Typography
Design
16 rabbit holes · 10 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Who designed the running man on exit signs?
- Who used :-) first?
- Does Sans Forgetica actually help you remember things?
- Is it true you can learn to read Korean in a day?
- Where does the word ampersand come from?
Rabbit holes
- Comic Sans was made for a cartoon dog
Vincent Connare saw a beta of Microsoft Bob where a cartoon dog talked in speech bubbles set in Times New Roman and thought that was just wrong, so he drew a font based on comic book lettering. It wasn't ready in time for Bob and ended up shipping elsewhere in Windows. It's hated for being used in the wrong places, not for being badly made.
Chidi Eze · 5 sources
- the running man on exit signs, and the pictograms everyone copies
moth · 7 sources
- the first :-) was a fix for people missing a joke
September 1982, Carnegie Mellon's message board. Someone posted a joke warning about a mercury spill in an elevator, some people took it seriously, and Scott Fahlman proposed :-) to mark jokes and :-( for serious posts.
Fern Achterberg · 7 sources
- the Clearview font saga on US highway signs
Clearview was designed to fix how Highway Gothic's letters blur at night in headlights (the holes in letters like e and a fill in with glare). The FHWA approved it in 2004, withdrew the approval in 2016 saying later research didn't show a clear benefit, then restored it in 2018.
Marco Bianchi · 6 sources
- Susan Kare drew the original Mac icons on graph paper
One square of graph paper per pixel. She also drew the first Mac fonts, which were named after cities (Chicago, Geneva, New York...). The ⌘ symbol came from a symbol dictionary, where it marks a place of interest on signs in Scandinavia, after Jobs supposedly objected to the Apple logo being all over the menus.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- how to tell Helvetica and Arial apart (and why Arial exists)
Look at the R, the G, and the top of the t. Helvetica's stroke ends are cut horizontal, Arial's are angled. Arial was drawn for Monotype in 1982 to fit exactly the same space as Helvetica without licensing it, which is how it quietly replaced Helvetica on so many PCs.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- Sans Forgetica, the font that was supposed to help you remember
Noor Rahman · 5 sources
- Hangul was designed on purpose, and the letters show your mouth
Created in the 1440s under King Sejong, explicitly so ordinary people could learn to read. The basic consonant shapes sketch the mouth: ㄱ is the back of the tongue raised, ㄴ is the tongue tip touching behind the teeth, ㅁ is the closed mouth. Reading it in a day is roughly true if you mean sounding out syllables. Understanding Korean is a much longer project.
Samuel Okafor · 5 sources
- a printer threw his entire typeface into the Thames so nobody else could use it
After falling out with Emery Walker, Cobden-Sanderson spent months in 1916 and 1917 walking to Hammersmith Bridge at night and dropping the type, the punches and the matrices into the river, a bit at a time.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- the tube map isn't a map
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- ink traps: notches cut into letters so they look normal when printed badly
Up close Bell Centennial looks like something took bites out of the corners. At phone-book size on cheap paper, the ink spreads into the notches and the letters come out clean. Design for the worst output, not the ideal one.
Fern Achterberg · 7 sources
- & used to be recited as the 27th letter of the alphabet
Kids used to recite the alphabet ending in '...X, Y, Z, and per se and', meaning '& by itself is and'. Slurred together that became 'ampersand'. The symbol itself is the letters e and t (Latin 'et') joined into one.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- The airport code rabbit hole
ORD, YYZ, MCO, MSY. Every weird code is a little fossil of an older name or a radio station identifier.
Mateo González · 5 sources
- why the enter key is a different shape in the UK
Arjun Pillai · 4 sources
- how do you build a typewriter for a language with thousands of characters?
The common design was a tray of a couple thousand metal characters with an arm that picked one at a time. Lin Yutang's MingKwai in the 1940s used keys to narrow things down to a handful of candidates you then picked from, which is weirdly close to how phone input and autocomplete work now.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down
Chidi Eze · 5 sources