Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
Alonealastalovedalongthe (Toot Café)All the hand painted signs I find disused in sheds and basements make me sad. I don't think the ability to print signs with computers and digital fonts actually made the world a better place. Definitely didn't make it more beautiful. Logos like the coca cola logo are static, dead imitations of beautiful handwritten scripts shoved in everyone's faces as a reminder of what once was a living, human pursuit rewarded by society.
I fell into web design via books. When I was maybe six or seven I remember reading about polar bears and how they hibernated in a large compendium about all sorts of natural habitats and curiosities ranging from foxes hunting in the desert and wild horses running on the Mongolian plains to Emperor penguins shivering in the Antarctic. And to this day I still remember that giant, double page spread of a bear and her cubs. It was a wondrous illustration but what piqued my curiosity was how the writer described hibernation.
What a great little story here. I may be biased because I love all of these types of things myself.
Sans Forgetica is a typeface designed using the principles of cognitive psychology to help you to better remember your study notes. It was created by a multidisciplinary team of designers and behavioural scientists from RMIT University. Sans Forgetica is compatible with both PC and Mac operating systems. Download it for free today, or keep scrolling to learn more about how it was made.
Sans Forgetica is a typeface that has been specifically designed by academics at RMIT University to enhance memory retention.
Download the font and Chrome extension, or hear more from the team who created Sans Forgetica, at: http://sansforgetica.rmit
As I look at some of the websites being created for the EDU522 class, it’s exciting to see what people are creating and how they’re expressing themselves. As hinted at in the Who Am I module, I do think it may be useful for some to think about the readability and accessibility of their sites. Even simple things like the color of a background against text can make it unpleasant or difficult to read. For ideas on readability, I recommend Kevin Marks’ WIRED article How the Web Became Unreadable.1
Be creative and have fun, but remember the multiple audiences and communities who may not consume your content the same way you do.
A friend pointed me to a story on Medium called “Death to Typewriters,” by Medium designer Marcin Wichary. The story is about the influence of the typewriter on digital typesetting. It references my “excellent list” of typewriter habits.
Minimalism doesn’t foreclose either expressive breadth or conceptual depth. On the contrary, the minimalist program—as it initially emerged in fine art of the 20th century—has been about diverting the viewer’s attention from overt signs of authorship to the deeper purity of the ingredients. ❧
This also sounds like a great way to cook!
Like all nonsense, it’s intended to be easy to swallow. ❧
You’re giving up far more than design choice. Mr. Williams describes Medium’s key benefit as rescuing writers from the “terrible distraction” of formatting chores. But consider the cost. Though he’s baiting the hook with design, he’s also asking you, the writer, to let him control how you offer your work to readers. Meaning, to get the full benefit of Medium’s design, you have to let your story live on Medium, send all your readers to Medium, have your work permanently entangled with other stories on Medium, and so on—a significant concession. ❧
You’re definitely not owning your own data.
Boiled down, Medium is simply marketing in the service of more marketing. It is not a “place for ideas.” It is a place for advertisers. It is, therefore, utterly superfluous. ❧
Subtle changes to letter shapes can embed messages
An interesting piece to be sure, but I’ve thought of doing this sort of steganography in the past. In particular, I recall having conversations with Sol Golomb about similar techniques in the past. I’m sure there’s got to be prior art for similar things as well.
“Professionals and amateurs in a variety of fields have passionately argued for either one or two spaces following this punctuation mark,” they wrote in a paper published last week in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.
They cite dozens of theories and previous research, arguing for one space or two. A 2005 study that found two spaces reduced lateral interference in the eye and helped reading. A 2015 study that found the opposite. A 1998 experiment that suggested it didn't matter.
“However,” they wrote, “to date, there has been no direct empirical evidence in support of these claims, nor in favor of the one-space convention.”
I love that the permalink for this article has a trailing 2, which indicates to me that it took the editors a second attempt to add the additional space into the headline for their CMS. And if nothing else, this article is interesting for its layout and typesetting.
I’ll circle back to read the full journal article shortly.1
Smelvetica is an experimentation in taking one of the worlds most beloved fonts, and turning it into a morbid monstrocity.
We need more fonts like this so people appreciate the good ones a bit more.
When I started to experiment with different ways of blogging, I realised what I was doing was a bit off. So I decided to redesign the blog.
I appreciate that others are grappling with these design ideas as well. I need to get back to some of my own work and experimenting in this area. It’s also a bit reminiscent of Dries Buytaert’s recent post Reclaiming my blog as my thought space in which he contemplates some of these types of issues and questions, though from a slightly different perspective.
📖 Read pages 220-356 of Just My Type: A Book about Fonts by (Gotham Books, , ISBN: 978-1592406524)
But type designers were more like apple growers cultivating unique fruit without protective fences; whenever someone stole them, they could argue that apples were the result of the sun and rain and God’s own fair intervention.
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… and font-editing software such as Fontographer.
Might be worth playing around with this program?
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A recent example concerned Segoe, created by Monotype and licensed to Microsoft, which bears a close relationship to Frutiger. Their common usage is different (Segoe for screen display at small sizes, Frutiger for signage), …
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There are hundreds of small presses in the Uk, Europe and the United States. One of the newest is White’s Books, which in the spring of 2010 had just eight titles in its list, …
I’m curious to look at some of these.
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Your choice may often come down to “Has it got a small caps italic?” So few of them do.
Ha! I have in fact actually made this very decision before.
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There is another rare feature that places his [White’s] books among the remnants of a type museum–the setting of a catchword at the bottom of the right-hand page.
I did always appreciate this vestige of publishing.
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Sabon was developed in the early 1960s for a group of German printers who were grumbling about the lack of a ‘harmonized’ or uniform font that would look the same whether set by hand or on a Monotype or Linotype machine. They were quite specific about the sort of font that might fit the bill, rejecting the modern and fashionable in favour of solid sixteenth-century tradition–something modeled on Garamond and Granjon. They also wanted the new font to be five percent narrower than their existing Monotype Garamond, in order to save space and money.
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Here are the rules as [Paul] Felton considers God intended them:
- Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document.
- Thou shalt lay headlines large and at the top of the page.
- Thou shalt employ no other type size than 8pt to 10pt for body copy.
- Remember that a typeface that is not legible is not truly a typeface.
- Honour thy kerning, so that white space becomes visually equalized between characters.
- Thou shalt lay stress discreetly upon elements within text.
- Thou shalt not use only capitals when setting vast body copy.
- Thou shalt always align letters and words on a baseline.
- Thou shalt use flush-left, ragged-right type alignment.
- Thou shalt not make lines too short or too long.
Quick synopsis of Felton’s book The Ten Commandments of Typography / Type Heresy
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Or this observation on digital type from the design critic Paul Hayden Duensing: ‘Digitizing [the seventeenth-century typeface] Janson is like playing Bach on synthesizer.’
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… type was like painting and architecture: an elitism prevailed, and what you produced was only half the story, and what you said about it counted just as much.
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But he [Sebastian Carter] also championed the not-such-a-great-job, the pieces of design and printing that didn’t turn out to be beautiful or clear, merely interesting. He illustrated his talk with some items that were ‘pretty cruddy’, and suggested that these too had a place in our world. ‘I would not want to live in a world of exclusively good design at the bus-ticket level,’ he said.
delivered mid-October 2004 Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture at the St. Bride Institute
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Thus armed, ‘the designers of tomorrow will not look back; we give them the chance to fail abjectly and completely; they’re all in the typographic gutter and some of them are looking at their scars.’ The result, of course, would bring forth more failure, but also types of originality and brilliance.
This sounds to me like statistical mechanics at work in design. Many will be in the median, some will be three signma out and either be truly great or out of the game altogether. The question is how to encourage more at the higher end, knowing that evolution is a very strong selector. In fact what does the distribution over a few generations look like with evolution in play? How strong is it?
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Peace
Why wasn’t this used in it’s actual face like the other examples? Was it not available? Or too expensive for one word?
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‘Where is the language of protest now?’ he asks. ‘We have been led to believe that culture was only there as a financial opportunity.’
Quote from Neville Brody
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The key, Brody said, in a strange echo of Morison, was ‘to change a newspaper entirely, but to make sure no one noticed. […] When we first showed it to focus groups they didn’t notice it had changed, but when we told them it had changed, they hated it.’
Sounds like America’s racial culture in the last 60 years. The question is did they hate it because they’d been lied to and it was a psychological effect after-the-fact when they obviously otherwise didn’t know?
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Buffalo and Popaganda
again, no exemplars of these faces
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the @ […] may be almost as old as the ampersand. It had been associated with trade for many centuries, known as amphora or jar, a unit of measurement. Most countries have their own term for it, often linked to food (in Hebrew it is shtrudl, meaning strudel, in Czech it is zavinac or rollmop herring) or to cute animals (Affenschwanz or monkey’s tail in German, snabel-a, meaning “the letter a, with a trunk,” in Danish, sobaka or dog in Russian), or to both (escargot in French).
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… and we were sucha funny family, a little bit Alan Bennett.
Who is Bennett? Curious cultural reference that doesn’t play in the US…
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Rather than ten letters of each new typeface showing in Handgloves and the rest of the alphabet shown beneath it, each font now comes with words unique to its character, style and possible use.
Kind of similar to the quirkiness of paint chip color names, somewhat useful, but meant to help sales too…
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Coles introduced me to Chris Hamamoto, who had a long list of Handgloves alternatives on his computer. Anyone in the office could add to it,
butthere were certain guidelines:The key letters, in order of importance, are: g, a, s, e. Then there is: l, o, I. And of lesser importance but still helpful: d (or b), h, m (or n), u, v.
Verbs or generic nouns are preferable because they don’t describe the font (like adjectives) or confuse the sample word with a font name (like proper nouns).
Avoid tandem repeating letters unless showing off alternatives.
Use one word, as spaces can get too large and distracting at display sizes.
This could actually be a rather interesting information theory problem.
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‘Real men don’t set Souvenir,’ wrote the type scholar Frank Romano in the early 1990’s, […] ‘Souvenir is a font fatale … We could send Souvenir to Mars, but there are international treaties on pollution in outer space … remember, friends don’t let friends set Souvenir,’
Souvenir bold evokes 1970’s porn and Souvenir Light evokes the Love Story movie poster, romance novels, and maybe the poster for Flowers in the Attic for me.
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… you can fire up one of a number of software programs — TypeTool, FontLab Studio and Fontographer are the most popular — and begin your quest.
I want to look at how these work.
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He [Mathew Carter] replied, ‘Some aspects get easier. But if you’re doing a good job you should feel that it gets harder. If you think it’s getting easier, you ought to look out. I think it means you’re getting lazy.’
Carter on whether computers have made the life of a type designer any easier.
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In 1968 the influential graphic design review The Penrose Annual asked exactly the same things: ‘Aren’t we done yet? Why do we need all these new fonts such as … Helvetica?’
The answer, than and now, is the same. Because the world and its contents are continually changing. We need to express ourselves in new ways.
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‘There are only thirty-two notes on a tenor saxophone, and surely to god they’ve all been played by now.’
Matthew Carter on Why New Typefaces?
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… there is a lavish app called TypeDrawing, which takes even the plainest fonts to exciting new heights; it may be the tool that teaches children about type–the modern version of the John Bull printing kit.
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…a set of Type Trumps–the designer’s version of the kids’ card game, with each font card rated for legibility, weight and special power.
an interesting set of “trading cards”
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Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
📖 Read pages 143-192 of Just My Type: A Book about Fonts by (Gotham Books, , ISBN: 978-1592406524)
…[Jock] Kinneir and [Margaret] Calvert did something else important: they established that it is a lot easier to read lower-case letters than capitals when travelling at speed.
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… and cows becoming part of the proceedings at any time.
Just a lovely quote nestled within this page…
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…the iPhone has an app for font identification named WhatTheFont.
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[Erik] Spiekermann’s blog, which is called Spiekerblog, contains acerbic comments on the type he sees on his travels.
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Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
📖 Read pages 89-142 of Just My Type: A Book about Fonts by
The flowery language continues apace almost as if this were a love letter to the typographic arts.
There is seemingly no solid narrative thrust throughout the book, which easily makes it something that one can read a chapter or two of every day. One needn’t swim along linearly, but could dip in to sections here and there without much loss based on my reading thus far.
Ironically, the first full Baskerville biography, published by CUP in 1907, was printed in Caslon.
This is just painful to read, particularly as in the sentence before it was noted that Baskerville’s original punches and matrices are housed at the Cambridge University Press. Oh, the horror! It’s one thing if you’re Vincent Connare, but Baskerville?!
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I did quite like the section on Johnston Sans which I hadn’t previously known any history about.
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In 1916, the same year that Johnston’s work appeared, Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant published their exhaustive study of the optical adjustments that were required of a typeface to aid readability and achieve visually balanced characters (this was the study that observed that a lower-case t often has to lean backwards, and the dot over the i has to be offset a little to the left.)
I’m curious to read more about the scientific research of perceptions in this areas, particularly if they’ve been updated in the last century.
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Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below
Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word
Green–Reference to read
Blue–Interesting Quote
Gray–Typography Problem
Red–Example to work through
Today Quanta unveils a completely re-engineered and redesigned site to better serve our readers and the journalism we produce.
I’m not quite sure I’m a big fan of the new site either. The other one was a bit crisper in look and feel. The typography and readability has improved a bit though. I think it’s almost a travesty that they’ve begun using Disqus.
While nice for some, I don’t think the bookmarking functionality is worth it for me; I’ll continue to bookmark articles on my own website to read for later. Other than gaining people’s email addresses, I’m not sure what Quanta gets out of the functionality. Readers have to be regulars to even consider bothering with the functionality.
I’ve claimed throughout this book that many bad typography habits have been imposed upon us by the typewriter. Here, I’ve collected them in one list.
- Straight quotes rather than curly quotes (see straight and curly quotes).
- Two spaces rather than one space between sentences.
- Multiple hyphens instead of dashes (see hyphens and dashes).
- Alphabetic approximations of trademark and copyright symbols.
- ellipses made with three periods rather than an ellipsis character.
- Non-curly apostrophes.
- Pretending that accented characters don’t exist.
- Using multiple word spaces in a row (for instance, to make a first-line indent.)
- Using tabs and tab stops instead of tables.
- Using carriage returns to insert vertical space.
- Using alphabet characters as substitutes for real math symbols.
- Making rules and borders out of repeated characters.
- Ignoring ligatures.
- underlining anything.
- Believing that monospaced fonts are nice to read.
- Abusing all caps.
- Thinking that the best point size for body text is 12.
- Ignoring kerning.
- Ignoring letterspacing.
- Too much centered text.
- Only using single or double line spacing.
- Only using the line length permitted by one-inch page margins.
