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Comment by beardyw | Hacker News Reader

Typography used to be an art. Now it's expected to be a science. My (much) older brother was a typographer by trade all his life and most of what he did was by eye, not by measuring.

For various reasons typography has become something everyone dabbles in, but few do well. It should not be a great surprise that something which is an art refuses to completely yield to science.

Personally I have never felt confident with it (for obvious reasons) and just hope to produce something acceptable.

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Typography is an artform, but don't blame science for its decline but rather conformism. I've generally known people to weep and wail when something strays an inch from Helvetica, Computer Modern, and Roboto. Therefore, all one needs to do to be an 85% expert at type is put <style>@font { roboto: url(data:...) charset(latin1); }</style> at the top of an html page and everything magically looks good. If I wanted to get into typography then I'd probably do it by learning Arabic since it's all cursive and really complicated, which means plenty of opportunities for creativity.

In many ways the familiarity and apparent simplicity of English text is a big challenge, particularly whole pages of text. A great book to read is Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield. Turns out I live not too far from the resting place of the only matrices of Doves type, at the bottom of the Thames.

My brother talks about setting whole pages by hand, and finding a word missing! Apparently it pays to leave a bit of extra space.

Actually, divers recovered them in 2014 to augment a digital reconstruction of the typeface: https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/

From the book

> Fearing it's use in shoddy printing and undesirable subject matter [Cobden-Sanderson] took the entire fund to Hammersmith Bridge and threw it in the Thames.

If after 100 years it is now for sale it feels a bit sad. I hope it is used well.

Totally agree. Typography is similar to grids in the same way.

As a design it's tempting to set up "a perfect grid" so your life will be easier and everything will look great. But it's often better to know how and why grids work, and then create more informal layouts intuitively.

I used to be a typographer's apprentice in a previous life.

Whenever I start adjusting stuff by eye (or ask for it to be done), junior front-end devs freak out and accuse me of various sins such as "cheating" or "guessing".

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