A few things I’ve learned about typeface design | Hacker News Reader

A few things I’ve learned about typeface design

ilovetypography.com

44 pointsjustinl8 comments

Sounded like an interesting article but honestly, it's late in the day here and I cannot make sense of the language in that article. Maybe I am stupid but to quote the chicken-farmer in Napoleon Dynamite: "I don't understand a word you just said".

Example sentence:

"Typography and typeface design are essentially founded on a four-way dialogue between the desire for identity and originality within each brief (“I want mine to be different, better, more beautiful”), the constraints of the type-making and type-setting technology, the characteristics of the rendering process (printing or illuminating), and the responses to similar conditions given by countless designers already, from centuries ago to this day."

Amazing visual stuff in the article though, but so academic and wordy... will give it another try tomorrow.

That sentence could have been two, three or four sentences or structured in a way that is a bit easier to understand.

I guess he wants to say that new typeface designs are influenced by three things (he says four but I say you can simplify that):

  - wanting to be original
  - technology
  - past designs

The rest of this particular sentence is essentially fluff :)

Mr Leonidas' writing style is perfectly in line with the image the University tries to portray. Writing is useless unless it is "academic" and it isn't academic unless it is overly complicated. Gerry's other job is writing legal contracts.

Typography is a complicated field requiring some knowledge of technical, artistic, and psychological material. I wouldn't expect a typographer to be able to come to HN and understand the technical meaning of "functional" in "functional programming" or "idempotent" in a discussion of REST, nor would I expect a programmer to understand the technical language of typography.

If you'd like to learn more, some excellent books are:

- The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst - Detail in Typography by Jost Hochuli - The Stroke by Gerrit Noordzij

I've read a couple of books on typography/design but none of them have been deep at all, just very basic on what different kinds of type styles are good at. I've got "Designing With Type" and it's very basic http://www.designingwithtype.com/5/home.php I've been wanting deeper material. Thanks a lot for the book tips they look like very promising -- added them to my tobuy list.

Not to mention the author feels the need to put down Wikipedia for some reason: "wide but shallow knowledge gained from online sources is dominant; there seems also to be little discrimination between sources that employ review and editorial mechanisms, and those that are open to wide, unchecked contributions"

That quote seems to be accurate. What do you take issue with?

Not academic just typographish :)

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