Yep, I created the new Avatar font | Hacker News Reader

Yep, I created the new Avatar font

swelltype.com

644 pointskrustyburger210 comments

The new typeface is nice, providing the required feel without succumbing to cliche, but now whoever is actually using it to typeset titles isn't doing any kerning! This makes the title look like it is supposed to be "Avata R" (the typographer almost certainly did create proper kerning in the font, but as soon as you start messing with different sizes and increasing the tracking, the kerning is going to have to be adjusted as well, and that wasn't done).

It's like James Cameron said "Fine! I won't let my guy I had make the titles last time choose the font, we'll have a new font made. But I want the my guy to do the rest of the title work, because he'll still do it for just a crew jacket."

https://www.creativebloq.com/news/avatar-way-of-water-logo

Anyway, I quite appreciate the WIP sketches, it makes it plain what the influences are: the bones of the letters are somewhat reminiscent of typefaces like Lithos or Penumbra, and the slight blobbiness of terminals and serifs (which might otherwise be classified as either wedge or flare serifs) subtly recall both Papyrus and some "runic" typefaces. The "runic" influence shows up in some other details as well, like the 'v' of the A's crossbar. The rejected "too extreme" lowercase has a hint of Fraktur or something similar.

Like Papyrus, though, this is most certainly a display font. I hope the designer gets to create a toned-down text version that will be usable for subtitles, fixing the other poor typography decision made in the first movie.

Hmm, thery're doing some kerning, right? Looking at the pic in your link, only the final A and R are so spread apart, all the other letters seem to have more overlapping baked in?

If you pushed the R to the left you're breaking the bottom letter spacing consistency...

I'm not convinced it would look better.

The sample image [1] of the author shows 'AVATAR' with much less spacing between A and R, which looks much better in my opinion.

[1] https://swelltype.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Avatar-samp...

Thanks, now I can't ever unsee it being "AVATA R"

I don't see it. It reads like "AVATAR" to me, even though this is the first time I am seeing the new logo and I read these comments before looking at the logo.

Are we reading it differently? I see that there is some additional space on the top before the "R", but I think that when I am reading it I might be looking mainly at the bottom 75% of the logo, and it looks fine there so maybe that's why it still looks fine to me?

Alternatively, having seen the first movie a couple of times and having seen the original logo a couple of times, maybe I am so used to the word "Avatar" from the original logo that even if I try to read the new logo as "AVATA R" I still read it as "AVATAR"?

On the other hand, there is a company in Norway (and I think they are in several other countries also), called "BDO" and even though I know about their company from having heard about it several times and having even attended a couple of business presentations that they have held, I consistently misread their logo as "LBDO". You can see their logo on the Norwegian website, it has the letters "BDO" on it in blue, with an L-looking shape in red surrounding the front and underside of the letters; https://www.bdo.no/nb-no/home-no . So it seems that familiarity is not always enough to read a logo the way that it was intended to be read.

I don't see it either. When I read it it seems fine, and if I look at the distance between the foot of the A and the R compared the the distance between the foot of the A and the T it looks the same. If I look at the top, specifically between the A and the R it seems like there is a lot of space there, but I don't internalize that as a problem. I found the Gosling bit funny, but more as a bit about overly sensitive people, rather than that the use of Papyrus might be an actual problem that matters to any significant number of humans.

My reading of the article is that the logo came before the type.

I noticed it immediately on the "Q&A's" where the A is separated quite a bit from the &. After that if you begin looking you can see a few other examples as well.

I use a "textured" font on my website (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IM+Fell+English, see https://maya.land) and it bothers me all the time that the deformations repeat across letters -- like cracked stone ones where the cracks are the same on every "a"? Because I think mine's simple enough, eventually I'm going to figure out how to get a similar effect with an SVG filter like the "xerox" one on https://endtimes.dev/.

I hate fonts that have textural imperfections that are repeatedly perfectly on every instance of the same character, destroying the illusion.

When I wrote my book "Crafting Interpreters", I hand-lettered every single word in every illustration separately so that it would be as imperfect as it appeared.

Your hand lettering is excellent by the way. Thanks for taking the time to do that. It's a lost art.

The only works of comparable quality I am aware of are classics like the Moosewood Cookbook[0] (famously completely hand typeset), Allen and Mikes Really Cool Backcountry Ski Book[1], and Anybody's Bike Book[2].

Hand illustrating technical content is so much better than sterile diagrams, and it lends a sense of personalization, especially if the illustrator is also the author, which is a rarity.

[0] https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/katzen-mollie/moo...

[1] https://skimo.co/allen-mikes-backcountry-ski-book

[2] https://archive.org/details/anybodysbikebook00cuth

Don't forget the Forrest Mims electronics books that were in every Radio Shack back in the day.

Oh, thanks for that recommendation. I’ll be sure to read them soon.

Thanks, that bike repair book is nice!

> I hand-lettered every single word in every illustration separately so that it would be as imperfect as it appeared.

Good lord, I'm going to think about this every time I consider dedication to craft.

Seriously, wow. That's impressive. I'm sorry this isn't more substantive of a comment, but I really wanted you to know how amazing that is (as you probably already do).

There is almost certainly a pathological component to how much effort I sunk into the book but once I started... I kinda just kept doing it.

Also, lettering was sort a of a nice peaceful zen break from the harder work of writing prose.

You'll probably enjoy his writeup (and a video) on his process: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-crafti...

Character alternates have been a feature in OpenType for a while. They can be triggered contextually or manually with CSS. Usually these and ligatures are enough to create natural-looking variations.

It's possible in PostScript to dynamically modify each glyph. Long long ago, I saw a small collection of typewriter and handwriting fonts that did this. This would have been back in the mid 90's or so.

I used a handwriting font with dynamic variations ~99-00 to generate address labels for someone entering competitions because printed labels were considered somewhat "cheating". Wasn't entirely convincing if you looked hard but miles better than 50 identical Times New Romans.

TIL postscript has an rng in the form of the rand function.

Assuming it’s widely implemented, it’d be hilarious to distribute files that replace their contents with a 4koma 1% of the time.

Is this related?

https://itnext.io/typescript-and-turing-completeness-ba8ded8...

I'd read this long ago, but my impression was that all the hinting stuff is auto stripped out of loaded web fonts for security/performance these days (maybe after some of those early font vulnerabilities that caused NoScript to block fonts), so most of us can't use it.

That's why I was wondering if ligatures might be a reasonable hack.

You may not have an explicit rand(), but with the ligatures & substitution rules, you can add so much context sensitivity that no one will ever spot any duplications.

That's how you can do things like https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_002_beta2.pdf#p... https://aftertheflood.com/journal/the-worlds-first-code-free... https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html (most of these will work in a browser). I've also suggested that you can create 'prank fonts' which add in subtle typos sporadically.

Less evilly, this is what calligraphy handwriting fonts do to get convincing variation.

I think this is probably true to most people, and therefore good advice, but boy howdy do I still notice the repeats in e.g. "handwriting" fonts with extensive alternates -- the worse the quirkier the glyphs are supposed to be.

Back in the day, I created a font called "Scribble Flinger" that would put smudges and stains throughout if you enabled the contextual alternates. I came up with several alternates for each glyph, and was pretty pleased with the result.

It's a free font, and I occasionally see it used in posters for rock shows or other "alternate" events.

But your point is right on. I only created three alternates per glyph, if I remember correctly, so if you were to try to use it for an entire page of text, it would reveal its tricks pretty quickly. For just a title or header, I think it holds up.

They definitely work better for short text, primarily titles and logotypes. If you only have a few instances of, say, lowercase "a", then it's going to be fine if you only have a few alternate glyphs.

(Having said that, there's definitely a bit of craft, if not art, in choosing the right glyphs and getting the kerning right.)

It especially stands out when you see repeated letters after each other in the same word, like "egg". Seems like a situation where font ligatures could be used to automatically fix it.

Do you know fonts that feature character alternates prominently? I cannot think of type that I've seen used which used variations on characters to lead to the appearance of natural looking hand written text.

The most (in)famous font that's chock-full of character alternates is Zapfino. Whether it'll look naturally hand-written is up for debate -- once you recognize Zapfino, you're going to recognize Zapfino -- but you can get some pretty expressive variants. The downside of recognizing Zapfino is always being permanently disappointed in how few people actually take advantage of those alternates, though.

You'll sometimes find them in other fonts, though; Hoefler Text's italics have a whole bunch of "swash" alternates, for instance, which can be a lot of fun for titles. (Both Zapfino and Hoefler Text are standard fonts on macOS.)

I found this one recently: https://ifonts.xyz/mythshire-font.html

Note how in the 'Dungeons & Dragons' example none of the repeated characters look alike. It only uses ligatures though, not contextual alternates, so words like 'egg' will still look mechanical.

You might be interested in Fredrick Brennan's TT2020 which is designed to explicitly address this

https://ctrlcctrlv.github.io/TT2020/docs/

Your website design is delightful!

I really got excited and thought this was about the other (IMHO better) Avatar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender

But this font looks cool too.

I think it's basically everyone's opinion that watched both, which is why 10 Years Later, 'Avatar' Is the Most Popular Movie No One Remembers https://www.vice.com/en/article/bjw4bv/10-years-later-avatar... which obviously is not completely true, as evidenced by this post, but one thing I have noticed is that whenever anyone mentions the movie Avatar someone always comes in and says I got excited because I thought we were talking about the other one, but whenever anyone mentions the other one nobody gives a damn about the movie.

on edit: I guess 13 years later, but who cares, it's Avatar the movie.

Yeah honestly I only remember Avatar the movie because of the SNL Papyrus skit mentioned in this article lol. Possibly superior to the movie. But who knows, maybe Avatar 2 with its new font will be better...

I mean, I do like the ideas and messages Avatar the movie was going for, but perhaps it was too visual for me. The experience of watching in theater was great/dazzling but nothing really stuck with me.

Reminds me of this video: Can you name a character from Avatar? https://youtu.be/kxp1IBK1OPI?t=6

I would have actually pass that test, I can name Colonel Quaritch, Jake Sully, Ripley and Eiwa (I think it counts as a character).

Are you sure there was a character named Ripley? I just went and looked at a listing of characters https://james-camerons-avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Chara... and they didn't have Ripley, but they did have Dancer #3, so I figured that's a pretty authoritative list.

Maybe you mean Grace Augustine, Sigourney Weaver's character?

on edit: I mean it's a pretty hilarious confirmation of my point if so.

Well, Ripley mention is a joke. I never remembered the name Weaver's character in "Avatar", of course.

so in conclusion, actually a pretty hilarious confirmation of my point that nobody remembers or really cares about Avatar the movie.

Hey, I named two characters (three with Eiwa!)!

I actually liked the movie, it's just that the characters aren't often addressed by names, so it's hard to remember them. In Aliens, for example, people always refer to each other by names (Vasques, Hudson, Bishop, etc), but in Avatar they don't.

(And i can probably name actors who played most roles, including Giovanni Ribisi)

I’ve never seen ‘The Last Airbender’, but always heard good things.

As far as Avatar ’The movie’, the plot & storyline was certainly not the most original, or memorable, but I’ll never forget watching it in 3D in the theater.

Still to this day, I don’t think any movie has come close to utilizing 3D visuals they way they did. It’s was absolutely stunning, and added a lot to the experience!

Especially for the time it came out, the 3D tech was just starting to become popular in theaters. I’ve seen many movies since then in 3D, and it always seems like an afterthought. Doesn’t really change or add that much.

Avatar, on the other hand, seemed to be designed from the get go to be a 3D movie and it shows. I will always hold it in my mind, as the pinnacle of 3D movies. Still waiting for someone to make a movie that even comes close.

The problem is it tried so hard to be a 3D movie that it was lacking in all other area. The movie itself was pretty boring with everything so predictable.

Funnily nobody watches movies in 3d anymore I think? Looks like it was bust a fad.

It was a fad! And it wasn't the first time either. 3D films were all the rage in the 1950s in movies like "The Creature From the Black Lagoon", although they used the older "red & blue" filter technology. In the 1980s it was back briefly for films like "Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn" using polarized glasses, and finally in the new millennium, movies like "Avatar".

The Lumiere brothers attempted 3D films even before they properly started with 2D ones (iirc).

It's hypothesized that, with old accounts of Lumieres' enterprise being very messy, the 2D premiere of ‘The Arrival’ was conflated with the 3D showing, and that's where we get the stories of the audience panicking about the train.

Good point. 3D film wasn’t new by any means. I remember doing some of those 3D movies (or actually ’4D’ movie ‘rides’) at Disneyworld, as late as the early 2000’s that we’re still using the older ‘red/ blue’ lenses.

Avatar however, took us to a whole new level. The modern CGI, along with the incredible amount of effort that went into planning out the cinematography to integrate with the 3D, is truly unmatched.

Many big ‘Blockbuster’ still have 3D versions, but it’s so clearly just something they add on after the fact, and they weren’t designed with that in mind. Very forgettable.

And during the 1980s fad, Weird All released his 2nd album, titled "In 3-D", which contains the song "Nature Trail to Hell" about a fictional 3D movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQK7cFwPayI

>The problem is it tried so hard to be a 3D movie that it was lacking in all other area.

This is okay IMO. There is no shortage of great movies. I don't mind that we've got Avatar: the incredible tech demo with uninteresting plot instead of Avatar: a good movie.

Exactly. I went along to see Avatar because I hadn't seen a 3D movie and figured I'd go and watch the best version of the technology. I enjoyed the experience, and also didn't bother seeing any other 3D movies and haven't seen Avatar a second time.

That’s a good way to look at it as a ‘tech demo’. And the greatest one we’ve ever seen!

I don’t disagree. I’m sure I’m not the first one to make the comparison, but the plot line was almost like a modern rip-off of ‘FernGully’. Nothing crazy. But the 3D visuals were so mesmerizing I didn’t care haha. Another comment compares it to a ‘tech demo’, and that’s probably a good way to look at it :)

Nobody? Theaters are still pretty packed for major releases.

It has its place in some movies.

"Alita: Battle Angel" might be a candidate. I thought the 3D cinematography was pretty good.

I really hope we get sequels to that. They left the ending nicely open in the movie, and there's a hell of a lot of material to draw on. Although imho the original manga kind of got worse over time. I've read the whole series except for the flashback books set on Mars, and it gets to be a bit of a slog and has some very strange ideas.

Cool, thanks for the recommendation! I’ll check it out.

That would be the following font I believe[0].

https://anchorfonts.com/avatar-the-last-airbender-font/

> Adrian Frutiger has designed the avatar’s structure with average strokes.

Sure sure, and storyboards were probably done by Picasso.

While that's quite a word salad sentence, there's a bit of truth to it -- the subtitle typeface that reads "The Last Airbender" is Adrian Frutiger's Herculanum, which is what you actually download when you click "Download Font" on that page -- which, ah, seems of dubious legality. The actual "Avatar" title looks clearly hand-drawn.

Thank you for that pointer. You made my day!

The show was great, but the live-action movie was a bit lackluster when it came out. I haven't rewatched recently to see how it aged.

What live-action movie? There is no live-action movie in Ba Sing Se...

The live action movie is widely regarded as a cinematic and adaptive dumpster fire. Panned by fans, critics and audiences

Anecdotally, my friend and I were the only people in the theater when we went to see it. I definitely remember some fundamental mechanics of bending being changed to suit the movie's narrative.

Here's how it aged: https://youtube.com/watch?v=m3x9WmjHDEM .

Possibly the greatest scene in cinematic history.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is the best TV show ever, despite being targeted at children aged 9 (no, I'm not exaggerating). It has great character arcs, depth, humour, and it landed the ending perfectly. (unlike overhyped D&D chaps).

My only complaint about it is that in the beginning of S1 they had way too many gags at Sokka's expense. Fortunately, they've significantly dialled it down around episode 6 or 7.

The Chapo boys make some interesting pro Avatar (the movie) points: https://youtu.be/s7CtTo88QOI

I love that show so, so much. It was the peak on top of a Nickelodeon that was already peaking (Spongebob etc).

Rewatched the show two weeks ago for the 10th time. It's a masterpiece.

As I had to search for the SNL avatar papyrus thing here it is:

https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ

You are doing God's work. This to me is one of the funniest SNL sketches ever.

It is also embedded in the article.

Doesn't play outside the USA (at least not Canada)

Yup. The one in the article at least. Does the YouTube one play in Canada? It works in Germany.

YouTube one's fine in Canada. NBC doesn't work outside the US, I think.

One of my favorite shorts from SNL

SNL should put it in a preshow ad of Avatar 2 screenings.

A lot of times, the issue isn't the font... it's ubiquity and misuse.

Comic Sans, for example, was literally for speech bubbles for a comic book dog.

Papyrus was created by a 23 year old who was reading the Bible and wanted to translate the feel to a computer.

>Comic Sans, for example, was literally for speech bubbles for a comic book dog.

Comic book? I'm not sure if that's accurate terminology. It was a cartoon dog in the Microsoft Bob software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

Comic Sans might have a better reputation if its lower-case was just smaller upper-case, as Dave Gibbons does.

The problem with Comic Sans is that it was a originally a pixel font designed to look good un-antialiased at a specific pixel size. When that was expanded to a vector font, the resulting proportions looked really horrific at other sizes.

Like taking an old 16x16 NES Super Mario Bros sprite, scaling it up to 4K and expecting it to look like an attractive portrait of an Italian plumber.

Papyrus also makes for a dogshit font for legible subtitles.

Given all the care that went into Avatar: the languages, the culture, the visuals, it's absolutely baffling how careless Cameron was about two things:

- the font

- and, most importantly, the music:

Creating the Music of the Na’vi in James Cameron’s Avatar: An Ethnomusicologist’s Role, https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/pie... from one of the people who tried to create a truly unique music for Avatar. And then simply rejected by Cameron.

Why Avatar has the Most Ironic Soundtrack of All Time by Sideways, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8

And the story.

I think it was a fine retelling of "Fern Gully"

Or Pocahontas: https://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/130283/original.jpg

The body text font for this blog post is hard to read.

I can't tell if that's ironic or not.

I imagine he's in a hard position. He makes fonts for TV shows / games / etc, and they tend to be silly/weird/unique. He kinda needs to use his own typeface for his blog, and he doesn't have a lot of "sane" options to choose from!

(Here's the font used for the paragraphs: https://swelltype.com/commercial-fonts/hyperspace-race/)

He creates fonts for TV shows but he doesn’t create fonts for books and blogs. Using such font for long text just screams bad typography.

I'm almost certain I've seen that font on the back of a Transformers toy box.

Seems to be that kind of misuse where a typeface used for titles or headings is used for the body.

I was about to make this comment. It's horrible. It makes me feel like I have a visual processing disorder. It's like my eyes are being disrespected.

I have same doubts. Looks like some kind of April fools to me.

The kerning in the word “often” was so bad!

Improve your life today:

about:config browser.display.use_document_fonts = 0

Sans-serif is typically not a very good fit for body texts. The line-height is also set too low, makes it harder to jump to the next line as you try to find which one it is.

This is absolutely correct for books, but a blogpost is not a book. The most significant reason to use sans-serif for UI text is that screens with less DPI tend to utterly destroy serif fonts with small font sizes. Serif fonts just rely that much more on high DPI values like on a book. If you somehow have an audience that's exclusively on Retina displays (e.g. for iPad/iPhone apps), I would be less hesitant to try out a few serif options. But designers tend to forget that e.g. not all desktop users are on color-graded 5K iMacs.

A Sans-serif font is totally fine for body copy.

Seems ironic to read this in a sans-serif font.

The font of this article is bloody awful though, I'll agree with you on that.

I’m curious where you heard that sans-serifs are not a good fit for body text.

Sans-serifs has been a popular choice for body text on posters, backcovers (of books, albums, board-games etc.), user interfaces, instruction pamphlets, social media, blog pages, etc. I honestly have no idea where a recommendation such as this could originate from.

"Don't use sans-serif typefaces for body text" has been age-old advice in the print world, on the principle that long blocks of text -- e.g., not posters, back covers, or instruction pamphlets, but short stories, novels, feature stories, newspaper and magazine articles -- is easier to read with serif type. In the print world, long-form text like that is overwhelmingly set in serif faces, not sans-serif.

Sans-serif type became the standard in on-screen computer contexts in no small part because at 75–100 PPI resolution, monitors just couldn't render delicate features particularly well; even good anti-aliasing is going to turn the serifs on 12-point text into gray smudges. Computers just did better when you went to sans-serif fonts, particularly ones designed with relatively high x-heights and big counters like Verdana.

I do wonder if the preference for serifs in long text bodies in print media is due to a reasons of historic technical limitations similar to the low PPI resolutions on older screen displays.

For example. It is easy to imagine older print technology being prone to ink bleed (particularly on mass print media such as books and news papers) which becomes very visible on small the smaller font-sizes prominent in the same media. I can also see how such bleed would be more disruptive without the serifs and the serif fonts would then be preferable.

With modern printers (or screen displays for that matter) such concerns would be as obsolete as the concerns that the serifs turn into smudges on low resolution screens.

The serifs have appeared for the first time in the Latin inscriptions cut in stone.

So if there was any technological reason for them, it was either due to the stone carving techniques, or more likely to the limitations of writing with a wide brush, because the stone was carved after the letters had been painted with a wide brush, to guide the carving.

After the Imperial Rome, the serifs have continued to be used when writing on different supports mainly due to tradition.

The serifs are not the only difference between serif and sans-serif typefaces, the second difference is that the sans-serif letters are drawn with lines of uniform width, while the serif letters are drawn with a combination of thick lines and thin lines.

There are some modern sans-serif typefaces, like Optima and many others inspired by it, which are intermediate between classic serif and sans-serif typefaces, by lacking serifs but using variable-width lines, like the serif typefaces.

Even if the serif fonts are the traditional fonts, used almost exclusively until the 19th century, when the sans-serif fonts became popular for certain uses (e.g. for titles, for advertising or for newspapers printed on cheap paper) there are good reasons to use them besides the tradition.

Their 2 extra features, serifs and variable-width lines, make the letters more distinctive, less similar to each other, and in the opinion of many people, more beautiful.

Because of that, when rendered at very high resolutions, most people consider the serif typefaces more legible, even if there are also younger people, who have read few books on paper, but who have been accustomed with reading sans-serif typefaces on low-resolution displays, so they may prefer the sans-serif typefaces.

As another poster has already said, the advantages of serif typefaces are achieved only at high resolutions, i.e. preferably on 4k displays or better and when not using stupid dpi scaling, but actually using the high resolution for rendering. On the many garbage laptop displays with low resolutions, the sans-serif typefaces are almost always better.

I want to add that why I am not completely convinced that it is better for the letters to have serifs, I definitely believe that the letters drawn with constant-width lines are much uglier than the letters drawn with variable-width lines.

Because of that, even if I use frequently sans-serif typefaces, I use only non-traditional sans-serif typefaces with variable-width lines, e.g. Optima Nova, Palatino Sans or Trajan Sans.

However, such typefaces with variable-width lines also need high-resolution displays to be useful. On displays with less than 4k resolution, their appearance at normal text sizes is degraded.

So would you then say that the popularity of sans-serifs as body text on printed media such as posters, back-covers, consumer packages, etc. is due to them preferring style over legibility?

It's an interesting question. I know that ink bleed was taken into account in type design, which actually led to some early digital versions of classic typefaces being poor renditions because they were too literally following the cuts of the metal and ended up being too thin.

The traditional rationale I come across is that serifs "lead the eye," but I have no idea if there's any real research about that. There's probably some truth to broadly stereotyping sans-serif fonts as generally more legible and serif fonts as generally more readable -- but I'm sure there's a myriad of exceptions. (Like, uh, Myriad, a sans-serif explicitly designed to be good for body text.)

Comic Papyrus - https://creativemarket.com/blog/designer-combines-papyrus-an...

Those aged/distressed fonts with little nicks / chunks missing / broken bits, look fine until there are two or more of the same letter in a sentence. Then I cant help but notice that the same letters are aged/distressed in exactly the same way.. It seems like a really obvious issue that clearly undermines the effect they are going for.

Agreed, that's definitely the big glaring issue to me too. Normally all letters being identical is a good expected thing, but for an aged look it falls flat because aging doesn't uniformly affect every single letter across pages and books of course. And our brains are pretty good at doing pattern recognition/outline shape comparison with stuff that is side-by-side, so once you notice it niggles a bit. Now that I think about it that seems like a product which should exist, be it standalone or as a plug-in, where "aging" could be soft-applied (not talking rasterizing the text then applying filters to the pixels themselves) to any arbitrary string of text either with a certain amount of random noise or via algorithms that would simulate various kinds of environmental effects on stone/wood/papyrus/vellum/paper. It's almost certainly not worth having that kind of complexity in fonts/typesetting engines themselves though the typegeek in me thinks it'd be pretty dang fun.

I've seen a ton of fonts out there abuse ligatures (Chartwell, Bullshit Sans). I wonder if something like that could be done for pseudorandomness... use a different texture depending on the text on either side.

You could in theory do just that, but the amount of work to achieve that would be staggering, automated or not.

What we really need in this world is procedural/generated-on-the-fly fonts, where you setup how the font is suppose to react to X and then use that.

Knuth's METAFONT might help, but it never took off because font designers aren't mathematicians or programmers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/...

There is also https://spectral.prototypo.io/ which was an unsuccessful startup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911784

I would be suprised if such a thing doesnt exist in the fancy programs professional movie poster making people are using nowadays. If not, then totally sounds like a product with a clear business case, customer #1 James Cameron.

Lol I love the following line from that sketch

> He just highlighted Avatar, he clicked the drop down menu and then he randomly selected Papyrus. Like a thoughtless child just wandering by a garden yanking leaves along the way.

That's what most people do with their PowerPoint slides and Word documents. I can totally relate with Ryan Gosling in the clip.

Anyone else having "font fatigue"? I just can't tell whether a font is new or not. They all look like they came from some standard stock library that everybody already uses.

That's not font fatigue. That means the font designers did their job.

You're not supposed to be able to tell if a font is new or not (unless you work as a typographer or graphics designer)

You should ask yourself: is the text legible, does it make reading easier? Does it add a bit of visual interest or flatten visual interest (ie fades into the background) depending on what the design calls for?

Those are the important questions. As to whether a font is new or not, if you are a typographer, then that is your bread and butter. I had a friend who's a typographer and they would be able to point out all the ways Helvetica is different from Helvetica Neue (and talk about it for hours and days on end), for example:

https://creativepro.com/helvetica-vs-neue-helvetica-same-but...

Tribal, yet futuristic. Love it!

Looks great. Although it could really use a "tt" ligature. Just look at the names "Scott" and "Letteri" and you'll see what I mean

I loved the link to the SNL skit. Agree it's a fantastic performance by Ryan Gosling. The funniest part for me though is how it ended with Comic Sans, the only font in the universe more reviled than Papyrus.

Hobo is pretty reviled too.

I think overused came before and caused reviled.

There's definitely a connection between overused and reviled, but I don't think one causes the other. Do people hate on Trajan for example?

Story is not very original, dull even, lots of clichés. True story, the person sitting next to me in the cinema fell asleep, well I almost did too. I really didn’t get all the hype around it. After re-watching it, some scenes are nonetheless great.

3D was ok, but if I remember correctly mostly a window into the world and not many scenes where the elements jump out of the screen into the our side of the room.

Released around the same time, A Christmas Carol was a great film in that regard - spectacular 3D experience.

Edit: The font looks great, really liked the article.

Yeah, I think it was mostly the 3D hype (and great marketing) that made Avatar a success. The movie itself is more or less just the sci-fi version of Pocahontas.

When Films&Stuff on Youtube did a 10-years-later video on Avatar [1], they said that it was not just about "the 3D hype". It was that Avatar was the first (and maybe still only) movie to use 3D effectively because they emphasized Positive Space (creating depth through 3D to strengthen immersion) over Negative Space (the popping-out-of-the-screen effect that's more commonly used because it's way more noticeable, but also gets old fast because it's fundamentally a gimmick).

I too have quickly grown tired of 3D movies and actively avoided them for the last 10 years, but when Avatar 2 comes out, I will definitely see it in 3D.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt-kEIQcLKw

"Dances with Space Wolves"

Well, the story was basically Pocahontas on an alien planet.

There wasn't anything original to the plot, so...

Technically it was good, but I only watched it once, I see films, just like I read books: for the story

I watch films for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the script, and Avatar had a lot going for it that wasn't written on the script when it came out, but films like that tend to age poorly. What's so impressive is that Avatar... didn't age poorly, it still looks quite good, even by our modern standards.

I'll probably see these for the spectacle, if nothing else.

The CGI was really well done. Helped by our brains not triggering the uncanny valley on alien faces(or at least, not nearly as much)

I just keep calling it Papyrus Black. A definite improvement though.

That web page font is so harsh on my eyes, hard to read.

Also, "tribal" is a weird choice of word. What is the intended meaning?

It's weird that you find it weird. The meaning seems obvious to me (despite being incredibly inaccurate, western-centric and mildly patronising)

I would say it means "evocative of cultures that are stereotypically thought to be tribal in the colloquial sense of the word"

Should have just used Papyrus. Now we'll never have a sequel to that SNL sketch.

I'm recently seeing more content than usual about that movie. It was pretty much forgotten but now that it has a sequel on the way is something to talk about again?

The font looks nice though

This is why movies cost so damned much and we're stuck with nothing but reboots, sequels, rehashes, and spinoffs, because the money people need a sure thing with this kind of expenditure.

Given that an independant funk band hired someone to design not one but two fonts purely for their own marketing material[0][1], I think you overestimate how much it costs to hire a font designer relative to the average film budget.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axrf_RPBJ6g

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEn7HcpfXE

You monster (j/k).

Nice font work. I’ll be greatly surprised if the Avatar sequels gain anything like the popularity the first movie had, but at least it won’t be because they used Papyrus.

It's absolutely a beautiful font.

I actually really like Papyrus(And it's only Libre clone AFAIK, Qualitype QTPandora), but this feels a little more solid and impactful.

People like this font https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ

But Papyrus was already the perfect typeface. It has the same sense of un-earned superiority of Avatar but is ultimately terrible, just like Avatar.

The Papyrus skit is funny, but am unclear is there an issue with using Papyrus? Is Papyrus not a good font?

I'm not getting it. In other words why was the skit made?

Papyrus is so widely used it's comparable to Comic Sans for many designers. It's not a bad font (even less so than Comic Sans) but it's overused and thus comes off as "amateurish". The skit names hookah bars, Shakira merchandise and off-brand tea because these are not only things that actually often use the font but also aren't considered examples of great design.

This is contrasted with Avatar being a massive blockbuster movie with a huge production budget and arguably one of the most successful movies of its time. As the article states, the font isn't really a terrible choice for the movie but because it's so "basic" it comes across as low effort compared to the overall production value of the movie itself.

You could argue that it's elitism but at least in part it's played for laughs because it's such an irrelevant detail while also being so potentially infuriating to those who actually do that kind of thing for a living. Realistically most professionals likely just rolled their eyes when they saw it used Papyrus or had a good laugh, but it's fun to exaggerate this to such dramatic proportions because it mixes a grain of truth (the font choice feels cheap) into an escalation of dramatic stakes (the protagonist losing sleep, obsessing over the typeface, stalking the designer, and finally crashing his car and yelling at him from the street) and the final pay-off (the designer smugly looking at him, implying the protagonist was right about the font choice being an evil act that the designer "got away with").

It’s an overused and often misused font, similar to how Trajan went from Rome-based works to being used on most dramatic and thriller film posters in the early 2000s.

That video was awesome, and this article was a great read. I would like a deeper dive on your choices, this is an interesting topic.

I wish they had secretly released the font and got it widely adopted a year or so ahead, to ensure we could get a second SNL skit.

(2020)

I love how you can’t distinguish lI| in that font. Very futuristic to have that relic of the past!

Heh, got scared it was going to be Papyrus

Looks like the Legend of Korra logo!

Obligatory: “I know what you did!”

I love how the designer seems evil

I love the meme scene where Ryan is driving and keeps eye contact with the designer!

Papyrus 2.0

Looks nice!

Yo, fix that kerning, dawg.

"I don't even think this is Papyrus. They clearly modified it."

"Whatever they did, it wasn't enough!"

Papyrus is the top SNL skit of all time. The next one is Grouch (Sesame street x Joker parody). What would be #3?

So many good ones, I can't choose.

Black Jeopardy with Tom Hanks -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7VaXlMvAvk

Close Encounter -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfPdYYsEfAE

Disney Housewives -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-2fnZfK9Lg

Friendos -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oPe80mdcZg

GE Big Boys -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZRzJJcq6Rs

Miley Cyrus and Kyle Mooney's Sex Tape -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEqStuivoio

Santa Baby -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkrpvCs-kfE

The Day Beyoncé Turned Black -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ociMBfkDG1w

Wells for Boys -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONhk-hbiXk

World War II 101 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdf_XdDwc-o

Chris Farley's "Down by the River" skit is my #1 of all time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv2VIEY9-A8

If we're digging into the classics, my prototypical excellent SNL skit is always Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzAFqrxfeY

Papyrus skit direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ

For me, it’s definitely Meet Your Second Wife: https://youtu.be/MJEAGd1bQuc

Those are both in my top 10, but IMHO "A thanksgiving miracle" ("Hello from the outside" Adele sendup), Cowbell, Taco Town, and United Way (Peyton Manning beaning that kid in the back with a laser pass), Kristen Wiig's Christmas Morning, and -- omg, best for last? -- Kate McKinnon's Paranormal encounters (really any of her Ms Rafferty skits) are all up there with Papyrus and Grouch.

I'm sure there's recency bias at play, but those are the ones I can think of now that just HIT.

Taco Town!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evUWersr7pc

I forgot about the Paranormal encounters, those were top notch

Haunted Elevator (ft. David S. Pumpkins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS00xWnqwvI

"The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders" is my all-time #1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDIAZCwHQE

Agreed Papyrus is top 3, I might quibble over the grouch because I think either the crime scene skit or the coroner skit might take 2 and 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo6CyNNC60M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjS8cA2Jfzc

There's so many I was trying to think of, but the one's that probably had the most staying power with the family and friends at the time were the Celebrity Jeopardy ones, by far. So many bad Sean Connery impressions for months, if not years. Here are a few...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEghu90QJH4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch_hoYPPeGc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaFSkWfFhO0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df5iwY7QUTY

Za (james franco) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkP2F7kWn7A

Spelling bee (also james franco) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02S8t0F1inc

Career Day (Adam Driver) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7HD2xG92-0

What's that name (bill hader) -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rImxuuD_kwM

Both "What's That Name"s easily make up two of my top three, with Papyrus being the other one.

The only good SNL skit is World Peace Rap (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce3ST3wRPCI) because it's a parody of a YouTube video from 2006 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--Vaz9jW054&t=75s).

There aren't any other good ones. I imagine the audience for SNL is entirely those people who reply to everything with GIFs from The Office.

Amendment: Stu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OJ7aW3Df5U) is okay because it's how I learned that Eminem stopped dying his hair and looks like a dad now.

For me it's "Levi's Wokes"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adPXDTvADD0

My favorite recently, and very close to home for me, was Home Repair Show with Oscar Isaac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma70ghSEMys

Edit: another one with lasting power in my household is Man Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XOt2Vh0T8w

Black Jeopardy with Tom Hanks

Jim Carrey did a pretty good Matthew McConaughey SNL skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3eN9u5N2Q4

Maraka - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1CeEXkNBGs

More cowbell.

God bless Julio Torres. One of my favorite SNL sketches of all time. That and "Fischer Price Wells for Sensitive Boys" -- another Julio Torres sketch!

Check out his HBO show Los Espookys. It's really good and fully lives in the surreal dream logic world of those sketches.

I have the same feeling about Calibri. When someone just picks whatever font came with MS Word/PowerPoint, it just makes me judge all the other decisions that they made in the project.

Maybe it's just me, but it genuinely disgusts me to see Calibri because it's not crispt and has some of the worst curvatures I've seen on a font.

Calibri has a reasonably large character set and is relatively "compact" in terms of optical size/metric. Not trying to say it's the best typeface for any given application but if you want something metric compatible, with a large character set, your options are somewhat limited (or have been until relatively recently). Many typefaces that are functionally similar in character representation, etc. are more open and take up more space.

Interesting - I feel that way about Times new Roman, and Tahoma (the previous 2 default Word fonts), but I find Calibri quite pleasant!

Out of curiousity, what are sensible basic fonts for documents that you would recommend instead? (Something meant to be read for 1-6 pages of content, not presented in powerpoint slides)

Intersting - I used to feel that way about Times New Roman too, but gradually grown to like it for its compatcness.

I tyically use LateX fonts for formal documents:

https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-to-make-word-documents-l...

For less formal documents, I tent to use Helvetica/Inter/Calisto MT/Constantia and a bunch of others that I collected over the years.

It's the default typeface for Office products since the 2007 release. So they just didn't pick anything better

Calibri was part of a family of "C" fonts released together as the ClearType Font Collection.

- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/cleartype/clear-...

- https://typographica.org/on-typography/microsofts-cleartype-...

I heard it's going to change in the next release (or maybe it did already).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com