I think the point though is it's not a "story". It's a fundamental shift. The shift is subtle and doesn't lend itself to sensationalism.
Entire countries have built their clout on fossil fuels. Wars have been fought. Now any country with a sufficient manufacturing base can be energy independent. And the resource is less controllable by a small group of people.
AI and geopolitics and everything else is huge right now, but they're being bent to the will of the current world order. The article is saying that that world order is going to change.
What font has been more tested for quick pass-through of data than the default system fonts? To me, this simply screams "This is the main body. You can find your information here"
No. System fonts have completely different reasons for existing than fonts you would want to use to communicate with the public. System fonts were initially created for legibility at certain screen resolutions, for dot-matrix printers, etc.
But it's worse than that. What I'm trying to explain is that every typeface, even the most innocuous one gives subtle, subconscious cues to the readers. Every font. The associations can range from some childhood Disney movie to a font you saw at a hospital while you were having a really serious medical problem. But after 30 years of everyone on earth looking at system fonts, readers now get the cue when they see a system font that they are looking at a shitty MS Word document their boss just pinned to the felt board. Or else they assume the author did not bother or did not have the skill to make it look good.
I'm a writer. I've written 6 novels. I love words and ideas, unencumbered by visuals. I've written at least 500k LoC on in my life, maybe double that, I don't know. That's all pure thought and logic. So I get the agitation: All I want to get across to you, my reader, my employer, is the information, my distilled ideas. That's all that's important. Read it or don't, I don't care, it's good and the logic works.
I'm also trained as a designer. My first several jobs were in ad agencies, since I was 14 years old as an intern. How will people subconsciously interpret the ancillary visual aspects of this is something I learned early on: what will they construe? Because bad design can prejudice someone against a great piece of writing, and vice-versa.
No visual thing you can make has zero cultural reference; everything you make that other people will see drags some bundle of pre-understood tropes into it. You can't make one without referencing some aspect of culture that affected you. The job of a designer - what makes a designer different from someone who just has aesthetic chops and can tell if a web page looks good - what constitutes the black arts of design - is to know every single cultural trope you are dragging in front of the customer's target audience and to understand how it will psychologically affect their state while they read the content, so you know how to trigger certain emotional resonances in them while they absorb the information the client is trying to get across.
That's what "giving a shit" means in terms of communicating visually.
Observe how there's no custom font, no weird font, and no "associations with some childhood Disney movie" to be found on a page seen and used by 2+ billions of users daily.
Funny you should bring that up, because FB is a perfect example of a visual relic from the late '00s which didn't age well. Much of the post-dot-com-crash world of design in the web and early mobile space was defined by a rejection of the excessive - wild crazy idiotic irreverent and often incoherent - typography and design of the '90s web. So, super basic fonts, white backgrounds, and what they thought was "minimalism". However, because they relied on the tooling rather than creating their own cues, (and also because their UI turned into a towering nightmare of crap) Facebook looks extremely dated to most people's eyes now. It looks like a 20 year old website...and not a particularly good one.
My outside opinion is that Meta does not give a shit at all about how Facebook looks at this point. I'm not here to make the case that revolutionizing their design would improve their onboarding rate now or something. I'm making the case that if you are some nobody with no network effects and no billion dollars, you have a better chance at getting people to read your content if you take the time to (a) get it out of system-ui fonts and (b) make a bunch of other aesthetic decisions that trigger certain pleasing feelings in your audience.
Most current system screen fonts in major OSs - as a general group, as a set of letter forms - are not and never were printed fonts. They evolved from bitmap fonts that were created with 90s constraints in mind. They retain some of that aesthetic, and they are not usually the best candidate for the job.
Leaving it up to your user's system font is also an arguably poor choice.
> Most current system screen fonts in major OSs - as a general group, as a set of letter forms - are not and never were printed fonts. They evolved from bitmap fonts that were created with 90s constraints in mind. They retain some of that aesthetic, and they are not usually the best candidate for the job.
This couldn't be more wrong. Things have progressed since the '90s.
Apple, Google, Microsoft hired real typographers to create their new fonts. Apple uses San Francisco in their printed materials all the time.
On Apple devices, system-ui is San Francisco, a TrueType variable font with 2937 glyphs, 4 axes and 369 instances. The axes are width, optical size, grade and weight. San Francisco also has all of the goodies someone who cares about typography could want: ligatures, small caps, contextual alternatives, true fractions, etc.
I think this qualifies as "giving a shit". ;-)
BTW, you can see each named instance in the developer tools in Firefox and Chrome on macOS.
An instance is a combination of the 4 axes; the instance of San Francisco compressed thin uses can be specified in CSS as:
Could you recommend any good books, video series, blogs, or other training for those that who need to understand fonts at your level professionally? Or maybe you could write one?
I know someone that is trying to break into this space but doesn’t have the past experience, and it’s almost impossible to catch up. I’d love to provide them with a resource.
In defense of Comic Sans, it’s not just for realtor pages. It can be effective for local, casual communication by appearing friendly and approachable. If I saw a flyer pinned to a corkboard advertising a fish and chips special in Comic Sans in a seaside town, my mouth would be watering, because I’d know that’s a mom and pop place that focuses more on the food and taking care of people than the marketing.
>> If I saw a flyer pinned to a corkboard advertising a fish and chips special in Comic Sans in a seaside town, my mouth would be watering
Heh. You absolutely nailed the concept. This is precisely right. Comic Sans is a totally crap font, but it's great if that's the feeling you want to get across! That's exactly how thoughtful design works. Level one is to know your references. Level two is: Use the kitsch when you want it. Use the profane. Use the found art. Then use the "classy" or "expensive" when you want to show a "classy" client. Level 3 and up is knowing how to play with those high and low cultural notes to make a kitschy client still look kitschy but subconsciously implant that the fish is of a slightly better quality; or make your "classy" real estate agent still look "classy" but show that they aren't a stuffy asshole. And do this without either client outright complaining.
Far as books, I'd qualify by saying that I learned the design craft on the job from an early age and was tutored by great art directors who let me experiment and explained these things to me; why what I was communicating with a certain background or certain font was going to negatively affect a consumer in a way I hadn't considered. And I had a couple great professors in college (but I dropped out). Most of the basic theory of the higher level of how to use this stuff to influence people is contained in Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media", which is the quintessential work on how one - in a design role - can change perception of the content of a piece by making informed psycho-sociological choices about the way it's presented visually. Lots of master works before and since on the concept of propaganda, but for designers McLuhan helpfully narrows it down to show that presentation is often more important than content, and for designers this means your role is essentially to master content the way an audio engineer masters a band's album. Which is often as important to the final output as the original recording quality itself. This is especially hard to do if you also wrote the content because it requires a certain objectivity about the work. Anyway, McLuhan's theory is timeless and kind of essential to get into the guts of everything: How brands work, how small design choices work, etc.
Being able to explain the difference between what looks good and being able to explain why you chose it (along with all the cultural references, positive and negative, which the choice is intended to trigger in the audience) makes the difference between a $40/hr design job and a $150/hr art direction job, so mastering the technique of selling the technique has a certain benefit as well. But you must come armed to your client with examples. The best way to learn is to look at everything you see around you and question all their design choices, why did they use those colors, those fonts, etc. and also see what trends are developing. Go back to the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and see what they were using then. Now who is your target audience, and what feeling do you want to give them?
[edit] Just want to add: I was a purely technical child who learned to code and run a BBS way before I knew anything real about design. I came up doing what I thought was cool ANSI art and then "designed" some stuff in Photoshop 3.0 for people when I was 12. I didn't understand anything. When you're a technical person you tend to see design as a problem to solve with programs and with code. You don't realize that design is a programming language that runs on human brains. This was a revelation for me when I was about 15, and it's informed all my choices since. So yes - fonts matter.
I think we're still missing an "open social" closed social network. Something like old-Facebook where you can post to an intimate audience of friends and family, and your feed isn't stuffed full of ads and influencers. Just a little private windows into your friends' lives.
That feels like something that could displace other social media in a way that's difficult for for-profit businesses to replicate since it goes against every product manager's instinct to leave engagement on the table, and would stand in stark contrast to the current social media landscape.
That looks really promising. It checks a lot of the boxes I already had in mind for such a system, like being able to continue a thread without exposing the whole thing to untrusted parties
Same here. I was surprised at everyone here who prefers the more-complicated-but-arguably-more-intuitive lexical sort. Naive alphabetical sorts break some expectations, but don't produce any weird edge cases.
I wonder if there's an age divide at play here, where those of us who grew up with the naive alphabetical sort prefer it.
It depends. I had an LLM whip up a JavaScript function "theThursdayAfterNextSunday"
JavaScript isn't my primary language and date functions are always a pain. But I know enough to review and test the code quickly. It doesn't change a 1-week project into a 4-hour one, but it can change a 20-minute project into a 5-minute one.
I bought mine from therealreal.com. I got a lot more ring than I'd normally be able to afford, and it's an elegant design you don't see everywhere.
Check with the recipient beforehand, of course. You're not the one who has to wear it, and no amount of logic is going to change a mind that wants a brand new, natural diamond.
I think there's a bit of an "everybody knows that" [1] phenomenon when it comes to knowledge like this. Devs come from different backgrounds and work on different types of projects. There are 10000 things you expected to know to be an expert, and all of us are continually learning.
Except that this is the developer of an apparently popular and well-invested product.
If you expect to make a note taking app, which only has a piece of text, a stop button and a floating animation, I hope that you figure out why your performance is being tanked by your single animation.
Entire countries have built their clout on fossil fuels. Wars have been fought. Now any country with a sufficient manufacturing base can be energy independent. And the resource is less controllable by a small group of people.
AI and geopolitics and everything else is huge right now, but they're being bent to the will of the current world order. The article is saying that that world order is going to change.