> Comic Sans is perfect for setting children’s activity timetables that are displayed in a school playground. It’s perhaps not as appropriate for announcing scientific breakthroughs.
I enjoyed his talk on adding lambdas to Excel, in general, but one particular bright spot was when someone asked why the slides weren't Comic Sans and he explained (my paraphrase...) that he had to give the talk outside Haskell circles and the rest of the world doesn't love him enough to forgive Comic Sans.
> Comic Sans is perfect for setting children’s activity timetables that are displayed in a school playground. It’s perhaps not as appropriate for announcing scientific breakthroughs.
If it was good enough to present the discovery of the Higgs boson [1], it is good enough for me.
Higgs Boson scientists are not necessarily graphics design experts. From what I’ve seen, a lot of times scientists just pick a font from Word and don’t care much about it.
I love how only 1 is about design and 2, 3, 4 are all technical.
> Its personality will prompt the appropriate emotional response(s) from our audience
For this to be just a bullet point, you need to understand the personality of fonts, then understand emotional responses of form, then understand audiences.
> Its design fits the intended use
Not so easy when you actually consider what this is asking. The design is what, and it applies to intent how?
The takeaway being, fonts are reallyreally hard. They're not even supposed to stand out (your content is).
I don't know if it's what's happening here, but it's a common phenomenon in HN that a post starts a trend of posts with a similar theme. People discuss a subject, they post some links to related projects in comments, other people wander into those links and find them or the links that those pages have worthy of their own HN posts.
We're in kind of a golden age of font quality and variety, and have widely available screens able to actually show & benefit from the details. It's almost the only fun thing about the current stage of computers/the internet.
I think we're also individually creatively starved from a generation+ of dismissing artistic and aesthetic pursuits. It's a socially-acceptable-within-computer-people-society way to acknowledge and participate in the creation of beauty.
I'm goin to guess that the recent Commit Mono post started it, it fizzled out a tad, and the Sweden font post yesterday kicked off some additional interest
Interesting, but I was hoping for something more prescriptive. And all the articles seem to be out of order. There is no "first" article for learning about typefaces.
Font family is a group of fonts. It could have 30 specific Helvetica fonts. Different from typeface in that you’re picking specific ones. It’s an implementation versus an idea.
These words all have slightly different meanings in different contexts and they’re totally muddled in common usage.
Simon Peyton Jones would beg to differ. :)