It did take off in newsletters but not here…
Now it did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573887#44576031
Readit Newsnubero commented on Designing for the Eye nubero.ch/blog/015/... · Posted by u/nubero
Very interesting, thanks!
I am also curious about the relative popularity of typography on HN... it seems to gain the interest of HN readers more than most other forms of design or art....?
It’s an interesting middle ground between technology, psychology and art. As I said in the article when I compared the skill set with that of the architect. Personally, I find that one of the most interesting aspects is the “usability” of typefaces. What is usually called legibility. But if you think about it, it’s really the usability of a typeface. I wrote about that too (and will again): www.nubero.ch/blog/011/
I am surprised to read how modern architecture (or font design) disregard optical balance, when this is so instrumental to looking good: as in, I am not seeing it, but maybe I am looking through rose-coloured glasses.
I don't think anyone would call me artistic, even if I dabbled in typography (both of the book design and font design variety), furniture and interior architecture (some exterior too): but I keep needing to draw things starting with pure geometric shapes and precise symmetry and then move them around to make it appealing even to me.
For instance, other than the obvious curvature in pillars in Parthenon, the spacing between them is even more important: notice how outward pillars have the next one closer to avoid the vast emptiness outside unbalance them.
The same holds true for fonts, both kerning and character design, but another thing not mentioned is how medium has influenced the design (ink dispersion needs different "holes" in heavy weight forms). The same holds for architecture and materials being used.
You made a good catch with the spacing of the columns! I actually wrote about it in the article in the 7th footnote. But that is where it had to remain because – as I assume you know from how you write – it’s a rabbit hole. We could go further and mention that behind the inner columns is actually the cella (inner chamber), which would make for a darker backdrop of these columns than the outermost columns, which would be set against the blue sky, would have. That too makes for a difference in perception and is a further reason, why the outermost columns are set more closely to their cella-backed neighbour columns… And so on, and so on… :-)
I think that's why they explicitly added the story about the color TV being an instant improvement.
FWIW, I've felt over the years that if you have to get used to it, it probably wasn't that good to begin with: so so many things that are totally different I've upgraded to and thought "omg this is amazing! how did I ever live before?" and, if I have to go back, it takes a long time to get used to the bad thing again.
The one example I have off the top of my head: higher resolution monitors. I was totally happy with my lower resolution monitors; but, the second I tried a higher resolution monitor, it ruined me for lower resolution monitors. I can totally get used to it again, but it takes a long time, and I really don't want to; upgrading, though, is instantaneously better.
I think these questions that all of you have brought up here are really interesting and definitely a part of the psychology of perception. Optical corrections, however, are really a different thing though. They have quite a strict demarcation in that they specifically deal with how we perceive the geometry/measurements/space of things.
I disagree with respect to Microsoft. Steve hated everything that worked but was ugly. Windows and Office had a brutalist beauty to it that you could fully customize if you desired to do so. Today with O365 and Azure it is a parody of its former design. Only after its default UI changed from 'dentist office' to 'parade of clowns with toasters' did everyone else decide they hated it.
If it is ugly, it doesn’t work. One you understand that – really understand that deeply – you will not go back to the frame of mind you have now.
I'm reminded of how the developers of LilyPond noticed that because of the asymmetric appearance of musical notes, they needed to be spaced asymmetrically in order to convey the sense of "equal spacing" between them to the eye. LilyPond is full of little beautification details like that to render scores that are pleasing to the eye and read the way musicians expect.
That is a very good catch, I learned something, thank you!
"The most striking features of Gothic architecture are the narrow, vertical proportions and the pointed arches. Gothic-era writing mirrors these concepts."
They didn't have printing press or some conscious aesthetic architecture-typecafe correspondence. That's just how the letters evolve if you want to quickly and densely copy them with a quill. It's like trying to draw meanings from connections between cuneiform and ziggurats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter
"Why do all of this? Because otherwise, the base of the building would look like it was sagging, and the columns would look like they were about to fall outwards."
Or, you know, it would ACTUALLY sag. The columns would ACTUALLY fall outwards.
I’m sorry but what you write is simply not correct. Gothic writing is actually a form of calligraphy and the very stilted shape that the characters have make it actually very hard/cumbersome/slow to write. Textura is one of the styles and it is called that because the whole page was supposed to look evenly “gray” when it was filled with writing.
For fast writing, people always developed a sort of cursive because that letter shape seems to almost automatically appear once the human hand uses a pen-like instrument with our (Latin/Greek/Western) writing and is writing fast. The Romans had a cursive for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) and many others after them did too. This was also used for quick messaging of news/instructions as opposed to monks copying books for months on end.
As for what you said about the sagging and the pillars falling out, that’s also incorrect. In the article, I mentioned the classical orders, which are Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. Only Doric temples used the curvature of the stylobate and the inclination of the pillars throughout. In the other two styles, this was very rare, if it happened at all. The two largest temples of the other two styles didn’t have it for example: The temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens is a Corinthian style temple which has a flat stylobate and no inclination of the columns. The same goes for the Artemision (Temple of Artemis) in Ephesus. There are countless other examples. The entasis is (mostly) the only thing that was transplanted from the doric style to the other two.
Great article, too bad they had to include Steve Jobs.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is – I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way – in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. "
All those original ideas they lifted right from Xerox Parc.
Edit: Sorry, forgot we were talking about design ideas. All those original ideas they lifted right from Braun.
That’s not quite true. If you look at what Bill Atkinson did with the innovations on the first Macintosh, comparing it to Xerox Alto won’t hold up. Of course they got a first general idea that an interface to a computer could be more than just a command line interface, but the Macintosh is to the Alto what a modern machine gun ist to throwing stones. The principle is the same in the sense that you somehow get a projectile to travel the distance to your enemy beyond your reach to hit him, but that’s about all there is in similarities. On the Alto, the windows couldn’t even overlap… Not to smaller what the people at Xerox Parc did, but the Macintosh Team and specifically Atkinson went way beyond anything that existed before.