[HN Gopher] Signifier - a Brutalist response to 17th century typ...
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Signifier - a Brutalist response to 17th century typefaces
Author : firloop
Score : 159 points
Date : 2020-08-25 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (klim.co.nz)
(TXT) w3m dump (klim.co.nz)
| dvaun wrote:
| I like using interesting fonts and would definitely grab this for
| my Kindle if I could afford the price tag.
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| For the curious, $400 for use on three devices (includes using
| the font to create printed materials)
| https://klim.co.nz/buy/signifier/
| sibane wrote:
| No one really needs an entire family though. Get the Regular,
| Regular Italic and Bold to do everything a normal person
| would need a typeface for. $150. Everything else if for
| weirdos and designers buying type for their clients.
| just_steve_h wrote:
| "... weirdos and designers buying type for their clients" -
| but, I repeat myself!
| achairapart wrote:
| Wow. This is a wonderful work of digital craftsmanship. I was
| absolutely blown away.
| bovermyer wrote:
| That epilogue was poignant and lent an entirely different feel to
| the entire article.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| He used Aristotelian terms but misunderstood them, probably
| because of how we now use "material" in ordinary English.
|
| The letters on the screen have form (shape, meaning) and matter
| (pixels). The matter of the letter has changed but it still has
| matter in the Aristotelian sense.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I was referring to the tragedy in the author's life.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I'm glad there are people in this world who can completely
| unironically and confidently write "Signifier's digital
| immateriality draws on a deeply material past. Acknowledging the
| processes and tools of digital form-making, I worked consciously
| with the computer to recast the lead, antimony, and tin of the
| 17th century Fell Types into ones and zeros."
|
| I certainly couldn't!
| Luc wrote:
| After skimming through most of the article that paragraph
| actually started to make some sense to me.
| lotyrin wrote:
| I had the exact opposite experience. This thesis (and the
| introduction) made perfect sense to me but the following
| results, methods and rationales left me unconvinced and
| uninspired.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Anything that smart people spend a lifetime doing--programming,
| font making, engineering, woodworking, auto repair, painting
| (house _and_ fine art)--has depths that look completely crazy
| to outsiders.
| enriquto wrote:
| You do not really need to be a smart person for that.
| Infinite depth is within everyone's reach! Cf. xkcd 1095[0]
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/1095/
| saghm wrote:
| I expected https://xkcd.com/915/ before I clicked
| enriquto wrote:
| There's also the one about cast iron skillets, that has a
| similar atmosphere https://xkcd.com/1905/
|
| Curiously, the three numbers do not seem really
| independent.
| Koshkin wrote:
| This is the style in which Brian Greene wrote much of his
| _Until the End of Time_ , here is just one example: "the
| position and the speed of a particle--that a classical
| physicist in the mold of Isaac Newton would adamantly claim can
| be specified with complete certainty but that a quantum
| physicist realizes are burdened by a quantum fuzziness that
| makes them uncertain."
| aaroninsf wrote:
| The philosophical context of font design is one of those niches
| of rarified contemporary hothouse cultural specialization that
| makes me thing, _this is as far as we go, as a culture._
|
| Reading these things I inevitably experience intellectual
| vertigo, the deep-zoom-into-a-fractal sense of perfectly
| accurate, almost totally unnecessary, precision at microscopy
| scale. It's more Gibson than Gibson, not least if you're aware of
| Douglas Hofstadter's obsession with "letter spirits" and their
| multidimensional relationship to GAI...
|
| We had a good run.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I agree with your emotional reaction, but calling anything the
| limit as it currently appears I think is foolhardy.
|
| Our current trajectory has long been less Keynesian feedback
| loop, and more zero-sum advertising-based competition between
| entrenched conglomerates over shrinking consumption. The recipe
| for vertigo in the art-design-advertising sector is the tension
| between bohemian ideals on one hand, and the social relations
| of patronage on the the other.
|
| Unless you think collapse or equilibrium is immanent, buckle up
| for more of the same.
| pembrook wrote:
| Maybe you should take a look in the mirror, we're all toiling
| in rarified contemporary hothouse cultural specialization.
|
| "Hey, here's a cool article about a guy who spent a year
| creating another over-engineered javascript framework because
| he had an aesthetic dislike of semicolons. This matters!
| Upvote!"
|
| Welcome to Hacker News.
| dvaun wrote:
| > ...not least if you're aware of Douglas Hofstadter's
| obsession with "letter spirits" and their multidimensional
| relationship to GAI...
|
| This is an interesting topic I've never seen before. Down the
| rabbit hole I go...thanks for posting this
| udev wrote:
| Not sure if it just me, but I find it considerably more relaxing
| to read the text from the photo of the page (with all the surface
| and font imperfections) than read text written with the same font
| rendered on solid background (this time perfect).
|
| It's almost like I need the paper and font imperfections to read
| faster.
|
| My theory is that the brain somehow uses the paper and font
| imperfections to coregister (align) the binocular images from our
| eyes, which leads to smoother reading.
| Koshkin wrote:
| This makes sense to me, as I had the same impression; my theory
| is that it is the diversity and the individuality of the
| letters in the text that makes reading easier, and slight
| imperfections and irregularities only add to this.
|
| The "brutalist" digital version, on the other hand, seemed to
| me more of a demonstration of how far one can go using tricks
| without anyone noticing.
| Anka33 wrote:
| Brutalism has socialist roots where the individual was to be made
| to feel small and insignificant.. pure evil shit!
| paultopia wrote:
| Is this a joke? Is there an actual typeface somewhere here
| underneath all the pomo theory? Are the pictures of one font or
| many?
| chipsa wrote:
| It's set in the typeface it's talking about.
| blululu wrote:
| This is a surprisingly nice type face. It looks blocky when blown
| up, but it is really clean for small text. It took me a second to
| zoom in on the text and realize that the article is written in
| the typeface itself. I'm curious is there might be a legibility
| benefit to having a more rectilinear font. Perhaps the transfer
| function of TTF's anti-aliasing is cleaner along the horizontal
| and vertical axes rather than along a diagonal or curve. Having a
| less curvy font might be easier to render since the edges align
| with the display.
| warent wrote:
| Interestingly, many fonts look very strange when zoomed in
| because they employ all kinds of tricks to exploit optical
| illusions to give their fonts particular expression, such as
| curves and pinches that are almost imperceptible when viewed at
| a normal size. Unfortunately at the moment I can't find an
| article which clearly demonstrates what I'm talking about.
| kindall wrote:
| Hinting is what that's called.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The font is certainly interesting conceptually, and doesn't look
| bad (though is largely indistinguishable from its "Garamond"
| source at normal sizes).
|
| And while I've read the whole thing and understand why the author
| considers this to be a "Brutalist" philosophy, I respectfully
| disagree. This is merely vectors adhering to a grid, which has
| nothing to do with the "exposing raw materials" philosophy that
| is the core of Brutalism. [1]
|
| To me, early pixel-based terminal fonts feel like the digital
| typography version of Brutalism -- not even attempting curves or
| calligraphy at all, but embracing the raw material of pixels for
| exactly what they are.
|
| If the author wants to bring a similar Brutalist raw-materials
| approach to modern vector-based typography I'd find that
| interesting as well -- but that would seem to have been done a
| long time ago, with typography based solely on primitive
| geometric shapes, of which classic typefaces from the 20th
| century would seem most suitable (Futura [2], Avant Garde [3]).
|
| In the end, Signifier is a cool concept typeface. But I
| unfortunately think the author fails at connecting it to
| Brutalism in any meaningful way, despite their attempt.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futura_(typeface)
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITC_Avant_Garde
| armandososa wrote:
| I don't think the point is "vectors adhering to a grid", quite
| the contrary it looks to me that the author is exposing the raw
| materials of a font which are, essentially, bezier curves
| expressed as ones and zeroes. I think the image that better
| conveys that idea is this:
| https://d14810e2jnirzn.cloudfront.net/media/documents/Signif...
|
| The non-signifier fonts have some extra points in their bezier
| curves, which are bits in disk, traveling on the network,
| stored in memory and processed by the rendering engine that are
| going to be completely wasted when rendered at 16pts.
|
| That's quite profound for me.
|
| And I'm not an authority in Brutalism, but looks like the
| author was faithful to what he thinks brutalism is concerned
| with (from the article):
|
| > Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but
| rather the quality of the material, that is with the question:
| what can it do?
| DC-3 wrote:
| I'm not sure I like the font but this sure is a lovely article
| warent wrote:
| This is a beautiful font, it looks like the kind of thing I would
| expect to be seen used in a dictionary or encyclopedia.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I'm sorry, but again, none of that stuff has anything to do with
| "brutalism" which has been made a complete buzzword for the last
| 4 years, just because "design needs trends". No it doesn't.
| Design for your audience and don't follow "trends".
| petters wrote:
| What would a "true" brutalist font look like?
|
| Brutalism is about exposing the materials used in construction
| (i.e. the raw concrete is visible). So maybe a font that also
| shows its own spline control points?
| tomcam wrote:
| Read the article. You may be surprised.
| tomcam wrote:
| I fear you did not read the article, which explains the usage
| completely.
| dvaun wrote:
| The author does explain[0] his underlying persective/meaning of
| Brutalism:
|
| > Brutalism wasn't a specific material or style, it was an
| attempt to be true to the raw qualities of materials. It was an
| ethic.18 Signifier adheres to this ethic, Brutalism's core
| concepts framed my working process and thinking rather than
| pre-determining the outcome. There's a sense of the vector, the
| grid, the underlying digital nature. For instance, you can't
| see that Adobe Garamond's a is digital, but you can see it in
| Signifier's a.
|
| And from the footnote:
|
| > "The difference is not merely one of form of words: 'Neo-
| Brutalist' is a stylistic label, like Neo-Classic or Neo-
| Gothic, whereas 'The New Brutalism' is, in the Brutalist phrase
| "an ethic, not an aesthetic. It describes a programme or an
| attitude to architecture." Reyner Banham, "The New Brutalism",
| (1966): 10.
|
| I don't believe that the term was applied based on it being a
| buzzword or a recent trend.
|
| [0]: https://klim.co.nz/blog/signifier-design-
| information/#footno...
|
| Edit: Added reference to the location in the article
| prennert wrote:
| Rarely is an article so explainatory as this one. The author
| writes (all below quoted):
|
| [...]
|
| > Thinking about the materiality of digital fonts lead to
| Brutalism. According to architectural historian and critic
| Michael Abrahamson, "the word 'Brutalism' has lost its meaning.
| At present, it equates to: large buildings, sometimes of
| concrete, constructed sometime between World War II and the end
| of the 1970s."7 Abrahamson clarifies and re-orientates the
| meaning, quoting Peter Smithson:
|
| >
|
| > Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but
| rather the quality of the material, that is with the question:
| what can it do? And by analogy: there is a way of handling gold
| in Brutalist manner and it does not mean rough and cheap, it
| means: what is its raw quality?
|
| >
|
| > My question now became, "what is the raw quality of digital
| fonts?" [...]
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Rarely is an article so explainatory as this one. The
| author writes (all below quoted):
|
| Yes, and I totally disagree they achieved any form of
| "brutalism" with their font.
| tln wrote:
| I felt the same when I skimmed the article, especially after
| seeing the "Signifier, version 1".
|
| But the actual version has sharp edges, echoing the "rigid
| geometric style" that characterizes brutalist architecture.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I felt bits of both awe and nausea, so it passed the my
| Brutalist test.
| cpach wrote:
| Related: If anyone is curious about the Fell Types, there are
| digitised versions available here: https://iginomarini.com/fell/
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I've never really thought too much about the font industry of the
| past - this is quite the interesting read.
|
| The font he's created is great. I wasn't fond of the sharpness
| initially, especially when the text is blown up, but it reads
| wonderfully when it's at a 'normal' text size.
|
| I must confess - I had no idea fonts were so expensive to
| license! (Not a criticism of the cost, just ignorant until now).
| EricE wrote:
| I had the same experience - found the blown up version to not
| be appealing at all, but ended up really liking, as you put it,
| the readability of the normal sized text.
| knolax wrote:
| True brutalism would've been a bitmap font.
| refresher wrote:
| I loved that after seeing the comparisons, you can notice that
| the article was writing in Signifier. Did not love the CPU usage
| of the page (at lease for me, it rocketed up. macOS, Safari)
| RaoulP wrote:
| Same here - macOS, Safari, and I've never heard my fans spin so
| loudly before. I wonder what causes it.
| tln wrote:
| Doesn't seem to happen on the font information page:
|
| https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/signifier/
| earthboundkid wrote:
| React is the new PHP: a dangerously welcoming ecosystem for
| amateurs. If you look at the trace, you see it's firing a
| timer for LazyImage every 300 milliseconds that that's
| causing constant repaints. It's terrible, but no one believes
| in craftsmanship anymore. :-) //
| Give react a chance to render before starting to poll
| // This gives us more chance of the opacity transition being
| visible // Should also fix rendering glitches
| in firefox where native image placeholder shows briefly
| setTimeout(pollForComplete, 300); },
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