Nara – the typeface that never existed (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Nara – the typeface that never existed (2011)

typotheque.com

85 pointsthiagoharry17 comments

The "non-existence" of fonts which are possible in the classification system reminds me of a similar idea in domestic cats - a graph which compiled how markings are derived from genetic factors [1], and which then speculated on new kinds of cats which by all rights should exist.

It's interesting to consider that we can, through cultural progress, explore some space of ideas and then look back with a new kind of categorisation to see what we've missed. It's a strange put-down of the idea that innovation really means trying everything.

[1] https://ixquick-proxy.com/do/spg/show_picture.pl?l=english&r...

See also the periodic table of elements, and the various versions that existed earlier on.

This happened in juggling as well, describing the patterns in a notation allowed people to find new ways to throw objects: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dwgusHjA0Y

There’s an interesting point of view in this quote that I feel is generally applicable to software beyond the specific field of typography:

”...digital type creation was far beyond the reach of a student from Eastern Europe since URW’s Ikarus font digitising system required an unimaginable investment in technologies, and Macintosh was still only a distant legend (and possibly still under US trade embargo). But soon a friend introduced me to the free Metafont programming language by Donald Knuth, which could run on a basic PC”

The East European student was extremely motivated to create a digital font design but didn’t have access to tools his Western counterparts could take for granted. So he turned to a system (Metafont) that was designed from a completely different perspective than the mainstream, and used it to produce a work of unique beauty and complexity.

Place this story in the context of today’s hardware. Who is the East European, and what’s the technology that he/she lacks access to? Maybe there’s somebody in India with incredible creative vision but only a low-end Android phone, just waiting to discover an expressive solution, no matter if way outside of mainstream Western software expectations.

There is no way to romanticize the tedious labor of meticulously scanning an image by hand, so to speak.

It's not quite that. Metafont models type using pen strokes rather than outlines, so the process of translating paper designs into the format couldn't be accomplished by just scanning the outline -- but of course it would be a great aid.

The letters in the image at the end of the article don't match the glyphs following the link at the end of the article.

It's a neat swing in the letters, in the former, but the latter I find like most fonts converges to the same principle base type for reasons of readability.

(2011)

Thanks, added.

> he taught me to respect the historical development of typography, as well as to disdain uninformed experimentation for experimentation’s sake.

Why not? I think experimentation is heaps of fun.

That quote initially rubbed me the wrong way too. But I think it should be understood in the specific professional context: a typographer shouldn’t be making their work unnecessarily “visible” by experimenting at the expense of the content. (I guess the father would have abhorred the brief mid-‘90s wave of intentionally obfuscated digital type.)

I think the word 'uninformed' here is key -- after all, the entire concept of the font being discussed is an experiment (of the 'what would happen if we look in this gap in this classification system?' kind). But it's not an uninformed experiment, it's one that arises from knowledge of what's been done historically, which is why it's interesting. Uninformed experimentation would be more likely to just reinvent some previous idea, badly. (Not that recapitulating previous work is inherently bad; but the idea of an informed experiment would be to recapitulate some development knowing that that was what you were doing.)

I somehow missed that. It makes a lot of sense now. Thanks!

Because that time could be used for informative study.

edit: and because fun is sinful, obviously, as is smiling, talking unless asked to, ... or eating apples from a certain tree.

Looks quite horrible with the webfont (seems nice otherwise though)

really like it with the exception of left and right square brackets "[]" which are horribly misaligned IMHO ...

Font playground: https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/nara

Yes, this seems odd. The angle brackets, curly braces and parentheses seem to align nicely but the square brackets are entirely different sizes.

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