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Five minute guide to better typography

pierrickcalvez.com

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Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#111

Post by programbreeding »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #105
programbreeding wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the author has chosen to "graylist" HackerNews in an attempt to sell copies of his book. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but warning you that anyone clicking on your link is actually redirected to https://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html

Graylist?

I have never personally seen it used the way it was used on this website, but graylisting is the middle-ground between blacklisting and whitelisting.

In a blacklist something is completely blocked. In a whitelist something is absolutely allowed. In a graylist you may be allowed after a certain number of attempts, or after completing some sort of task, etc. It's kind of like a soft block.

In this scenario the website detects the link is coming from HN and "graylists" your visit to the website. You are redirected to a page that explains he's trying to sell a book and people coming from this site just use his bandwidth and never pay. But the website explains if you don't want to pay you can still get to the book by browsing to the website directly -- as opposed to being redirected there from HN.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#112

Post by Someone »

brians wrote: post #94
Someone wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book “the Mac is not a typewriter” ( https://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-2nd/dp/0201782634 ) may help get them some idea about style. It is 15 years old, targets print, and is aimed at Mac users, but that doesn’t matter that much. (For PC users, there is “the PC is not a typewriter” ( https://www.amazon.com/Pc-not-typewriter-Robin-Williams/dp/0... ), but that is even older, so I’m not sure it will be more u…

Fifteen? I read that by 1991, latest. It’s nearly thirty. And it’s just what I thought of here: this article has the same simple clarity.

The second printing I referenced is from 2003. The (presumably) first printing on my bookshelf is from 1990.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#113

Post by sigi45 »

cjoy wrote: post #44
twhb wrote: post #34

It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag. For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just…

Typography is not just concerned with maximising readability. It is subject to aesthetics and taste, which are strongly linked to habit and consensus. Most prolific type designers have at least once toyed with the idea of a mathematically constructed, ideal letter form. The final design is either allowed to offend the human eye or mathematics. I do not know a case where this was not true.

How about the golden ratio? romans and greeks used it often.

Fractals are also very beautiful.

I would argue that there are a lot of mathematical rules in architecture and would argue that this is true for fonts as well.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#114

Post by hypertexthero »

twhb wrote: post #34

It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag. For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just…

Typography is not an exact science.

”Beware, @sPECtre! The road to hell is paved with isometric typefaces. :)”

—[Hoefler&Co](https://twitter.com/HoeflerCo/status/836248823458455554) in a series of comments on an initial typeface design.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#115

Post by mbrock »

anonfunction wrote: post #39
twhb wrote: post #34

It's a quest of mine to understand this subject mathematically. I'm convinced that typography is an exact science, it's just easier to use intuition than find the formulae that govern it. Like catching a baseball versus understanding gravity and drag. For example, when aligning that header, they're moving the leftmost pixels into alignment with the body's leftmost pixels. The correct state is well-defined, it's just…

I disagree completely, typography is an artform and therefore completely subjective. I actually preferred the unaligned header example. Sometimes there is a lot of white-space that makes people perceive things to be aligned. Often perfectly aligned text calls for something unaligned to stand out. There may be a scientific approach to finding the best typography to convey information to a specific group of people but…

Completely subjective is too strong! Music is art but harmony is mathematical.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#116

Post by IgorPartola »

brianpan wrote: post #92
IgorPartola wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baseball is... I mean if a team of engineers can design a rocket that lands vertically, I am fairly certain they could design a robot that hits balls with a bat. In fact I am surprised we don’t already have robot baseball. Typography is supposed to be perceived by human brains. So it will be subject to interpretation. Baseball is absolute: you can measure where the ball flew, where it landed, and who caught it.

It's amazing how blind to humanity we developers can be. If you take the human out of the batters box, you're no longer playing baseball. Baseball is a game. Played by humans for the sake of competition. If you build a robot that is able to hit every ball. Guess what? There's no point in playing baseball anymore. Have you "solved" baseball? Or have you destroyed the usefulness of it? Approaching baseball by solving t…

You are wrong in a subtle way. Robots playing baseball would be silly and useless. Almost as bad as athletes who use steroids (ha!). But baseball is a sport. Sport and art are similar: by humans for humans is usually the winning formula.

Typography can be art. It can also be utilitarian. Most typography is. Imagine if the entire WWW used either Comic Sans or Times New Roman with 1.x or 2.x line spacing. Just no. I am willing to bet you have published stuff online (even this comment; how meta), and your publications have benefited from having good typography. Typography that you didn’t have to think about or arrange or pick out. Making utilitarian typography more beautiful is a benefit to everyone. If only a select educated and experienced few could use beautiful typography because it was an arcane art, as you seem to want it to be, then well, we’d be using Comic Sans. If using more advanced mathematical models results in 99.999% of the readable web being more beautiful, I am for it. It doesn’t preclude someone from doing work by hand to either stand out more or to create art. But it certainly would be good for everyone if more advanced models existed. This is the same as how it is better that we have Google Fonts as opposed to every website owner having to create or commission a from scratch font.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#117

Post by npgatech »

jacobolus wrote: post #97
npgatech wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edwin Land also made tremendous contributions to color science through empirical measurements and finding the deeper "mathematical" models[1]. Besides his scientific achievements, he was a real renaissance man, a tour de force of human intellect. Unfortunately, Josef Albers's pseudoscience[2] and artistic non-sense get most of the credit[3] when it comes to color theory. [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/201…

I don’t think it’s fair to criticize Albers in this context, and this particular critique seems mostly like pedantic nitpicking at a fairly concise non-technical book; he wasn’t trying to establish a detailed technical model, but rather to teach artists to think. ( “The book does not begin with optics and physiology of visual perception, nor with any presentation of the physics of light and wave length…. What counts…

I read Josef Albers' Interaction of Color years ago and I've also bought the iPad app. I've been disappointed by both.

The problem is that "experiential" teaching without any scientific explanation is inadequate and misleading. Teaching part is where you explain the students - why. It is perhaps the approach in art colleges where rigorous science doesn't matter.

The problem stems when Josef Albers made scientific claims which go unquestioned as the factual basis for his cool color experiments. That is wrong and that's exactly the kind of nitpicking we need to do. What you call 'Pedantic nitpicking' is necessary and essential to the scientific process.

It is rather misleading to start the book with "The book does not begin with optics and physiology of visual perception, nor with any presentation of the physics of light and wavelength…. What counts here—first and last—is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing." and then go on to explaining his experiments using false claims (which again are highlighted and detailed in Alan Lee's criticism).

Anyhow, even if I am considering Josef's Interaction of Color from an artistic standpoint, he simply points out the cool illusions without any follow up on how to use/implement his concepts. I find it as a casual book that sits on the coffee table, not on my work desk.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#118

Post by npgatech »

jacobolus wrote: post #99
npgatech wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that he used color to make interesting new art. I think he explored new areas of color which were not known before - and I applaud his artistic efforts. However, Josef Albers went beyond his art to make false claims about color theory, how the human brain perceives color and made broad generalizations - based on anecdotal evidence and intuition. He went unchallenged for the most part. See the critic…

I recommend Mark Fairchild’s book Color Appearance Models .

Thanks. This looks extremely interesting.

Re: Five minute guide to better typography

#120

Post by jacobolus »

npgatech wrote: post #117
jacobolus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s fair to criticize Albers in this context, and this particular critique seems mostly like pedantic nitpicking at a fairly concise non-technical book; he wasn’t trying to establish a detailed technical model, but rather to teach artists to think. ( “The book does not begin with optics and physiology of visual perception, nor with any presentation of the physics of light and wave length…. What counts…

I read Josef Albers' Interaction of Color years ago and I've also bought the iPad app. I've been disappointed by both. The problem is that "experiential" teaching without any scientific explanation is inadequate and misleading. Teaching part is where you explain the students - why . It is perhaps the approach in art colleges where rigorous science doesn't matter. The problem stems when Josef Albers made scientific cl…

You’re approaching the book the wrong way. The original came with a big pile of colored papers. You are supposed to spend dozens of hours over the course of months doing careful visual study of various arrangements of them. If you don’t do the exercises in the book you’re not going to get much out of it.

Albers is not dogmatic. His purpose is not to prescribe a particular style or method. This is not a recipe book. He wants his students to explore deeply and learn how colors interact by spending a whole lot of time looking at them carefully, and then develop their own methods and styles.

The book is not supposed to be about “scientific progress”. It’s supposed to be a pedagogical tool aimed at artists. If you want a technical explanation, you are looking at the wrong book.

It sounds like you wanted to read a technical color science book. There are plenty of those out there, pitched at various audiences.

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