Signifier – a Brutalist response to 17th century typefaces
klim.co.nz
klim.co.nz
I’m Kris Sowersby, designer of Signifier and author of the design info post on Klim.
First up, I’d like to thank you all for taking the time to read it. I really appreciate it.
I’ve neither heard of Hacker News nor been here before. But I’m chuffed that you’re discussing and critiquing with such wit and (on the whole) sensitivity. I never expected it from this quarter, and it’s something that the online type & design community seems to be lacking. I’ll address some specific points in thread where necessary.
—Chur.
And while I've read the whole thing and understand why the author considers this to be a "Brutalist" philosophy, I respectfully disagree. This is merely vectors adhering to a grid, which has nothing to do with the "exposing raw materials" philosophy that is the core of Brutalism. [1]
To me, early pixel-based terminal fonts feel like the digital typography version of Brutalism -- not even attempting curves or calligraphy at all, but embracing the raw material of pixels for exactly what they are.
If the author wants to bring a similar Brutalist raw-materials approach to modern vector-based typography I'd find that interesting as well -- but that would seem to have been done a long time ago, with typography based solely on primitive geometric shapes, of which classic typefaces from the 20th century would seem most suitable (Futura [2], Avant Garde [3]).
In the end, Signifier is a cool concept typeface. But I unfortunately think the author fails at connecting it to Brutalism in any meaningful way, despite their attempt.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
The non-signifier fonts have some extra points in their bezier curves, which are bits in disk, traveling on the network, stored in memory and processed by the rendering engine that are going to be completely wasted when rendered at 16pts.
That's quite profound for me.
And I'm not an authority in Brutalism, but looks like the author was faithful to what he thinks brutalism is concerned with (from the article):
> Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of the material, that is with the question: what can it do?
In the case of a digital font, there are only a bunch of splines, without separate "layers" of structure and ornaments.
The difference between loose rounded curves and sharp quantized curves is therefore the same as the difference between buildings with different room shapes, not the difference between more or less Brutalist styles.
Even if not meaningfully Brutalist, this font makes sense (the reasons to prefer quantized shapes are particularly valid) and looks surprisingly good, and that's what should matter.
We work very hard to ensure concept, execution and communication are as solid as they possibly can be. I would never emptily invoke anything.
The early bitmap fonts embraced the the raw material of the pixel, but their underlying form and structure were determined by (at least) 500 years of typographic history and evolution. These days, the “raw material” of digital fonts is not bitmaps but curves. Of course, they're all rasterized one way or another for print or screens!
I am comfortable that I’ve brought a Brutalist ethic to Signifier. I think you’re conflating geometric primitivism with a material sensibility. The designers of Futura (and other geometric typefaces) were not concerned with the material of their production, rather the aesthetic sensibilities of the era. The history of vectors and splines for drawing shapes is not predicated on making primitives per se, (rects, circles, triangles etc,) but articulating complex, subtle curves. The broader history of letterforms is skewed heavily towards articulating subtle curves rather than primitive shapes, so the actual style of Signifier’s letterforms are aligned towards the shapes, proportions and rhythm of early typefaces rather than 20th century models.
And yes — Signiifer is largely indistinguishable from “Garamond” at small sizes is largely the point! There’s even a bit in the design info about it. Thank you for making that observation.
I certainly couldn't!
Curiously, the three numbers do not seem really independent.
Those numbers.. Can't be a coincidence.
Tobias Frere-Jones has some blog posts on Typeface Mechanics if you’re interested:
https://frerejones.com/blog/typeface-mechanics-001 https://frerejones.com/blog/typeface-mechanics-002
I don't have much more to add than that: I really like this font. It pushes proportion in so many subtle ways, and the result is just... I want to write a book so that I can typeset it in Signifier.
I wouldn't have thought it was possible to make a font that's so recognizably classic and yet so distinctively itself. That took taste, and just enormous reserves of effort; but an effort which shows itself in a restrained, elegant fashion.
I firmly disagree with the comment that it's indistinguishable from Garamond! The f, d, and g immediately tell me that this isn't Garamond, and that's before I opened up Font Book to compare some more subtle letters. The f positively looms over the subsequent letter, while the loop of g swells voluptuously into the space around it. Yet somehow, they manage to do this without crowding their neighbors.
That's really hard! Again, love it. Great font.
The font he's created is great. I wasn't fond of the sharpness initially, especially when the text is blown up, but it reads wonderfully when it's at a 'normal' text size.
I must confess - I had no idea fonts were so expensive to license! (Not a criticism of the cost, just ignorant until now).
It's almost like I need the paper and font imperfections to read faster.
My theory is that the brain somehow uses the paper and font imperfections to coregister (align) the binocular images from our eyes, which leads to smoother reading.
The "brutalist" digital version, on the other hand, seemed to me more of a demonstration of how far one can go using tricks without anyone noticing.
The letters on the screen have form (shape, meaning) and matter (pixels). The matter of the letter has changed but it still has matter in the Aristotelian sense.
Only commenting because I feel this word is overused these days.
Everyone loses loved ones and in many cases it is not experienced as tragedy but as death being a normal and essential part of life.
But I am glad they have made it. They also raise an important point: half-arsed revivals of older fonts. I've been trying to make posters in the style of 1930s adverts. There are a few challenges, but one of the biggest is finding the correct font that hasn't been modernised.
// Give react a chance to render before starting to poll
// This gives us more chance of the opacity transition being visible
// Should also fix rendering glitches in firefox where native image placeholder shows briefly
setTimeout(pollForComplete, 300);
},Anyway using delays hoping that things are in place in 300ms is asking for trouble, I thought reacts whole thing was to put everything in a component lifecycle callback so everything happens in the order it needs to
For those interested in the underlying cause, it seems to have been a bug in Safari. The following CSS triggered infinite repaints:
transition: all;
transition: background-color;Klim type are objectively top 3 type foundries in the world not many people doing better than them. So its a great deal.
Reading these things I inevitably experience intellectual vertigo, the deep-zoom-into-a-fractal sense of perfectly accurate, almost totally unnecessary, precision at microscopy scale. It's more Gibson than Gibson, not least if you're aware of Douglas Hofstadter's obsession with "letter spirits" and their multidimensional relationship to GAI...
We had a good run.
This is an interesting topic I've never seen before. Down the rabbit hole I go...thanks for posting this
Our current trajectory has long been less Keynesian feedback loop, and more zero-sum advertising-based competition between entrenched conglomerates over shrinking consumption. The recipe for vertigo in the art-design-advertising sector is the tension between bohemian ideals on one hand, and the social relations of patronage on the the other.
Unless you think collapse or equilibrium is immanent, buckle up for more of the same.
"Hey, here's a cool article about a guy who spent a year creating another over-engineered javascript framework because he had an aesthetic dislike of semicolons. This matters! Upvote!"
Welcome to Hacker News.
Ancient Babylonians were surely enthusiastic about astronomical computations, you are enthusiastic about clever fonts (and rest assured that there are much more extreme ones around), and some entirely different mathematical technology will be mind-blowing tomorrow.
Brutalism is about exposing the materials used in construction (i.e. the raw concrete is visible). So maybe a font that also shows its own spline control points?
A font with it's own BCP's exposed exists!
But they're still drawn with béziers… the're not the BCP's themselves. Now that would be a recursive/fractal vector nightmare.
> Brutalism wasn’t a specific material or style, it was an attempt to be true to the raw qualities of materials. It was an ethic.¹⁸ Signifier adheres to this ethic, Brutalism’s core concepts framed my working process and thinking rather than pre-determining the outcome. There’s a sense of the vector, the grid, the underlying digital nature. For instance, you can’t see that Adobe Garamond’s a is digital, but you can see it in Signifier’s a.
And from the footnote:
> “The difference is not merely one of form of words: ‘Neo-Brutalist’ is a stylistic label, like Neo-Classic or Neo-Gothic, whereas ‘The New Brutalism’ is, in the Brutalist phrase “an ethic, not an aesthetic. It describes a programme or an attitude to architecture.” Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, (1966): 10.
I don't believe that the term was applied based on it being a buzzword or a recent trend.
[0]: https://klim.co.nz/blog/signifier-design-information/#footno...
Edit: Added reference to the location in the article
[...]
> Thinking about the materiality of digital fonts lead to Brutalism. According to architectural historian and critic Michael Abrahamson, “the word ‘Brutalism’ has lost its meaning. At present, it equates to: large buildings, sometimes of concrete, constructed sometime between World War II and the end of the 1970s.”⁷ Abrahamson clarifies and re-orientates the meaning, quoting Peter Smithson:
>
> Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of the material, that is with the question: what can it do? And by analogy: there is a way of handling gold in Brutalist manner and it does not mean rough and cheap, it means: what is its raw quality?
>
> My question now became, “what is the raw quality of digital fonts?” [...]
Yes, and I totally disagree they achieved any form of "brutalism" with their font.
But the actual version has sharp edges, echoing the "rigid geometric style" that characterizes brutalist architecture.