171–180 of 205 posts
I have a (fair warning) rant here that is likely going to ding my HN karma, but here-goes. I work closely with design and I am consistently saddened by the state of the tech industry when design discussions pop up on HN. They almost always devolve into a cesspool of blanket criticism and rejection. "Those designers..." an HN commenter will inevitably say, "...all they care about is making things look pretty." Well, s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak. Besides, I don't think it's open source.
Nimbus Sans is not a lookalike for Helvetica, it is a Helvetica. The visual appearance of fonts is not copyrightable. And it's GPL'd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nimbus Sans is not a lookalike for Helvetica, it is a Helvetica. The visual appearance of fonts is not copyrightable. And it's GPL'd.
What does it mean for a font to be GPL? Does it carry the license along into any project you use that font in?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is annoying. However, it's not as bad as I thought it might be. Since the display is quite big in size, I generally use one window on each half of the display and I don't feel I'm really missing out on vertical space too much. The DPI is sufficiently high that I don't find the horizontal size too small either, which was certainly the case with half of a 1920×1200 display previously. On the other hand, it's su…
My main problem with 16:9 is how obscenely long they are. I use my monitors to do work, not watch movies, so I have a lot more need for vertical real-estate. Tilting them on their side doesn't help, because they're far too narrow that way.
This is one of those times where as a working creative that frequently reads Hacker News I straight up face palm. I have to imagine a lot of these commenters would say the same in regards to any sort of subjective artistic choice that isn't purely optimized for efficiency. I would like to leave you with a quote by Briano Eno from a really good lecture he gave several years ago that I hope can provide a jumping off po…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I didn't even realise Helvetica needed a licence. Nor that its pay per click: "When purchasing your digital ad license, you specify the number of impressions your campaign will require. If you’re uncertain how many impressions you will need, you can purchase a small allotment and true up at the end of the month." https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica/licenses
This year I happen to work for a client that licenses all of their brand fonts. Licensed and pay-per-use fonts have easily and quickly worked their way up to the top 5 most agitating things to work with. - They track use by embedding a link to the third party font provider, which does a 302 redirect to a file on your server that requires revalidation every load. So while you host the actual file delivered to the clie…
GDPR, here we come!
> Automated bot traffic, whether benign, malicious, search engines, or anything at all, becomes very expensive. A flood of scrapers hitting your site shifts from a minor nuisance to a very big deal.
As they used to say on the chans: "Oh, exploitable!"
This would be a wonderful way to financially DDoS some organization you just don't like very much.
I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay licensing fees.
The article contains an image [1] showing several tech-company-funded fonts side-by-side. The fonts have some differences, but I'd have to agree with you the changes are so subtle it's hard to believe they resulted from an attempt to make a _radically_ new typeface. [1] https://www.arun.is/blog/custom-typefaces/unique_typefaces_m...
You can tell how old a car is by the extra words on the back under the name. "Fuel injected"? 1980's or 1990's. "Hybrid"? 2000's or 2010's. Similarly, you can tell the era of computer software by what strange thing they decide they need to customize. We're in the era of "slight variants of Helvetica". (Nobody's asking for a Zapfino clone, strangely.) For whatever reason, fonts and logotypes are the axis on which ever…
Personally I think the problem is the over-use of analytics in page design. No one can compete on page design anymore because it doesn't convert well with focus groups or in A/B testing, so every page looks like a Bootstrap template. So they try to find SOMETHING that won't put up lower conversion numbers yet is slightly different so they can say their page is unique.
If, say, physics-engine-based layouts became popular for general user interfaces, it would take over the entire development of the product. It would affect every part of the budget and schedule and architecture. You couldn't feasibly A/B test it.