After playing with the font for a while, I’ve started getting to know what I want. I want to bring back the nostalgic feeling of interfaces from the 90s — Verdana/Tahoma and Lucida Grande — they were highly legible and warm. Also, even though designing your own version of Helvetica is cool, it’s psychologically hard to do when you have so many open-source Helvetica descendants — Inter, Geist.
I redid most of the glyphs. Now counters are more open and letters have abrupt joints. The letters I and J have serifs and the letter M has two stories.
Interestingly, once you get spacing right, text starts looking legible even when letter forms are not perfect.
The entire update is about generative AI. Companies have been adding generative AI whenever it’s useful for the past few years. Apple was among few companies that didn’t and now they jumped on that bandwagon as well.
One would expect Apple to add AI features sparingly, where it feels right, where it doesn’t obstruct the user flow, where it’s invisible. They have not. Instead, they’ve released a bunch of unrefined features as if to show their relevance.
Some features — summaries, proofreading — are more or less valuable. While others — emoji generation, anyone? — are out of place.
Another problem with iOS 18 is that it looks like it was designed in a haste. Apple has been slowly losing its design edge for a few years, but this update feels even less polished. You get buttons that are not aligned, font colors that do not match, and patterns that do not work.
The entire update feels like there was no attention to details — neither to design nor feature choices.
The algorithmic feed is among the worst inventions of the 21st century. The extent of damage it has caused is hard to measure, but you can probably feel it.
The main issue with generated feeds is that they need to rely on some metric to decide what content to show you. In most cases, this metric is engagement, which is pretty annoying. To be fair, any metric would be bad. It’s impossible to reduce what someone likes or dislikes into one number.
When a single number is used to track the quality of recommendations, it stops reflecting reality. Instead, people start to gamble it. As a result, you get clickbait tweets, posts, and video titles. Content quality deteriorates, yet you are more likely to engage with it.
The best solution I’ve found is to avoid any app or service with algorithmic feeds.
For example, I almost abandoned Twitter. There was a time when I could read what the people I followed wrote. Then, Twitter introduced algorithmic feeds and eventually removed third-party clients.
It’s not only about Twitter. Much worse happened to Instagram where you almost don’t see what your friends post. Meta knows better what you’ll engage with.
I would still love to use Twitter or Instagram. But it’s too much work — there are only a few people left there who I like following, the rest became victims of this race to the bottom — self-promotion at the expense of sincerity.
There’s an essay by Scott Alexander on the topic of competition and the incentives it creates. I want to finish this post with a quote from that post:
There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
I didn’t like this book at first. At the beginning, he talks about spiritual nonsense — the Source. It didn’t make much sense then and it doesn’t make sense now. The best approach is to ignore these parts or think about them as Rick’s way to express things that he’s unable to put into words. If you survive this initial shock, you get to the good part.
The good part, and why you should read it, is all the things that you believe in and wanted to hear somebody else saying. Things that we collectively lost along the way.
We live in a messed-up world where quality is reduced to a few numbers on a dashboard or where people stopped doing what they like and started doing what drives engagement. I needed to know that there are people who still appreciate simple things and who work for themselves.
His main point is that art (read it as ”anything you do”) is about yourself. The quality of your work is what you should struggle to improve. Everything else — feedback, critique, self-doubt, motivation — is a means to the final result.
At some point in my life, I lost track of who I am — there were too many voices aroud, and too many instances where I need to conform to someone else’s opinion. This book gave me a breath of fresh air and I don’t care anymore.
I’ve recently started using Strava to create cycling routes. I noticed that sometimes it doesn’t use some roads because the paving is not specified. In theory, you can add additional points to route through these roads, but this isn’t the best solution.
Strava uses Mapbox for maps and navigation, which in turn uses OpenStreetMap data.
I wanted to know what roads didn’t have a surface type specified to adjust them in OpenStreetMap later.
I needed a way to query OpenStreetMap data. I found Overpass Turbo, which allows you to query and visualize any data from OSM.
I used this query to highlight all roads that didn’t specify their surface type:
[out:json];
(
way[highway~"primary|secondary|tertiary|residential"]["surface"!~"."]({{bbox}});
);
out body;
>;
out skel qt;
Filtering roads with a certain speed limit
Another useful application of Turbo Pass is finding roads with certain speed limits. Scalp road is one the most beautiful roads in Ireland, but it has an 80km/h speed limit. I can only ride on it in the morning when the traffic is low. At other times, I need to find roads with lower speeds.
The following query can be used to highlight roads with 30-60 km/h speed limits.
I’ve designed basic glyphs of the Latin alphabet and numbers. Making them consistent in form, weight and contrast takes a lot of time.
I’m still struggling with the letter and the stroke widths. Initially, my values were too small, resulting in letters that were too narrow and too light. The letters are still too light.
I bought a few books on font design:
Designing type by Karen Cheng. Unlike most books that only touch on general topics of typography, this one goes through the design process for each letter.
Size-specific adjustements to type designs by Just Another Foundry. I’m not even close to implementing optical sizes, but it’s interesting to read, and it’s beautifully made.
I’ve also started to notice details in fonts that I previously overlooked. This might be what Ellen Lupton describes as typomania:
Introduced through the innocuous pages of a college textbook, typography will soon stalk you everywhere. You cease to find solace and sustenance at the supermarket; instead, you puzzle over the diamond-shaped tittles that dot the i’s of the Triscuit logo…
One day you step off the edge of the subway platform wondering whether the words ‘STAND BEHIND THE YELLOW LINE’ are set in Akzidenz Grotesk or Helvetica.
I first wondered why I’m doing this when there are so many Helvetica alternatives available online. But then I remembered how much joy I get from working on my font. Regardless of the many others that exist, this one will be mine.
I found this song from Bo Burnham a while ago, but I keep returning to it again and again.
When I was a kid, the internet was my way to get out and have fun. Today, the internet feels claustrophobic and stifling—a place I want to run from.
I’m still learning how to live with all this. I’ve ditched Google and am slowly abandoning all services that use auto-generated feeds. I’m returning to simple technologies — pictures stored in a folder on my computer, RSS readers, notes in text files, and my paper notebooks.
But I’m not there yet. And while I’m learning, the best thing I can do for my mental health is to laugh it all off.
Design workflows at most tech companies follow an incredible number of structured tasks: for each project, designers must create user personas, user stories, journey maps, wireframes, user interviews, and much more. However, driven by a desire from businesses to turn design into a process-heavy, measurable function, we’re filling our time with checklists instead of focusing on the very thing that makes designers relevant.
… and he’s right. People don’t think anymore. They mindlessly follow rituals, hoping to create something useful. This is how universities and bootcamps teach “design”. Check any university website, and you’ll see that it’s all about creating personas, user flow diagrams, low and high fidelity prototypes. While being useful at certain cases, they don’t gurantee “quality”.
If you look at design methodologies, most of them are created by either professors or consultants. None of these people practice product design. But they do get bonus points and money by reinventing the wheel. Design Thinking? What were people doing before Design Thinking?
He then makes another good point on the gap between designers and engineers:
For years, I’ve argued the design profession – fueled by how we educate designers – operates on outdated ideas about the separation of labor. Designers are expected to come up with the ideas, while engineers are merely there to execute them. Design stays in a corner away from technology.
The idea “I’m a designier, I don’t code” is so artificial. If you want to create good solutions, you cannot delegate understanding of technologies to other people.
In the past, designers were engineers who loved and respected computers. Today, it’s rare to find a designer who genuinely enjoy creating software.
[…] they decided to spend millions of dollars churning the font used or read by billions of people to a new one which looks eerily like a squarer Calibri and which is indistinguishable from MS’s previous Segoe, Google Roboto, Apple San Francisco, or Helvetica.
He supports his argument by an image of the letters of Aptos, Roboto, San Francisco, and Helvetica.
Whether Microsoft should have changed its default font is a separate discussion. I’d like to focus on typefaces matter even when they look similarly.
For the experiment sake, let’s consider Helvetica and Univers. They are both based on Akzidenz-Grotesque (also called Standard). They were released in the same year. They don’t have any serifs, and their letter shapes look almost the same. There are some minor differences in letter forms — especially a, k, K, G, R, and Q, and some differences in weight — but is it enough to justify using one over another?
Now let’s compare texts that are set in these fonts. The difference becomes obvious. Helvetica has a more familiar feel as you have seen many times, it is also pretty hard to read in such small sizes, and it appears somewhat “mushy” as if letters were thrown together. In contrast, Univers conveys a sense of orderness and mathematical precision; it’s also easier to read.
Typography is close to cooking where mixing ingredients together and then adding a small pinch of spices creates something better than the sum of its parts. You can’t predict the flavour of a dish by just looking at the ingredients. Similarly, you can’t appreciate a typeface by just looking at its letterforms.