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TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

typestax.com

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Re: TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

#13

Post by toomim »

chrismorgan wrote: post #8

Some remarks. The entire thing ends up feeling tasteless to me: it has a whole bunch of knobs (metaphorical and for a change pseudo-physical), half of which shouldn’t exist and some others which should being missing, with terrible calibration, poor defaults, and just… it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi . Various factors make me suppose this is low-effort vibe-coding, but I make this response anyway for the potential…

It's interesting that I disagree with all of these points.

Re: TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

#14

Post by rahulmax »

Author here. Thank you very much for the kind words!

I'm a product designer and a design engineer and I love tactile interfaces and typography.

My goal was to challenge myself to build this purely by 'describing' the interface to an LLM, without giving it any image references. Being mosly working in Figma / Sketch for the past decade or so, the process was utterly painful and I craved to go back to Figma to polish and correct the interface, but I persevered and described the UI to the LLM and progressively built the UI.

The stack is Next.js / React / Zustand with zundo for undo/redo, Clerk for auth. I also made the LLM write 60-odd unit tests and playwright tests running against production. It was AI-assisted throughout.

chrismorgan's critique below is mostly correct. Thanks a ton! The eyebrow one is a straight bug. Base range 8 to 32 is indefensible. Word spacing shouldn't be a control at all. Those three are getting fixed today.

Re: TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

#15

Post by rahulmax »

vessenes wrote: post #2

Oh I love this a surprising amount. Also a good reminder of some of the dividends of vibe coding -- this would have been an extremely useful tool for at least two decades of web designers if published in the early 2000s. Even now for a type nerd who is not a designer, it was fun to play with -- really cool.

Thank you so much! I am from that era, and I remember, a few of these types of interfaces existed back then.

I was still in college at the time and used to be fascinated by how painstaking it was to build such UI in photoshop, and then putting everything in nested HTML tables to achieve this. Everything was rudimentary, CSS was in its nascency and everything broke in Internet Explorer 6

Re: TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

#16

Post by rahulmax »

pmkary wrote: post #12

This is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in such a long time. The numeric sliders, the color pickers, the analogue numeric displays, such a great great interface. I wish more and more things were this beautiful.

Thank you so much, your comment inspires me to create more of these!

Re: TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

#19

Post by rahulmax »

chrismorgan wrote: post #8

Some remarks. The entire thing ends up feeling tasteless to me: it has a whole bunch of knobs (metaphorical and for a change pseudo-physical), half of which shouldn’t exist and some others which should being missing, with terrible calibration, poor defaults, and just… it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi . Various factors make me suppose this is low-effort vibe-coding, but I make this response anyway for the potential…

Author of the tool here. Thank you very much for your detailed review. I appreciate the time and effort to go through to provide elaborate critique.

- The eyebrow one is a straight bug and I'm glad you caught it.

- Base range 8 to 32 is excessive, agree.

- Per-element overrides existing doesn't help, if the thing that loads first establishes uniformity. I'll fix this too

- About the the tracking, you're right that flat -0.02em across h1 to h6 is wrong. I think the proper fix is to make it size-aware

- I'll fix and curate the pairs more, and aim for half of what I have now.

Re: TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

#20

Post by pmkary »

rahulmax wrote: post #16
pmkary wrote: post #12

This is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in such a long time. The numeric sliders, the color pickers, the analogue numeric displays, such a great great interface. I wish more and more things were this beautiful.

Thank you so much, your comment inspires me to create more of these!

You're very welcome and so selfishly I must say: please do!
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