"It makes me want to punch someone in the face."
March 22, 2015 5:18 AM Subscribe
Typographica reviews its favorite typefaces of 2014.
I showed this website to my 9-year-old and he said "Did they put Comic Sans?" and I was like "No, of course not" and he was like "Why? I like Comic Sans."
posted by escabeche at 6:37 AM on March 22, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by escabeche at 6:37 AM on March 22, 2015 [4 favorites]
I like that font Neutral. The Typotheque foundry is selling it with their Lava serif book face. They look nice together. I guess I'm always just looking for something that's like Helvetica but different, you know?
posted by Nelson at 8:08 AM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 8:08 AM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
I've been testing out the free Input in Terminal and Coda over the last few days. Not bad.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:43 AM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by a lungful of dragon at 10:43 AM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
The Questioning Monotheism article that goes with the Input font is great reading. It really is time we move to decent typography in our code editors. A single monospace font makes no sense in the modern era of editors and languages that have automatic layout and no longer require manually lining up columns.
posted by Nelson at 10:56 AM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Nelson at 10:56 AM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
That LA ligature in St Croce is insane.
posted by ardgedee at 11:00 AM on March 22, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by ardgedee at 11:00 AM on March 22, 2015 [3 favorites]
Nelson: "The Questioning Monotheism article that goes with the Input font is great reading. It really is time we move to decent typography in our code editors. A single monospace font makes no sense in the modern era of editors and languages that have automatic layout and no longer require manually lining up columns."
I write code in Rails for a living. Rails is pretty modern. Even in this day and age, using a proportional font would make debugging much more difficult and would make lining up columns and such impossible. I won't lie: I spend a lot of time doing the former. My sense of perfection/taking pride on my work requires the latter. I need a good monospaced font.
a lungful of dragon: "I've been testing out the free Input in Terminal and Coda over the last few days. Not bad."
If you haven't followed the link, Input lets you customize proportional/monospace, weight, spacing and lets you choose some of the letter/punctuation/zero shapes. I am in no way a typography geek. I don't have strong opinions about kerning and such. That being said, I am picky about what font I have to look at all day. I love the idea of being able to customize a font to what I like. I'm going to try it at work this week.
posted by double block and bleed at 12:53 PM on March 22, 2015 [3 favorites]
I write code in Rails for a living. Rails is pretty modern. Even in this day and age, using a proportional font would make debugging much more difficult and would make lining up columns and such impossible. I won't lie: I spend a lot of time doing the former. My sense of perfection/taking pride on my work requires the latter. I need a good monospaced font.
a lungful of dragon: "I've been testing out the free Input in Terminal and Coda over the last few days. Not bad."
If you haven't followed the link, Input lets you customize proportional/monospace, weight, spacing and lets you choose some of the letter/punctuation/zero shapes. I am in no way a typography geek. I don't have strong opinions about kerning and such. That being said, I am picky about what font I have to look at all day. I love the idea of being able to customize a font to what I like. I'm going to try it at work this week.
posted by double block and bleed at 12:53 PM on March 22, 2015 [3 favorites]
Caliphate White Privilege is my new band name.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:09 PM on March 22, 2015
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:09 PM on March 22, 2015
> Even in this day and age, using a proportional font would make debugging much more difficult and would make lining up columns and such impossible.
That's addressed at length in the article. The author's response is basically, "this should be the editor's job." He's not wrong, but it's also a weak punt. Without a universal method of delineating custom tab stops, there's no way to be certain that my IDE will correctly format the code formatted in your IDE.
The advantages of using proportional fonts are immense -- the article goes over them -- but without solving the hurdle of formatted subcolumns, they still aren't going to outweigh that one negative.
Another, lesser, IDE-bound problem is font selection itself. I can't think of any that allow multiple fonts within a single document. Embedded formatting is more or less by definition the antithesis of plain text. Being able to use multiple fonts within a single document -- say, when I'm writing some PHP, I can have the PHP, HTML, and JS in a file each look distinctly different -- could be done through live text parsing, which some IDEs do, but the ones I've tried are all intolerably slow at it* and it ends up being a burden that outweighs its benefit.
*(Maybe if corporate-bound IDEs were written in OS-native code rather than Java. That would be nice.)
posted by ardgedee at 3:07 PM on March 22, 2015
That's addressed at length in the article. The author's response is basically, "this should be the editor's job." He's not wrong, but it's also a weak punt. Without a universal method of delineating custom tab stops, there's no way to be certain that my IDE will correctly format the code formatted in your IDE.
The advantages of using proportional fonts are immense -- the article goes over them -- but without solving the hurdle of formatted subcolumns, they still aren't going to outweigh that one negative.
Another, lesser, IDE-bound problem is font selection itself. I can't think of any that allow multiple fonts within a single document. Embedded formatting is more or less by definition the antithesis of plain text. Being able to use multiple fonts within a single document -- say, when I'm writing some PHP, I can have the PHP, HTML, and JS in a file each look distinctly different -- could be done through live text parsing, which some IDEs do, but the ones I've tried are all intolerably slow at it* and it ends up being a burden that outweighs its benefit.
*(Maybe if corporate-bound IDEs were written in OS-native code rather than Java. That would be nice.)
posted by ardgedee at 3:07 PM on March 22, 2015
As an aside, I'm quickly seeing how different versions of Input are optimal for the various displays I use. This is going to be a fun work environment digression for a while.
posted by ardgedee at 3:20 PM on March 22, 2015
posted by ardgedee at 3:20 PM on March 22, 2015
I was going to say exactly what Nelson said! I love Neutral because it looks like Helvetica, just a great, clean font that can be used in lots of different situations.
posted by Jubey at 5:39 PM on March 22, 2015
posted by Jubey at 5:39 PM on March 22, 2015
Jubey: "I love Neutral because it looks like Helvetica, just a great, clean font that can be used in lots of different situations."
I like Neutral because it's kind of like what people want Helvetica to be, but without the small quirks and weirdness that makes Helvetica less neutral and universal than it could be, and more like "HEY I'M USING HELVETICA".
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:44 PM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
I like Neutral because it's kind of like what people want Helvetica to be, but without the small quirks and weirdness that makes Helvetica less neutral and universal than it could be, and more like "HEY I'M USING HELVETICA".
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:44 PM on March 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
But Neutral also manages to look like Franklin Gothic, Univers, and a Grotesk! How'd they pull that off?
posted by fontor at 5:50 PM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by fontor at 5:50 PM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
> But Neutral also manages to look like Franklin Gothic, Univers, and a Grotesk!
Yeah, that's what strikes me about responses that it looks like Helvetica. It doesn't look like Helvetica at all to me. Much more like, as you say, Franklin G, Aksidenz Grotesk, and maybe a little Univers?
posted by ardgedee at 7:30 PM on March 22, 2015
Yeah, that's what strikes me about responses that it looks like Helvetica. It doesn't look like Helvetica at all to me. Much more like, as you say, Franklin G, Aksidenz Grotesk, and maybe a little Univers?
posted by ardgedee at 7:30 PM on March 22, 2015
The reason Neutral looks like so many different things is that it was designed to be sort of an average of various plain sans serifs. Read the review and the info at Typotheque. The research book is fascinating too.
posted by Typographica at 7:44 PM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Typographica at 7:44 PM on March 22, 2015 [2 favorites]
Neutral is the attempt to create a typeface that is free of all connotations or associations that could distract a reader from the text, a font that delivers the character of the written material untouched by the character of the typeface design.
It's interesting that it seems to do the opposite. While the whole set looks somewhat consistent, I see different typefaces depending on which letter or glyph I'm looking at. It's a bit distracting, even if the text is pleasant to read.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:16 PM on March 22, 2015
It's interesting that it seems to do the opposite. While the whole set looks somewhat consistent, I see different typefaces depending on which letter or glyph I'm looking at. It's a bit distracting, even if the text is pleasant to read.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:16 PM on March 22, 2015
a lungful of dragon: "It's interesting that it seems to do the opposite. While the whole set looks somewhat consistent, I see different typefaces depending on which letter or glyph I'm looking at. It's a bit distracting, even if the text is pleasant to read."
I think it's safe to say that this is not the experience of the average reader, who doesn't know that much about typography.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:12 AM on March 23, 2015
I think it's safe to say that this is not the experience of the average reader, who doesn't know that much about typography.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:12 AM on March 23, 2015
Another, lesser, IDE-bound problem is font selection itself. I can't think of any that allow multiple fonts within a single document. Embedded formatting is more or less by definition the antithesis of plain text. Being able to use multiple fonts within a single document -- say, when I'm writing some PHP, I can have the PHP, HTML, and JS in a file each look distinctly different -- could be done through live text parsing, which some IDEs do, but the ones I've tried are all intolerably slow at it* and it ends up being a burden that outweighs its benefit.
Well the example they use is just a case of syntax highlighting, no? I'm pretty sure editors like Sublime Text will maintain syntax highlighting for multiple languages in one file. I'm not sure I actually love the idea of doing this but it seems like it could be done.
posted by atoxyl at 2:49 PM on March 23, 2015
Well the example they use is just a case of syntax highlighting, no? I'm pretty sure editors like Sublime Text will maintain syntax highlighting for multiple languages in one file. I'm not sure I actually love the idea of doing this but it seems like it could be done.
posted by atoxyl at 2:49 PM on March 23, 2015
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posted by Devils Rancher at 6:30 AM on March 22, 2015