8 ms·

I was with you up to "I do not give a shit" What font has been more tested for quick pass-through of data than the default system fonts? To me, this simply sc

I was with you up to "I do not give a shit" What font has been more tested for quick pass-through of data than the default system fonts? To me, this simply screams "This is the main body. You can find your information here"

noduerme 1y ago
No. System fonts have completely different reasons for existing than fonts you would want to use to communicate with the public. System fonts were initially created for legibility at certain screen resolutions, for dot-matrix printers, etc. But it's worse than that. What I'm trying to explain is that every typeface, even the most innocuous one gives subtle, subconscious cues to the readers. Every font. The associations can range from some childhood Disney movie to a font you saw at a hospital while you were having a really serious medical problem. But after 30 years of everyone on earth looking at system fonts, readers now get the cue when they see a system font that they are looking at a shitty MS Word document their boss just pinned to the felt board. Or else they assume the author did not bother or did not have the skill to make it look good. I'm a writer. I've written 6 novels. I love words and ideas, unencumbered by visuals. I've written at least 500k LoC on in my life, maybe double that, I don't know. That's all pure thought and logic. So I get the agitation: All I want to get across to you, my reader, my employer, is the information, my distilled ideas. That's all that's important. Read it or don't, I don't care, it's good and the logic works. I'm also trained as a designer. My first several jobs were in ad agencies, since I was 14 years old as an intern. How will people subconsciously interpret the ancillary visual aspects of this is something I learned early on: what will they construe? Because bad design can prejudice someone against a great piece of writing, and vice-versa. No visual thing you can make has zero cultural reference; everything you make that other people will see drags some bundle of pre-understood tropes into it. You can't make one without referencing some aspect of culture that affected you. The job of a designer - what makes a designer different from someone who just has aesthetic chops and can tell if a web page looks good - what constitutes the black arts of design - is to know every single cultural trope you are dragging in front of the customer's target audience and to understand how it will psychologically affect their state while they read the content, so you know how to trigger certain emotional resonances in them while they absorb the information the client is trying to get across. That's what "giving a shit" means in terms of communicating visually.
- vntok 1y ago
  Facebook cares, right? Given their impact, their resources, their objectives, they of all companies must "give a shit". Right? So here are the fonts of the Facebook posts listed on a Facebook user's wall: > Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif > system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif Observe how there's no custom font, no weird font, and no "associations with some childhood Disney movie" to be found on a page seen and used by 2+ billions of users daily.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    Funny you should bring that up, because FB is a perfect example of a visual relic from the late '00s which didn't age well. Much of the post-dot-com-crash world of design in the web and early mobile space was defined by a rejection of the excessive - wild crazy idiotic irreverent and often incoherent - typography and design of the '90s web. So, super basic fonts, white backgrounds, and what they thought was "minimalism". However, because they relied on the tooling rather than creating their own cues, (and also because their UI turned into a towering nightmare of crap) Facebook looks extremely dated to most people's eyes now. It looks like a 20 year old website...and not a particularly good one. My outside opinion is that Meta does not give a shit at all about how Facebook looks at this point. I'm not here to make the case that revolutionizing their design would improve their onboarding rate now or something. I'm making the case that if you are some nobody with no network effects and no billion dollars, you have a better chance at getting people to read your content if you take the time to (a) get it out of system-ui fonts and (b) make a bunch of other aesthetic decisions that trigger certain pleasing feelings in your audience.
    - Izkata 1y ago
      Facebook got modernized multiple times and doesn't look at all like it did 20 years ago.
      - noduerme 1y ago
        hard to tell with all the cruft but I'll admit I'm not a user. The point stands about the shift in web design in the early 2000s

noduerme 1y ago

No. System fonts have completely different reasons for existing than fonts you would want to use to communicate with the public. System fonts were initially created for legibility at certain screen resolutions, for dot-matrix printers, etc. But it's worse than that. What I'm trying to explain is that every typeface, even the most innocuous one gives subtle, subconscious cues to the readers. Every font. The associations can range from some childhood Disney movie to a font you saw at a hospital while you were having a really serious medical problem. But after 30 years of everyone on earth looking at system fonts, readers now get the cue when they see a system font that they are looking at a shitty MS Word document their boss just pinned to the felt board. Or else they assume the author did not bother or did not have the skill to make it look good. I'm a writer. I've written 6 novels. I love words and ideas, unencumbered by visuals. I've written at least 500k LoC on in my life, maybe double that, I don't know. That's all pure thought and logic. So I get the agitation: All I want to get across to you, my reader, my employer, is the information, my distilled ideas. That's all that's important. Read it or don't, I don't care, it's good and the logic works. I'm also trained as a designer. My first several jobs were in ad agencies, since I was 14 years old as an intern. How will people subconsciously interpret the ancillary visual aspects of this is something I learned early on: what will they construe? Because bad design can prejudice someone against a great piece of writing, and vice-versa. No visual thing you can make has zero cultural reference; everything you make that other people will see drags some bundle of pre-understood tropes into it. You can't make one without referencing some aspect of culture that affected you. The job of a designer - what makes a designer different from someone who just has aesthetic chops and can tell if a web page looks good - what constitutes the black arts of design - is to know every single cultural trope you are dragging in front of the customer's target audience and to understand how it will psychologically affect their state while they read the content, so you know how to trigger certain emotional resonances in them while they absorb the information the client is trying to get across. That's what "giving a shit" means in terms of communicating visually.

vntok 1y ago
Facebook cares, right? Given their impact, their resources, their objectives, they of all companies must "give a shit". Right? So here are the fonts of the Facebook posts listed on a Facebook user's wall: > Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif > system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI Historic, Segoe UI, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif Observe how there's no custom font, no weird font, and no "associations with some childhood Disney movie" to be found on a page seen and used by 2+ billions of users daily.
- noduerme 1y ago
  Funny you should bring that up, because FB is a perfect example of a visual relic from the late '00s which didn't age well. Much of the post-dot-com-crash world of design in the web and early mobile space was defined by a rejection of the excessive - wild crazy idiotic irreverent and often incoherent - typography and design of the '90s web. So, super basic fonts, white backgrounds, and what they thought was "minimalism". However, because they relied on the tooling rather than creating their own cues, (and also because their UI turned into a towering nightmare of crap) Facebook looks extremely dated to most people's eyes now. It looks like a 20 year old website...and not a particularly good one. My outside opinion is that Meta does not give a shit at all about how Facebook looks at this point. I'm not here to make the case that revolutionizing their design would improve their onboarding rate now or something. I'm making the case that if you are some nobody with no network effects and no billion dollars, you have a better chance at getting people to read your content if you take the time to (a) get it out of system-ui fonts and (b) make a bunch of other aesthetic decisions that trigger certain pleasing feelings in your audience.
  - Izkata 1y ago
    Facebook got modernized multiple times and doesn't look at all like it did 20 years ago.
    - noduerme 1y ago
      hard to tell with all the cruft but I'll admit I'm not a user. The point stands about the shift in web design in the early 2000s