Live data from Hacker News

The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

aresluna.org

11–20 of 63 posts

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#11
post #4

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 recognis…

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.

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#12
post #4

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 recognis…

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?

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#14
post #4

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 recognis…

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.

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#15
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.

Post reply on HN