Perfect Days

Film-meditation about life, work and getting joy from all this.

Typeface Updates 001

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.
• A few essay-like books from Hyphen Press — Unjustified texts, Modern typography, and Detail in typography. I first heard about this print house in Robin Rendle’s blog. These books go out of print quickly, so I wanted to own them.

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.

Welcome to the Internet

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.

Product Design Is Lost

In Product Design Is Lost, Rune Madsen writes:

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.

Drawing My First Font

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.

Not Newer, but Better

In Vitsoe: A Purpose-Driven Company, Mark Adams says:

Focus on better, not on newer. Why are we obsessed with the new? We should be obsessed with better. That is what drives us at Vitsœ. After all, it is the way that the natural world operates: constantly improving, not launching new species.

Every company, every movie director, everyone tries to create something new. Very few people try to make something better. Many forgot that creating new is not the goal, it’s a byproduct of creating something good.

Maybe it has always been like this. People create new things, it’s our nature. Still, it feels today time between fashion trends is narrower.

Creating new things for the sake of being new not only brings shallowness, it also deteriorates the quality of what we already have. We destroy what has been done before and instead fill our world with novel inferiority.

Quality work requires patience, contemplation and deep thought. In the race to “innovate”, there’s little time left to pause and reflect.

Variable Fonts Demo

I’ve put together a little interactive demo on variable fonts where the font’s weight and optical size change when you move your mouse around. It’s easier to see how the letter shapes adapt to the changes. Notice how the letters “open up” when the optical size decreases and how the stroke thickness varies unevenly when the weight changes.

One interesting thing I noticed while playing with it is how cool it feels when your actions and their results are coupled. When you work with a computer, your thoughts and actions are translated into a series of discrete steps. You type a letter, create a rectangle, or open a tab. This is not how we communicate with objects in real life. But this example feels closer to how you drive a car or play a musical instrument.