Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's that puzzling. After designing the typeface, those same designers have time to sit down and write up a fancy brochure for it. Engineers on the other hand, have a long list of existing tickets, so the minute they fix the broken magic string, there's another fix to move on to and no time to write a fancy brochure about the SQL schema.
The irony, of course, is that codebases would be a lot better if developers did sit down at the end of a project and wrote high quality documentation for it. Even better if they did it while developing the codebase. Also, this comment is especially ironic on HN where the top 10 comments on every Show HN submission will be nitpicking about the design of the website or the wording used, etc.
Sweden Sans
141–150 of 190 posts
Re: Sweden Sans
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typographic documentation is for designers generally, but there is a world where this can actually help everyone. Designers should make consistent designs. By doing this Developers can create functional designs systems that have sane default behaviors. Once you can get to that point, the system serves to reduce the load from the dev, not increase. I have created a tailwind-based design system interpretation like this…
I agree with much of your comment, but take umbrage with: > the point of the entire backend of an app is to serve the front end It’s a phoney argument. Once can just as easily say “the whole point of a front end is to provide simple access to the backend, rather than doing it via APIs”. The whole system is important. Some backends have appalling frontends and are still popular. The opposite is also true.
Re: Sweden Sans
#143I am fascinated by typography and page design and enjoy reading about it, but I have to admit I don't understand how this level of pedantry is able to survive. The amount of documentation and attention to detail spent on typefaces and when to use them is often off the charts compared to the time spent on stuff like keeping the website running, documenting the API or even the basic functionality of the app. It's like…
Re: Sweden Sans
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are not understanding is how corps are selling fonts. The Font is garbage.
Nobody's selling this font. Cynicism in regards to corporations is a good thing but this is cynicism to the point of disconnecting from the actual underlying facts.
Re: Sweden Sans
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points which I generally agree with, but I still think it's common to see a remarkable level of time and effort spent on typography compared to even other parts of the frontend. Not always, but surprisingly often. Many companies have these style guides around typography. Beautiful, thoughtful, very well made things for sure, yet when some backend dev makes a typo so the custom font drops to arial or whatever, it…
News flash: technical worker thinks more resources should be diverted from non-technical matters to technical matters. Film at 11. ;-) The people who design interfaces and the people who do branding and identity work are rarely the same people. I've done both (and was developer all over the stack for a decade,) but never at the same time. Branding and identity work is usually done by specialized agencies, and they're…
Generalizations like this are just so bad. My biggest beef with design/"product" folk in the tech world is this thing that many of them do, where they justify their existence as a group of people and a business function by bad-mouthing developers.
Re: Sweden Sans
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points which I generally agree with, but I still think it's common to see a remarkable level of time and effort spent on typography compared to even other parts of the frontend. Not always, but surprisingly often. Many companies have these style guides around typography. Beautiful, thoughtful, very well made things for sure, yet when some backend dev makes a typo so the custom font drops to arial or whatever, it…
News flash: technical worker thinks more resources should be diverted from non-technical matters to technical matters. Film at 11. ;-) The people who design interfaces and the people who do branding and identity work are rarely the same people. I've done both (and was developer all over the stack for a decade,) but never at the same time. Branding and identity work is usually done by specialized agencies, and they're…
For example this page. First thing you see is a hero image showing their font in use. It's a pretty important element that takes up the whole screen. It's blurry and pixelated. Not the worst I've seen but definitely gives me more car dealership not car manufacturer vibes. It's a 1.3MB png that looks just as good converted to an 80KB jpeg and imo even better as a 20KB avif. If it was instead a 1.3MB jpeg or avif starting from a high quality source that thing would look crisp and super car manufacturery.
There is also a section in the page where the text goes blurry because they've included a table as an image. Or I should rather say it's both blurry and an image because they could have just included a higher res image of the table. They have plenty of other images where it looks fine. Again something that gives me car dealership vibes. Actually I would say blurry text image table is specifically a dodgy second hand car dealership level of vibe.
Now you could say that the typography page isn't user or customer facing so its not that important but I see plenty of shitty blurry images on otherwise polished looking pages all over the internet, and also if they covered images in their design system like they do typography then it wouldn't matter. They'd just be in the habit of only using high quality images and have some process in place to deliver them in appropriate formats.
So while backend vs frontend or functionality vs polish are imo boring and played out webdev topics, I am super curious as to why they care enough about inspiring positive feelings through web design to make an entire custom font, have a page of guidelines on how to use said font, but dont have the same level of care for images. And why I see this contrast enough to consider it reasonably common in the industry.
Re: Sweden Sans
#147I’m surprised that a country would choose/create a typeface with only four weights and no italics for their design system. I’d understand if it was primarily a display font, but it seems intended for body copy as well.
Re: Sweden Sans
#148Beautiful , clean and definately a complete body of work. However I cannot say I like it. It reminds me of the text governments use on informing rules and regulations, visa rules, duty free information and so on. For publication, Garamond Premier Pro is my favorite of them all: https://fontsgeek.com/fonts/Garamond-Premier-Pro-Regular
Well, that seems to be its primary use-case so I guess it works as intended, no?
Re: Sweden Sans
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points which I generally agree with, but I still think it's common to see a remarkable level of time and effort spent on typography compared to even other parts of the frontend. Not always, but surprisingly often. Many companies have these style guides around typography. Beautiful, thoughtful, very well made things for sure, yet when some backend dev makes a typo so the custom font drops to arial or whatever, it…
Arial is the Rob Schneider of typefaces.