Made a few changes to the site, and now I can have posts without titles. It gives a sense of freedom, similar to what you might have unconsciously experienced on Twitter. Having a title adds a layer of seriousness to a post.
The Archive layout has changed to accommodate missing titles — now the dates link to posts, and the dates are in ISO format set in tabular figures for proper alignment.
With each iteration, it’s becoming more brutalist, and I like it.
I found King Creosote randomly through some recommendation on YouTube or Spotify — I don’t remember. Diamond Mine is now the first album I bought in a very long time. Then, I found this tender documentary about life in Scotland and loved it.
These albums are so good at grounding you. You might sit in a train or walk through a busy street, and you start forgetting that you’re part of this crowd. You feel as if you’re a bystander, noticing all the small details in people and things around you — everything that makes them special.
I’ve started drawing my first font. It’s the perfect pastime activity — you massage letters until they start looking good. It’s soothing.
There’s no end goal besides drawing something that I could use for my website. This means I don’t need to think about covering all the glyphs — the basic Latin alphabet would be enough. I’m not even using italics here.
It feels weird not to know the scale, for example, what cap height or x-height to choose. Most of the time, it feels like “I don’t know what I’m doing”. But this is a good feeling because I haven’t felt “stupid” for a while. When you design something for the web, you at least keep your knowledge from using HTML and CSS, so you know the scale. Here’s the medium is new.
For now, I want to push as far as I can without thinking about the font metrics and edit the letters later. It means that I will need to do double work, but it allows me to focus on mastering the tool first.
Finally watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, a TV series produced in the 1980s. I don’t think there are many people like Carl Sagan. The show he created is so delicate, with many complex emotions. It’s captivating, fun, sad, and melancholic. The original music was composed by Vangelis, and it’s hard to imagine how it could be better.
We’re now rewatching the sequel by one of his students — Neil deGrasse Tyson. While it covers similar topics and has better graphics, it feels a little shallower.
A few hours after I wrote the last post, I remembered one chapter from Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman:
Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate — two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?” I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.
I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations.
He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
“Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing” — working, really — with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
Typeface design has turned out to be an activity that’s easy to start but very hard to master. It’s relatively straightforward to get to know your tools and learn how to draw basic glyphs. The hardest part is making the entire text look good. You run into problems when you like a glyph on its own, but it catches your eye when it’s part of the text. As Matthew Carter said, “Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters.”
The biggest challenge with personal projects like this is the lack of restrictions. When you have a list of requirements, it provides the necessary constraints that shape your work. Without them, you tend to stagger from one idea to another, with no clear goal to measure your progress against. As a result, the design changes frequently.
But this lack of restrictions also has its advantages, as it creates a lot of room for experimentation. You get to understand why some typefaces have a curved leg on an ‘R’ and others are straight by just trying it yourself. You might copy an element from a typeface you like and discover why it works. You end up learning more in a given time by trying different things.
However, it’s hard not to hit a wall when you don’t have a specific goal. Knowing that making it good will take more time than just learning how to do it adds another layer of frustration. Even though there was never any particular goal to start with and it was always about learning, It feels like a failure not to see your projects “finished”.
Note to self: Never set goals like “designing a typeface for your site.” It’s too concrete, too result-oriented. It undermines the playful aspect of the process. Instead, focus on the journey.
I don’t want this to become a project I feel obligated to finish; I want it to remain a toy.