▲ 209 points
back
65 comments
A sentence I wouldn't have expected to encounter today:
"A failure to really dig in to the buttcrack creates a bold spot, but even worse, it de-emphasizes the B-ness."
It's a very colorful way to describe the phenomenon, but it is a real problem with the "Y" part of the B.
you're not even mentioning the "can't get a finger in there!" text with the arrow that comes in above. i love it. it feels like humor is finally coming back again in the public discourse, and i'm here for it.
Not too long ago there was a submission of a font-editor[1] and I gave it a shot trying things out, just to realize, that my creations looked off and ugly, not really understanding why. This helps a lot. So much nuance to so many things....
As someone who has designed multiple type families, I might be biased, but this is wonderful. I'm going to send this to any aspiring type designers I meet, or anyone who's curious about what goes into shaping letters.
Ooh, recognize this domain!
Oh No created the official typeface for one of my favorite bands, Vulfpeck
https://ohnotype.co/fonts/vulf
There's some great lyrics animations in a lot of their music videos[1] done by Rob Stenson using an open-source library he authored called Coldtype[2]. I played around with it a few years ago, it's quite neat. You can animate variable fonts with python, and even hook it into midi tracks and a lot more.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2_CJ_nx-l4
[2] https://github.com/coldtype/coldtype
Bonus link, Rob also did the visual for this video, hooking into midi tracks to visualize a synth cover of a Bach fugue
Did not expect Sesame Street for fonts. Excellent.
This is pretty great. Might have been better to see before my typeface layperson's implementation of these guys: https://letterspractice.com/dbg/lp
(note: root site not actually ready for publish. don't click too many things or you could ruin my life (mostly a joke about the ruination))
(2020), check https://ohnotype.co/blog/tagged/teaching for letters other than A.
Also by this guy: Futurefonts.com Lots of great cheap in-progress fonts with documentation of the process of creating them.
Not the type theory we wanted, but the type theory we needed.
It's very interactive and pretty!
The designer obviously knows a thing or two. I enjoyed the fun presentation that others seem to dislike.
Where I ran into trouble was the readability of the annotations on the visuals. The tiny font combined with the low contrast was too much for me. I found myself squinting and trying to get close to my monitor. Eventually I had to move on, even though I was enjoying the content.
> What we want is a balance between the top and bottom negative spaces.
One thing I never understand is why they say "negative spaces" instead of just "spaces".
In visual design, it is things that occupy space. The areas left unoccupied by things are called negative space.
So if you hang a massive painting, that painting takes up positive space. The parts of the wall that are not covered by that painting make up the negative space.
I've just never encountered a situation where that's a necessary distinction. If I say "the painting takes up too much space on the wall" I don't need to say "the painting has too much positive space" nor "the painting removes too much negative space".
Just last week I was hanging photos with my wife in our home and after she had proposed a placement I told her "I don't like the balance of the negative space there". I could have said "I don't feel like the parts of the wall not taken up by photos are balanced there" but "negative space" is a convenient abstraction. (Note that this is different from the photos themselves being unbalanced, which is also a concern but was not a problem then.)
Think of it like a foreach loop. Sure, it's equivalent to the corresponding for(;;)-style loop but it's also a convenient mental shortcut.
If you are doing visual design, if you want to call out the parts of the space you are working in where you _aren't doing anything_, that is the 'negative space'.
If you are producing a letterform, all the parts of the object you are producing which is not filled by letter is the 'negative space'. The "space" is the whole area, including the letter.
People intentionally play with the distinction in optical illusions:
https://inthewhitespace.com/2021/11/17/what-it-means-to-be-i...
I think there is a very large difference between saying, e.g., "there is too much space" (the total area is too large) vs "there is too much negative space" (there are not enough things in the area). I think there's a better argument that "negative space" is redundant with "empty space", but personally I don't mind the term so I will not make that argument.
Henry Moore is a sculptor that uses the negative space a lot. It can be useful to refer to the "holes" in the sculpture
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moor...
I guess one reason is that adding "negative" turns the generic noun "space" into a specific term of art. A shibboleth, if you will.
Communities don't generally invent jargon for no reason, and a lot of things that people see as gatekeeping and shibboleths are just terms that save a lot of time in communication between people who know what they mean.
If you are a programmer, terms like "imperative" or "declarative" are extremely opaque to outsiders, but convey a lot of information efficiently if you know what they mean.
To clarify, I didn't mean it in a disparaging way. I'm a hobbyist photographer and have used the term a plenty of times myself. I'm also interested in graphic design and typography :D
I agree.
[stub for offtopicness]
All: please note this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Yes, sites that don't work on your device are annoying—but uninteresting, offtopic, irritable threads are the closer-to-home annoyance here.
Please don't let the comments deter you from giving the site a try! Ok navigation is finicky on mobile but this isn't a blog post, it's quirky, I find the humor funny and the subject matter deserves some artistic liberty on the presentation side
Sorry—I feel bad about moving this one because you were on the downhill (good!) side of the contrarian dynamic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542904), but the subthread mostly reverted to the uphill (bad!) side, in keeping with this sequence of sadness:
1. objections
2. objection to the objections (<-- you were here)
3. objections to the objection to the objections
Its notable that on desktop, the navigation is excellent. Custom navigation is rarely great, but this fits the content so well.
I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?
"Custom navigation" means I as a reader need to split my focus between learning how this thing works, and consuming the information presented, which is presumably the goal of this page. I can't say for sure because the instant my screen started scrolling the opposite axis I smashed the back button.
Pick a lane: this kind of stuff is fine as a "design" showpiece, but if the goal of a page is to convey information, why introduce distractions over sticking with familiar patterns?
> on desktop, the navigation is excellent
https://files.catbox.moe/kzqxcw.png
How am I meant to use this? None of the sidebar text is clickable.
Fancy navigation isn't worth a damn to me without graceful degradation.
I use NoScript on desktop and was confronted with a complete jumble of words overlaying each other, each individual piece apparently word salad. I can't even understand what the intended purpose of the page is. My best guess is that it's trying to demonstrate a font... ?
This is kind of a seminal resource for a lot of new type-designers. This appearing on hn only for everyone to moan about how the mobile site is lacking kinda makes me feel like I should spend less time on here
Don't despair! Threads, in their early stage, are subject to a contrarian dynamic. Fortunately this usually (often? sometimes?) gets corrected, as it did in this case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45530593
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I wouldn’t expect nuanced takes on typography from HN. As a long time user the comments are entirely expected - and actually skew more positive than I would have guessed. Respectfully.
Ridiculous scroll jacking on mobile. Sure it's quirky but it's also so disorienting I gave up.
Imagine taking design advice from someone doing _that_ to scrolling.
It is too annoying to carefully scroll to the small ranges at which texts are visible, with a custom horizontal scroll, to fish out small bits of text, which do not even seem to be written well. And that is after enabling JS, without which it is broken, yet not obviously (not much more than with JS). Websites about design and typography tend to be broken and illegible, but this one seems to stand out even among those.
But as with quite a few of other such websites, disabling CSS actually renders it easily legible and navigable, even without JS.
I do find this kind of analysis fascinating, and yet (personal choice in creative outputs aside) I also find what seems to be the increased use of swearing in blog posts/website copy to be, frankly, lazy.
Great content, terrible form.
[flagged]
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Its not even just mobile. Scrolling down on my desktop using the scroll wheel... Page goes down, then right, then down. I find it disorienting and completely turns me away from the site. I've seen it before and every time, it's a net negative to the site in question; sometimes a lot.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the author does not in fact specialise in web design, and thus its quite expected that when they do something unusual that it won't work for some portion of the audience.
It works fine on some mobiles.
I tried scrolling right and left and reloaded the page a couple times.
Turns out scrolling down is translated to scrolling left.
It works well for me on mobile
This could have easily been a youtube short or whatever 'vine offshoot' is your particular favourite flavour.
On one hand, videos are terrible for accessibility. On the other hand, by being a website, in theory this stands a better shot. And yet, someone on a mobile phone probably has a much worse experience trying to consume this content than the equivalent as a series of shorts, one for each letter.
I don't know what conclusions we are meant to draw. I just found it an interesting realisation.
It's not immediately intuitive but hardly unusable. Reminds me of apple.com (and that's not a compliment).
This page works beautifully in my iPhone. As I scroll down, the content slides and animates. I actually came here to say that I’m stunned that this effect can be good in mobile, only to find out your comment :D
swiped to scroll down. page scrolled right. did not appreciate