2023-05-24

• [[Listened]]: [[Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization with Rodrigo Nunes]]

• [[Move]] the [[body]] with less [[mass]].
• What is the [[rhythm]] of someone's respiration in panic? What is the rhythm of a [[heartbeat]] in [[panic]]? How do they [[breathe]] differently when in [[fear]]?

• Wednesday, 05/24/2023 ** 18:33 What have I learned about fonts in the past day or so?

• Variable fonts are fascinating and the best tool to use.
• Open-source font culture is brillant, but the design and type community are so far behind software in this regard. Open-source font projects exist - and many of those that do are truly exceptional - but most of the leading type foundries keep their work proprietary (and inaccessibly expensive). The tools to build fonts with free software are still immature, especially if you can't program.
• Bitmap fonts are brilliant in their own way - for their ease of use. I wonder if there are technologies to 'smooth them over' to convert them to TTF fonts if they're specified at a high enough resolution. This also seems impossible, as the decision to 'smooth something over' is entirely aesthetic, and the small details of these details is so important.
• Rendering fonts is a mess.
• Ligatures can be used for so many brilliant things. I love the '99 balloons' look.
• New appreciation for 'Inter'. I'm not happy with some of the parts of the font that have been rounded off - loose ends and such (without a better word) - but the fact that inter is brilliant for legibility in every use case is incredible. I wouldn't choose another free font for a user interface after trying it - it's the best default imaginable.
• Even great type designers miss little details. I keep finding little edges - little cracks - of designs that don't feel as thought-out as the type designer would like to have you believe. Studying type teaches you to appreciate pixel-perfect detail in a way that not many other crafts can.
• I like 'neo-grotesk' fonts with sharp edges.
• Univers might be the best font. All of the principled fonts that I like are variations of Univers.
• Tricks for making fonts more readable:
  • Fonts must be incredibly legible at their most thin to readability on small screens.
  • Perfect the spacing, the punctuation, and particular letters.
  • Picking a few letters to make 'flash' can help your font stand out in a competition, but particular letters that are distracting significantly hinder readability.
  • Multi-language support is insane. Practically impossible. I'm immensely appreciative of type designers who work across language boundaries - especially when deviating from Latin characters.