The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025) | Hacker News Reader

The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

aresluna.org

391 pointsdcminter58 comments

I started reading the article with a feeling of "I don't recognize this at all" from the first few images that slowly loaded.

Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it."

A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.

> Carve something into plastic, on the other hand, and it can survive decades. Substitute plastic for metal, and you just turned decades into centuries.

"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."

I've been saying for years that future archaeologists will wonder at these mysterious emblems they dig up, generally associated with a large deposit of what was once highly refined iron, aluminium and copper. About half a metre wide and 11cm high, made of incredibly durable plastic obviously intended to last for centuries, if not millenia.

And they'll puzzle over the inscriptions, "G809 BGG", "R420 BRL", "RFS 131Y", "SJ12 EXW", "RE51 CUE" - this on some huge chunk of steel, easily three times as big as the rest, and so many others.

What could they mean?

As a non-American, I don’t even understand today what that means. (And the website linked to isn’t loading, so I don’t have the context from that.)

I believe those are car license plate numbers.

British ones of various vintage, with RFS 131Y the oldest of those, from 1983.

My old Volvo 340GLE 1.4, first car after I passed my driving test. Awesome things, engine at front, gearbox at back, 50/50 weight distribution, enough torque to break traction if provoked, inoffensive enough not to freak out your girlfriend's dad.

Perfect car for a 20-year-old.

License plates vary between countries but this description should be recognisable to most of the world.

We use "AA AA 1234" or variations of that, so the examples did not register as license plates at all. Interesting.

Regardless of the content, what other 50x11cm mass produced metal signs are there? I was thinking street name signs, before reading the examples.

The comment described them as made out of plastic, while license plates here are usually made from aluminum, so I was thinking more along the lines of some kind of packaging.

In the UK they're incredibly high quality perspex, to the extent that if you need to make up some small HV insulators that won't be subjected to a lot of mechanical stress you could do worse than chop up some old numberplates.

"We believe they served some kind of religious purpose."

I mean, <gestures at car culture>...

I thought it was 40K reference at first about certainty of steel

it's from the mistborn series by brandon sanderson. fun books. would make a great big budget TV series someday

Mistborn was supposedly picked up for film.

Picked up by Apple, of all places, and Brandon finished the first draft of the screenplay last week.

Ironically, most of the metal stuff doesn't survive from antiquary. For instance most statues were in bronze not marble, but since metal can be easily recycled the only metal statues that survived are from ship wrecks.

Stone is a safer bet to survive the centuries, but even those are reused as bricks, like the Rosetta Stone:

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

You can buy rocks engraved with "Nothing Is Written In Stone". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nothing+is+written+in+stone&ia=ima...

The site is killing my brave browser. Maybe long thin transoceanic paths, or phase of the moon.

So many partially loaded images.

But definitely worth the wait. A great read. I liked the almost mimetic quality of "which slightly broken font plate is being reused to make the broken "3" I keep seeing" which is a classic detective novel trope, e.g. Lord Peter Whimsey in "strong poison" and a typewriter glitch he recognises.

It is definitely a "Macbook Pro on a wooden table at a coffee shop, owner with tattoos and stylish facial hair" kind of website

Yea, but if I bought coffee table books and this was printed by Taschen, I'd buy it.

That typeface is so familiar. One imagines a great big red "reset" up in the clouds, benevolent creator pondering pressing, this is definitely the font on the button. I can smell machine oil, hear 50hz hum just looking at these labels.

> hear 50hz

100Hz, actually…

On Fennec on Android, no images appear to load at all. Edit: they do, it just takes ages. Could be the slow connection.

There's 600 photos and one 500 MB video. It seems like they are being served directly from the owner's Apache server from response headers. Server could be overloaded?

Could be. And they're high quality images and movie clips.

I think my ad blocker was the problem. Disabling it didn't turn it into the fastest website in the world—the images loaded in about 15 seconds—but that was a lot better than the never loading I was getting before disabling it.

I love this article, it's been posted here several times before. The first time I read it I had been in New York and was waiting in JFK to fly home, so naturally it resonated.

In some ways it's THE perfect hacker news article. It's about design sensibilities and typography, and as we know all HN readers have great taste, so it tickles that part of the brain.

It's mechanical and analogue, so it harkens back to a time when engineers built things with their hands and their work had a physical manifestation in the real world. So for the former 'physical' engineers who turned to tech for better career prospect (like me) it tickles that part of the brain too!

It has an air of Americana in that New York is its most iconic city and this article is drenched in 'look how good we used to make things', and then it delightfully leads us back to old blighty for the Anglophiles.

For an article romantic about a font, it's perfection. Catnip for nerds.

More like "The hardest website your browser will work on" ... will come back once it loads

600 images in the page takes time to load.

Nah, it is only using 90MB of RAM in my PC.

At the same time, Gmail is using 244MB.

My average tab opened is about 30MB, so the difference is only 3 times the memory.

Probably only the network connection struggles for a few seconds in my phone, and that's it.

Some past comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053419

It's a pretty font and gives that instant retro look on keyboards for example.

I've tried it on the computer with "Gorton Digital" and that's just terrible, I can't recommend it. The spacing/kerning is all wrong.

Hoping someone takes on the project of making a nice digital font, potentially a mono-spaced one too.

I'm using National Park Typeface for my site and I kinda like it

List of digitized versions: https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/

Nice one, thanks!

The author is selling "Gorton Perfected" for $20: https://shifthappens.site/store/

I love this.

As nerdy as it is, it is also an interesting historical look on how certain things in society/culture have a life that is hidden in plain view and quietly goes on. It is an interesting reflection on many things in life.

The Gorton machines being initially developed by a lens manufacturer made a lot of sense given the 1920s brochure material the author included earlier. That material (unlike the later versions presented) focused on the machine's ability to do circular engravings (exactly the speciality the lens text presumably needed)

That was a fun read. I was a draftsman as a teenager in the late 80s and I did my best to make my handwriting look like those letters. Then, as a CAD operator, I put that font on everything I produced. It never once occurred to me that it looked like that because it was designed to be legibly engraved.

Gorton does strike me as very similar to Century Gothic which is the default font for a lot of CAD software I've used (Creo, maybe others).

Cool to flip through their master copy typeface reference: https://archive.org/details/gorton-master-copy-type-for-all-...

Funny, I'd actually noticed that this font was knocking around in various places, particularly in American media, without giving it too much conscious thought. Although I had decided that I liked it. It's very 60s, mechanical, tactile, and almost cute in its ignorance of typography rules that would come to be unquestionable. It's nice to put a name to the font.

I started reading this article and thought to myself "Author is just talking about Leroy and calling it Gorton for some reason."

Sure enough. I learned a lot of history from this wonderful piece. And I still have the Leroy device I used in the 70s.

Unrelated to the article, but I'm a big trackpad user and, man... I sure hate it when websites hijack my scrolling / pinch + zoom functionality. Totally throws me for a loop.

And on the pedestal these words appear (in Gorton):

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains.

https://archive.ph/mYRQX

(the site seems to eagerly load lots of large images, and a 500MB video)

It's funny reading an article about kerning mistakes in font usage while the author doesn't even bother to implement lazy loading of images.

Great read. I wish it loaded faster, without the retina resolution images.

Very few of the images are loading for me.

Now I read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_lettering

... and I find it distracting by how wrong it is. It should say "Single stroke Gothic", or even better: mention Gorton directly.

Instead, it says: "a Gothic sans-serif script", even if it mentions Leroy a few paragraphs later :)

> Of course you will see it, the same way you saw a lot of Arial in the 1990s, or Calibri today.

Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.

Jesus, who thought loading hundred of MB of images in a single page was a good idea?

Normally I hate the pointless use of javascript in basic text and image websites, but lazy image loading would probably stop this server having been hugged to death

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