> The installation ended up being the most devious part of the prank in the end, since it would install on the system it makes it really difficult for anyone to understand why everything looks just that little bit wrong.
> Installing Smelvetica on your system (mac only, at the moment) means that all renderings of Helvetica will use Smelvetica, including websites and applications
No worries. I'm engaged to a professional graphic designer. Critique of menu typeface, color palette, layout, and print material is almost ritual that I've had to grow skin for when we eat out.
The XKCD quote was a pretty good indication of the author's intent. I like it and will be using it in place of comic sans for all my inter office punnery. As much as I like graphic designers, the ability to give them an occasional seizure is hard to pass up.
Half the developers on my team wouldn't notice this. Another 45% wouldn't care. The last 5% would lose their hair trying to convince management why customers would hate it and how detrimental to the UX the font is, while consistently seeing it pushed to the next release because feature deadlines.
This font is the kind of stuff that gives me nightmares.
Fans of typographic humor may enjoy Liz Crain's ceramic work. One of her specialties is ceramic pieces that look like old rusted metal cans. And her husband is a retired typesetter, so the cans often feature typographic themes.
After buying her Interrobang piece a while back, we asked her to make a Keming can to go with it. Here they are together:
Yes. My other half hasn’t got over the 30 minute rant and regular random explosions about it to this day when we hired a plumber and his van had comic sans and clipart from Microsoft office on the side. This was 15 years ago.
> This project began by pulling the original “Helvetica” font from my system files, and making a copy of it. From there I opened it in FontForge, which is a brilliant open source font editor.
Pretty sure the license won’t allow you to do any modification to the font installed on your system.
Obviously it's a joke. But I didn't get it. I thought this was making fun of Helvetica, but as was pointed out elsewhere, apparently its not. This is basically "poorly kerned Helvetica." Which was the part I missed.
I'm so tired of Helvetica everywhere that this is actually an improvement. Once upon a time it was a great way to make an modernist artistic statement, like "Ill" should be three straight lines. Now Helvetica is a meaningless default choice.
Helvetica is a fine default choice. So is Arial or verdana or any other "boring" font.
I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.
I learned page layout in the 90s, and have by virtue of the time period, committed acts of typography tantamount to war crimes. As such, I have self-imposed a lifetime ban on “getting clever” with fonts. My one exception is Computer Modern, which I strategically use as a geek shibboleth.
Language support used to be huge: I shipped web fonts for years so things would render accents and non-English characters correctly or at all. Dropping Windows XP was joyous.
These days I generally agree except for things like logos or games, or specialized applications like the dyslexia-friendly fonts. It’s hard to beat rendering immediately for most uses.
One one project we had to cram a lot of text into a columnar UI. A UI that would be used in meetings on a projector.
So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do a poor man’s eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable. Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any font lore so I didn’t learn until much later that this was a design goal of Verdana, but I’d say mission accomplished.
Corporate tools at headquarters didn’t like it, and with no context demanded we change it back to a “normal” font. Apparently I’m still upset about this.
I teach Chemistry and have come to rely on Trebuchet MS. It has good readability even at the back of the classroom and it’s capital I, lowercase l, and number 1 are all distinct. You’d be surprised how common students are confused by Carbon and Iodine (CI) vs Chlorine (Cl) for example.
YMMV but I found Verdana to be a perfect font for my Kindle.
Granted, it's a Kindle Touch, I don't know if I would choose it again on one of the newer models (not that I would buy one, Amazon's locking up of those models makes a thriving homebrew scene impossible).
I don't necessarily like verdana, but it is a very legible font for small font sizes. I happen to like a lot of information on my screen, and I keep font sizes low. For a long time Verdana was my default font for the web.
Does anyone know a good resource to learn about fonts and how to pick and match them? I'd like to know if there is more to choosing a font than just scrolling through all of them and stopping when it looks okay.
The basics are that a font should have immediately recognizable characters (aka glyphs), so that you could read text on a road sign or an indoor navigation sign from afar, in bad lighting, while moving and being nearsignted (it's sorta an edge case but a good one). At the same time, glyphs must form a line that guides the eye without making it stumble—there should be no jarring inconsistencies, of which wrong letter-spacing is a case. Glyph shapes affect the perceived spacing, so there's interplay between the aspects of a font. The Kern Game is a good primer: https://type.method.ac/
As usual, learning to see good fonts is a matter of recognizing bad ones first. You'd want to look at reviews of bad fonts, more-or-less detailed.
Then there's also the matter of the font style: a decorative font may easily have an untasteful twang to it (e.g. “playful” ad fonts), or be overly pretentious for the task. This is also a matter of looking at a lot of examples and thinking of what they make you feel.
These are just the basics, and designers sometimes diss fonts that look fine to me. But these help. Also, IMO learning to see and apply the proximity principle covers a lot of design, including typography (e.g. line spacing and paragraph positioning).
Well, Helvetica's been old-fashioned for well over 20 years, so it's not suprising that folks would have been over it for that long a time.
I remember watching the documentary of the same name, and wondering how everyone could be so fond of what's ultimately a very plain font. Now, Garamond or Bookman — those are fonts! All just a matter of taste, of course.
It's all context, isn't it? Helvetica's use in graphic arts back in the 60s bordered on the sublime, and for that reason has become a foundation stone upon which everything thereafter was built and refers to. It's hard to escape from.
I just wish I could peek inside the head of someone in the previous century, witnessing the birth of sans serifs such Akzidenz Grotesk - THAT must have been Earth shaking.
And I'm with you on Garamond - I have an entire side project's brand built around it. We outsourced the second iteration of its website (because Shopify is a bit of a dog to dev for on Windows... for me anyway) and the person we outsourced to thought it best to strip out our entire brand language and replace with whatever rounded sans (replete with flat colour scheme) was doing the web fashion rounds of two years ago. We're still putting the pieces back to this day! :)
That sort of thing's my marker of a poor 'designer' — someone who has no concept of how to work with what they're given, instead needing to start from scratch. In that vein, if you can't work to other's rules, you're just a decorator.
