I’m Kris Sowersby, designer of Signifier and author of the design info post on Klim.
First up, I’d like to thank you all for taking the time to read it. I really appreciate it.
I’ve neither heard of Hacker News nor been here before. But I’m chuffed that you’re discussing and critiquing with such wit and (on the whole) sensitivity. I never expected it from this quarter, and it’s something that the online type & design community seems to be lacking. I’ll address some specific points in thread where necessary.
The font is certainly interesting conceptually, and doesn't look bad (though is largely indistinguishable from its "Garamond" source at normal sizes).
And while I've read the whole thing and understand why the author considers this to be a "Brutalist" philosophy, I respectfully disagree. This is merely vectors adhering to a grid, which has nothing to do with the "exposing raw materials" philosophy that is the core of Brutalism. [1]
To me, early pixel-based terminal fonts feel like the digital typography version of Brutalism -- not even attempting curves or calligraphy at all, but embracing the raw material of pixels for exactly what they are.
If the author wants to bring a similar Brutalist raw-materials approach to modern vector-based typography I'd find that interesting as well -- but that would seem to have been done a long time ago, with typography based solely on primitive geometric shapes, of which classic typefaces from the 20th century would seem most suitable (Futura [2], Avant Garde [3]).
In the end, Signifier is a cool concept typeface. But I unfortunately think the author fails at connecting it to Brutalism in any meaningful way, despite their attempt.
I take your points about bitmap fonts for early pixel displays. They were determined by the coarse raster of the screen. But screens have evolved, and manually bitmapping every px size for every physical screen resolution would be a fool's errand.
The early bitmap fonts embraced the the raw material of the pixel, but their underlying form and structure were determined by (at least) 500 years of typographic history and evolution. These days, the “raw material” of digital fonts is not bitmaps but curves. Of course, they're all rasterized one way or another for print or screens!
I am comfortable that I’ve brought a Brutalist ethic to Signifier. I think you’re conflating geometric primitivism with a material sensibility. The designers of Futura (and other geometric typefaces) were not concerned with the material of their production, rather the aesthetic sensibilities of the era. The history of vectors and splines for drawing shapes is not predicated on making primitives per se, (rects, circles, triangles etc,) but articulating complex, subtle curves. The broader history of letterforms is skewed heavily towards articulating subtle curves rather than primitive shapes, so the actual style of Signifier’s letterforms are aligned towards the shapes, proportions and rhythm of early typefaces rather than 20th century models.
And yes — Signiifer is largely indistinguishable from “Garamond” at small sizes is largely the point! There’s even a bit in the design info about it. Thank you for making that observation.
I don't think the point is "vectors adhering to a grid", quite the contrary it looks to me that the author is exposing the raw materials of a font which are, essentially, bezier curves expressed as ones and zeroes. I think the image that better conveys that idea is this: https://d14810e2jnirzn.cloudfront.net/media/documents/Signif...
The non-signifier fonts have some extra points in their bezier curves, which are bits in disk, traveling on the network, stored in memory and processed by the rendering engine that are going to be completely wasted when rendered at 16pts.
That's quite profound for me.
And I'm not an authority in Brutalism, but looks like the author was faithful to what he thinks brutalism is concerned with (from the article):
> Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of the material, that is with the question: what can it do?
I agree — it’s been a buzzword in the graphic design industry for at least 10 years now. During Signifier’s 15 year development I've seen many trends surface and disappear! And during the a year we spent working on the marketing concept and approach for Signifier, I struggled with even mentioning the term “Brutalism”. In the end, I decided it was OK, because it was true to my process, research and thinking.
We work very hard to ensure concept, execution and communication are as solid as they possibly can be. I would never emptily invoke anything.
I understand Brutalist architecture to be characterized by the avoidance of arbitrary ornaments added to the actual structure of the building, which should be embraced and valued rather than hidden and considered too plain.
In the case of a digital font, there are only a bunch of splines, without separate "layers" of structure and ornaments.
The difference between loose rounded curves and sharp quantized curves is therefore the same as the difference between buildings with different room shapes, not the difference between more or less Brutalist styles.
Even if not meaningfully Brutalist, this font makes sense (the reasons to prefer quantized shapes are particularly valid) and looks surprisingly good, and that's what should matter.
I'm glad there are people in this world who can completely unironically and confidently write "Signifier’s digital immateriality draws on a deeply material past. Acknowledging the processes and tools of digital form-making, I worked consciously with the computer to recast the lead, antimony, and tin of the 17th century Fell Types into ones and zeros."
Anything that smart people spend a lifetime doing—programming, font making, engineering, woodworking, auto repair, painting (house and fine art)—has depths that look completely crazy to outsiders.
I had the exact opposite experience. This thesis (and the introduction) made perfect sense to me but the following results, methods and rationales left me unconvinced and uninspired.
What's the takeaway here supposed to be? That you understand the subject so deeply that no concrete or constructive content is necessary in your criticism? Because I take from your comment the exact opposite conclusion.
That paragraph was really something to parse. At first, I tried to read it. Then I realized it was probably some GPT-3 output. Then I realized it was probably some boilerplate lorem ipsum text. And then, I could read it.
This is the style in which Brian Greene wrote much of his Until the End of Time, here is just one example: "the position and the speed of a particle—that a classical physicist in the mold of Isaac Newton would adamantly claim can be specified with complete certainty but that a quantum physicist realizes are burdened by a quantum fuzziness that makes them uncertain."
This is a surprisingly nice type face. It looks blocky when blown up, but it is really clean for small text. It took me a second to zoom in on the text and realize that the article is written in the typeface itself.
I'm curious is there might be a legibility benefit to having a more rectilinear font. Perhaps the transfer function of TTF's anti-aliasing is cleaner along the horizontal and vertical axes rather than along a diagonal or curve. Having a less curvy font might be easier to render since the edges align with the display.
Interestingly, many fonts look very strange when zoomed in because they employ all kinds of tricks to exploit optical illusions to give their fonts particular expression, such as curves and pinches that are almost imperceptible when viewed at a normal size. Unfortunately at the moment I can't find an article which clearly demonstrates what I'm talking about.
I think you’re referring to “optical sizing” in fonts. In essence, fonts at small sizes are more robust and large sizes have more detail. Very much like comic books illustration, for example. If you blow up a small face on a comic strip and compare to a big face, the big face will have a lot more fine detail. The small face will be simplified and more gestural, so it can be “read” at small sizes.
Tobias Frere-Jones has some blog posts on Typeface Mechanics if you’re interested:
I think ~warent is referring to features like ink traps, which are features that do look strange up-close, but might help increase contrast or other qualities at small sizes.
I don't have much more to add than that: I really like this font. It pushes proportion in so many subtle ways, and the result is just... I want to write a book so that I can typeset it in Signifier.
I wouldn't have thought it was possible to make a font that's so recognizably classic and yet so distinctively itself. That took taste, and just enormous reserves of effort; but an effort which shows itself in a restrained, elegant fashion.
I firmly disagree with the comment that it's indistinguishable from Garamond! The f, d, and g immediately tell me that this isn't Garamond, and that's before I opened up Font Book to compare some more subtle letters. The f positively looms over the subsequent letter, while the loop of g swells voluptuously into the space around it. Yet somehow, they manage to do this without crowding their neighbors.
I've never really thought too much about the font industry of the past - this is quite the interesting read.
The font he's created is great. I wasn't fond of the sharpness initially, especially when the text is blown up, but it reads wonderfully when it's at a 'normal' text size.
I must confess - I had no idea fonts were so expensive to license! (Not a criticism of the cost, just ignorant until now).
I had the same experience - found the blown up version to not be appealing at all, but ended up really liking, as you put it, the readability of the normal sized text.
Not sure if it just me, but I find it considerably more relaxing to read the text from the photo of the page (with all the surface and font imperfections) than read text written with the same font rendered on solid background (this time perfect).
It's almost like I need the paper and font imperfections to read faster.
My theory is that the brain somehow uses the paper and font imperfections to coregister (align) the binocular images from our eyes, which leads to smoother reading.
This makes sense to me, as I had the same impression; my theory is that it is the diversity and the individuality of the letters in the text that makes reading easier, and slight imperfections and irregularities only add to this.
The "brutalist" digital version, on the other hand, seemed to me more of a demonstration of how far one can go using tricks without anyone noticing.
He used Aristotelian terms but misunderstood them, probably because of how we now use "material" in ordinary English.
The letters on the screen have form (shape, meaning) and matter (pixels). The matter of the letter has changed but it still has matter in the Aristotelian sense.
We don't know how old the author's mother was when she died. My grandfather died of cancer at 79. While it was sad (and I still feel sad when I think of it) I wouldn't ever describe it as a 'tragedy'.
Only commenting because I feel this word is overused these days.
You're simply changing the meaning of the word then and also, I would suggest, debasing the complex experience of death by suggesting it is a singular, universal experience of 'personal tragedy'.
Everyone loses loved ones and in many cases it is not experienced as tragedy but as death being a normal and essential part of life.
But I am glad they have made it. They also raise an important point: half-arsed revivals of older fonts. I've been trying to make posters in the style of 1930s adverts. There are a few challenges, but one of the biggest is finding the correct font that hasn't been modernised.
I’d hazard a guess that most posters from the era are hand-lettered, not typeset from fonts. You’ll be hard-pressed to fake a 30’s aesthetic with modern digital fonts.
I loved that after seeing the comparisons, you can notice that the article was writing in Signifier. Did not love the CPU usage of the page (at lease for me, it rocketed up. macOS, Safari)
Interesting cause. I wonder how long we’ll need to manually specify what transitions. It seems like an optimization problem that the browser could solve on its own, but I guess not yet.
React is the new PHP: a dangerously welcoming ecosystem for amateurs. If you look at the trace, you see it's firing a timer for LazyImage every 300 milliseconds that that's causing constant repaints. It's terrible, but no one believes in craftsmanship anymore. :-)
// Give react a chance to render before starting to poll
// This gives us more chance of the opacity transition being visible
// Should also fix rendering glitches in firefox where native image placeholder shows briefly
setTimeout(pollForComplete, 300);
},
Hmm, settimeout is one shot, setinterval is the repeating one, unless that’s calling itself recursively?
Anyway using delays hoping that things are in place in 300ms is asking for trouble, I thought reacts whole thing was to put everything in a component lifecycle callback so everything happens in the order it needs to
Hello! Thanks for having a fossick through our code ;) Happy to report that the issue has now been resolved. I've added a post explaining the underlying cause a little up in the thread. (I'm not sure how notifications work on HN, so figured I'd drop a reply here, too).
This is the CyberTruck of fonts, and it is brilliant in a similar way. I think this designer is on to something. The legacy type styles are proven over centuries - or have we just been conditioned over centuries? I think of this as a Serif with the legibility of a Sans.
No one really needs an entire family though. Get the Regular, Regular Italic and Bold to do everything a normal person would need a typeface for. $150. Everything else if for weirdos and designers buying type for their clients.
The philosophical context of font design is one of those niches of rarified contemporary hothouse cultural specialization that makes me thing, this is as far as we go, as a culture.
Reading these things I inevitably experience intellectual vertigo, the deep-zoom-into-a-fractal sense of perfectly accurate, almost totally unnecessary, precision at microscopy scale. It's more Gibson than Gibson, not least if you're aware of Douglas Hofstadter's obsession with "letter spirits" and their multidimensional relationship to GAI...
Maybe you should take a look in the mirror, we're all toiling in rarified contemporary hothouse cultural specialization.
"Hey, here's a cool article about a guy who spent a year creating another over-engineered javascript framework because he had an aesthetic dislike of semicolons. This matters! Upvote!"
I agree with your emotional reaction, but calling anything the limit as it currently appears I think is foolhardy.
Our current trajectory has long been less Keynesian feedback loop, and more zero-sum advertising-based competition between entrenched conglomerates over shrinking consumption. The recipe for vertigo in the art-design-advertising sector is the tension between bohemian ideals on one hand, and the social relations of patronage on the the other.
Unless you think collapse or equilibrium is immanent, buckle up for more of the same.
It's the same "perfectly accurate, almost totally unnecessary, precision at microscopy scale" involved in doing anything with numbers.
Ancient Babylonians were surely enthusiastic about astronomical computations, you are enthusiastic about clever fonts (and rest assured that there are much more extreme ones around), and some entirely different mathematical technology will be mind-blowing tomorrow.
I'm sorry, but again, none of that stuff has anything to do with "brutalism" which has been made a complete buzzword for the last 4 years, just because "design needs trends". No it doesn't. Design for your audience and don't follow "trends".
The author does explain[0] his underlying persective/meaning of Brutalism:
> Brutalism wasn’t a specific material or style, it was an attempt to be true to the raw qualities of materials. It was an ethic.¹⁸ Signifier adheres to this ethic, Brutalism’s core concepts framed my working process and thinking rather than pre-determining the outcome. There’s a sense of the vector, the grid, the underlying digital nature. For instance, you can’t see that Adobe Garamond’s a is digital, but you can see it in Signifier’s a.
And from the footnote:
> “The difference is not merely one of form of words: ‘Neo-Brutalist’ is a stylistic label, like Neo-Classic or Neo-Gothic, whereas ‘The New Brutalism’ is, in the Brutalist phrase “an ethic, not an aesthetic. It describes a programme or an attitude to architecture.” Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, (1966): 10.
I don't believe that the term was applied based on it being a buzzword or a recent trend.
Rarely is an article so explainatory as this one. The author writes (all below quoted):
[...]
> Thinking about the materiality of digital fonts lead to Brutalism. According to architectural historian and critic Michael Abrahamson, “the word ‘Brutalism’ has lost its meaning. At present, it equates to: large buildings, sometimes of concrete, constructed sometime between World War II and the end of the 1970s.”⁷ Abrahamson clarifies and re-orientates the meaning, quoting Peter Smithson:
>
> Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of the material, that is with the question: what can it do? And by analogy: there is a way of handling gold in Brutalist manner and it does not mean rough and cheap, it means: what is its raw quality?
>
> My question now became, “what is the raw quality of digital fonts?” [...]
Brutalism is about exposing the materials used in construction (i.e. the raw concrete is visible). So maybe a font that also shows its own spline control points?
I replied above how I do believe it adheres to a Brutalist ethos. We design exactly for my audience, and while we don’t follow trends we’re very aware of the zeitgeist.
I’m Kris Sowersby, designer of Signifier and author of the design info post on Klim.
First up, I’d like to thank you all for taking the time to read it. I really appreciate it.
I’ve neither heard of Hacker News nor been here before. But I’m chuffed that you’re discussing and critiquing with such wit and (on the whole) sensitivity. I never expected it from this quarter, and it’s something that the online type & design community seems to be lacking. I’ll address some specific points in thread where necessary.
—Chur.