scrolling / pinch + zoom functionality. Totally throws me for a loop.