nubero

Now it did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573887#44576031

It’s an interesting middle ground between technology, psychology and art. As I said in the article when I compared the skill set with that of the architect. Personally, I find that one of the most interesting aspects is the “usability” of typefaces. What is usually called legibility. But if you think about it, it’s really the usability of a typeface. I wrote about that too (and will again): www.nubero.ch/blog/011/

The Taj Mahal is 372 years old, the Parthenon 2457. And the latter isn’t even the first Doric temple.

You made a good catch with the spacing of the columns! I actually wrote about it in the article in the 7th footnote. But that is where it had to remain because – as I assume you know from how you write – it’s a rabbit hole. We could go further and mention that behind the inner columns is actually the cella (inner chamber), which would make for a darker backdrop of these columns than the outermost columns, which would be set against the blue sky, would have. That too makes for a difference in perception and is a further reason, why the outermost columns are set more closely to their cella-backed neighbour columns… And so on, and so on… :-)

I think these questions that all of you have brought up here are really interesting and definitely a part of the psychology of perception. Optical corrections, however, are really a different thing though. They have quite a strict demarcation in that they specifically deal with how we perceive the geometry/measurements/space of things.

If it is ugly, it doesn’t work. One you understand that – really understand that deeply – you will not go back to the frame of mind you have now.

That is a very good catch, I learned something, thank you!

Thanks for your nice comment! It’s good to hear that people get something out of it! If you want to help, please share the link to the article around your colleagues and friends. Thanks again!

I’m sorry but what you write is simply not correct. Gothic writing is actually a form of calligraphy and the very stilted shape that the characters have make it actually very hard/cumbersome/slow to write. Textura is one of the styles and it is called that because the whole page was supposed to look evenly “gray” when it was filled with writing. For fast writing, people always developed a sort of cursive because that letter shape seems to almost automatically appear once the human hand uses a pen-like instrument with our (Latin/Greek/Western) writing and is writing fast. The Romans had a cursive for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) and many others after them did too. This was also used for quick messaging of news/instructions as opposed to monks copying books for months on end.

As for what you said about the sagging and the pillars falling out, that’s also incorrect. In the article, I mentioned the classical orders, which are Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. Only Doric temples used the curvature of the stylobate and the inclination of the pillars throughout. In the other two styles, this was very rare, if it happened at all. The two largest temples of the other two styles didn’t have it for example: The temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens is a Corinthian style temple which has a flat stylobate and no inclination of the columns. The same goes for the Artemision (Temple of Artemis) in Ephesus. There are countless other examples. The entasis is (mostly) the only thing that was transplanted from the doric style to the other two.

That’s not quite true. If you look at what Bill Atkinson did with the innovations on the first Macintosh, comparing it to Xerox Alto won’t hold up. Of course they got a first general idea that an interface to a computer could be more than just a command line interface, but the Macintosh is to the Alto what a modern machine gun ist to throwing stones. The principle is the same in the sense that you somehow get a projectile to travel the distance to your enemy beyond your reach to hit him, but that’s about all there is in similarities. On the Alto, the windows couldn’t even overlap… Not to smaller what the people at Xerox Parc did, but the Macintosh Team and specifically Atkinson went way beyond anything that existed before.

Incidentally, I also wrote a piece about AI and more or less that point: www.nubero.ch/blog/014/

It did take off in newsletters but not here…

Interesting thoughts, thanks for commenting!

I almost got run over by one of Zurich’s new trams a few weeks back, and the reason is bad industrial design.

There’s a hand icon on mobile, and a mouse pointer on the desktop version actually…

I expect a minimum of interest and curiosity with my audience. Also the ability to read. “Take a look at the following pictures¹” it says at the first clickable example. The choice of plural (images) gives a good hint, together with the footnote and the icon that’s sticking out from the lower right corner of the image.

“Take a look and click around” it says above the next clickable example. Another hint.

As for what is gained: The example with white space inside letters works much better when clickable. In separate images, the effect is lost.

It’s a metaphor. Keep your pants on

I really don’t understand in which context you want to save space. We are not talking about printed book pages after all but screens. You can always scroll. As for the tracking of FF Unit: That’s by design. The letters themselves are actually a bit compressed compared with similar typefaces but the tracking is a bit wider. That makes it more legible as the individual letters are in less danger to “fuse” together.

Corrected that, thank you. Also nice to see, that you picked up on the single use vs. multiple use distinction (words vs. text).

And a footnote explaining it. Having open eyes and being able to read helps.

I actually know about the quality issues with the Japanese iron ore and impurities. It’s just a metaphor. Do you also approach people who say “killing two birds with one stone” and tell them how that is physically almost impossible?

When creating or testing typefaces, you always go with things like “1. Illiad” to compare one with another. If during this test, one is clearly the winner – like Unit (or something like Unit) is over SF Pro, then you don’t need real world tests. If your soup is way too salty in the kitchen, it will be the same in the dining hall. It’s really not rocket science.

The german signboard was a good real-world example that I happened to see for myself, that’s why I included it. It is a perfectly fine example of the sort of phenomenon I was talking about. The fact that this particular example was a signboard doesn’t alter the fact, that the same applies for buttons on user interfaces for example. On the Macintosh Prototype, there was apparently a “Do It” button that some test users read as “Dolt” (idiot), so it was changed to “OK”. I also didn’t “study fonts in school”, I’m a typographer. And if my arguments are not enough to convince you, you can look at what others said: https://x.com/espiekermann/status/1775993252736372738

Unfortunately, one of the many pieces, where the term affordance is confused with what should be the term signifier. When people talk about the former, they usually mean the latter.

> But I also recognize that using a simple icon or word as a touch target has its benefits in many contexts.

Yes. Sometimes. I said so in the afterword of the piece. Maybe you missed it: “Does every virtual button – every button in a graphical user interface – have to look like a pressable, physical 3D button? Of course not. They also don’t need to look exactly like my redesigns either. On a case-to-case basis it might even be better to do something else entirely.

The whole idea is to reduce cognitive load. And since the brain works by recognising patterns and dividing the environment up into areas, this reduction is best done by making elements with different functions appear markedly distinct from one another. It is, in other words, a fallacy to believe, that the brain has an easier time if everything looks “simplified” in the way which happens with the flat design doctrine. The opposite is the case.”

> There are reasons beyond numb-headed fashion that lead to their use.

Certainly not where buttons that used to have button shapes were replaced with only icons or text.

> After all, it’s not enough to understand that something is a button, you also have to understand what it does (or more specifically, people who have a use for it need to understand what it does, and people who don’t have a use for it need to recognize it is irrelevant to their situation). This can only be done with context.

That is correct but it also wasn’t the scope of the article at all. It was simply about the importance of understanding which element on a bitmapped screen is a button in the first place. How to make a button – no matter what it looks like – communicate what its function is would be more than enough scope for another article.

> I think the problem with your article is that you are not taking the style you’re arguing against seriously.

In what sense am I supposed to take seriously a UI decision that was detrimental to usability?

> If you think it’s always wrong and can’t see any good reason why it’s used, you will not be able to make a good argument for why to use more traditional buttons instead.

That is not a logical statement. I can, for example, say that National Socialism is always wrong and still make a good case against it.

All that being said, I’m actually a great fan of reduced aesthetics. The torn-off paper in the various notes app and leather stitching were horrible. But as I said in the piece, They are still to be preferred if the only other option is a reduction that makes the UI unusable. My exact words were: “Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.”

You got it.

Did you read the first footnote I wrote in the piece? It’s actually about this exact thing you are talking about:

In many graphical interfaces that expect a mouse as input, the programmers will make the clickable area of the upper row buttons the same as the lower row ones, although this will be invisible at first. You can hover with your mouse over the buttons and then, magically, a button shape will appear. It’s not going to be a nice 3D-button shape however but just an outline. This serves no functional purpose. For instead of showing the user where all the buttons are from the outset, the whole affair becomes sort of a hide and seek game, where users have to guess which item they might be able to click.

You are both correct. That’s one of the reasons I mentioned multi-sensory feedback. Every little bit helps. Now, sound can of course be annoying, but it’s up to the discretion (and taste) of the designer to make that call or not – as always, depending on the context.

Wait for Part Two…

I’m writing Part Two of the article right now and I have a feeling you’ll like it…