4 ms·
I've been seeing these all my life and for some reason never thought to ask if anyone else noticed them. I never found them particularly distracting and didn't
by d23 14y ago
I've been seeing these all my life and for some reason never thought to ask if anyone else noticed them. I never found them particularly distracting and didn't know they were a sign of bad typography. Still, cool to see an article about them.
- firefoxman1 14y agoSame here. Did you tend to notice them out the corner of hour eye more than straight-on?
- tekromancr 14y agoI think the vision mode that detects rivers is more of a "big-picture, perhriphery" type where the vision mode that you use for for reading is a focused, small area type. I think you will always catch them in the big picture, but may not notice when reading.
- pygy_ 14y agoThe peripheral vision is also blurry. Rivers stand out more in blurred text, even in central vision.
- martinced 14y agoDefinitely. People typesetting books are supposed to get rid of them but it's a manual process. As I've written in another comment I'd typically "blur" my vision a bit and quickly scan all the pages of the book to track these down (on screen) and then remove them. Don't know what was the technique of other typesetters when it came down to finding these. Some proofreaders would note them should they find / notice any but some wouldn't. Now that I think of it, using OP's findings it would probably wouldn't really be too hard to write a "plugin" taking screenshots of Quark XPress / Adobe InDesign / LaTeX preview and showing "rivers" in a HUD on top of the screen-rendered pages. This would make chasing "rivers" quite easy.
- homosaur 14y agoIf you start to study typography at a relatively deep level, there will be two things that will absolutely kill you on a daily basis. One is rivers. The second is bad kerning on signs/displays.
- holloway 14y agoYeah bad keming is a real problem
- mheiler 14y agoNote to myself: Don't study typography.
- theblazehen 14y agoAlso do not visit the Wikipedia page on kerning. It taught me to recognise bad kerning :(
- RyJones 14y agoNot stuff like this? http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4047502122/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4047502122/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/6836803380/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/6836803380/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4047501878/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4047501878/
- spacemanaki 14y agoNot a font-nerd but I'll bite. Is the 'N' in MADISON and SECOND upside down? (but correct in http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4046758633/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryjones/4046758633/)
- RyJones 14y agoYou are correct. It drives me nuts when I walk around Second and Madison in Seattle; I would assume the workers were trolling when they did it, but I have pointed it out to plenty of co-workers that didn't see a problem.