31–40 of 52 posts
This is an experiment from 2011 in which the author produced a font by averaging all the fonts on their system. I'm reposting it here because I noticed that this looks a lot like the uncanny valley produced when an image AI tries to make text, which makes perfect sense: it's a statistical average of fonts.
It also reminds me a bit of what text looks like after multiple rounds of photocopying. Like the handouts we'd get in grade school.
This is an experiment from 2011 in which the author produced a font by averaging all the fonts on their system. I'm reposting it here because I noticed that this looks a lot like the uncanny valley produced when an image AI tries to make text, which makes perfect sense: it's a statistical average of fonts.
Interesting how modern designers think readable fonts (with serifs, so people can reliably distinguish between Al and AI, for example) are "uncanny" because they don't follow the latest trends in ultra-minimalist "design" and other fashions.
Looks blurry on my phone.
I've used Averia (Serif Libre, specifically) for at least a decade as my primary font for email, web pages in 'reader' mode, writing long-form text, etc. I find it extremely legible, and even calming. Ironically, I've been a typographer for decades, both for print and online. Averia might seem an odd choice for someone intimately familiar with typographic theory/history and the vast catalog of possible fonts. But the…
It's kind of like how if you take the average of enough male or female human faces, the result is a very pleasing, attractive face.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of like how if you take the average of enough male or female human faces, the result is a very pleasing, attractive face.
That's interesting, because my intuition of an "average" face is, well, average and uninteresting. Can you share your source?
The trick is that there are two "averages" in play. Let's call them the "attractiveness average" and the "physical average". Your intuition concerns the attractiveness average: you know that there are beautiful people and ugly people, and "average people" must be somewhere in the middle, yes?
But when scientists average faces to create a perceived attractive face, they're averaging together the physical characteristics of each face: distance between the eyes, position of nose and ears on the head, size of mouth, symmetry, etc. The claim is that we have an intuitive, perhaps instinctual, notion of what humans "should" look like and our perception of attractiveness is roughly a measure of conformation to that standard. So an intuitively "average-looking" person is more correctly stated as having a medium amount of deviation from the human mean.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of like how if you take the average of enough male or female human faces, the result is a very pleasing, attractive face.
That's interesting, because my intuition of an "average" face is, well, average and uninteresting. Can you share your source?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/957820/Across_the_Grooves...