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The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

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Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#41

Post by kingkongjaffa »

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.

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#43

Post by Shorel »

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 :)

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#44

Post by Shorel »

ucyo wrote: post #19

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

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.

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#45

Post by inhumantsar »

yohannesk wrote: post #26
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #13

> 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 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

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#46

Post by cwmma »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #13

> 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."

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.

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#47

Post by FrameworkFred »

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.

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#48

Post by eightysixfour »

inhumantsar wrote: post #45
yohannesk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#49

Post by mech998877 »

FrameworkFred wrote: post #47

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).

Re: The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

#50

Post by jimmaswell »

mfru wrote: post #18
mvdtnz wrote: post #6

[flagged]

Counterpoint: I give a shit about this because I love typefaces / fonts, how they are made and what the history behind them is.

I can appreciate the aesthetics of a font but I found the author's disadulation of the letters excessive and totally unrelatable. They look nice while clear and functional for their use case to me.
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