It's a long time since I thought about doing Leroy lettering, so I was delighted to see the tiny clip of someone doing that. My thoughts on Leroy were a bit divided, I have to say.
When I was young we were first taught how to letter by hand, so when we were allowed to use Leroy, it felt a lot like cheating. I suppose it was great that perfect results were easy to achieve, but replacing skill with pattern-following was not necessarily an improvement.
To this day, I linger over old research articles that have maps and graphs that had been lettered by hand. Many papers written in the 1800s have beautifully clear line drawings of apparatus that can be much more useful than the photos included in newer papers.
Yes and: Lettering guides (sort of) allowed multiple people to maintain drawings. Even then, individual skill and technique allowed team mates to recognize each other's work.
I knew one person who had perfect hand lettering. And could mimick other people's lettering. Alas, they eschewed forgery, embracing jazz instead. (They hand lettered their own liner notes, natch.)
Leroy sets was something that would set my dad off on a rant of his struggles with a Leroy lettering set. These would come on in quiet moments of contemplation. When I entered design school his first question was regarding Leroy lettering. We were the first class to go through the curriculum with a Macintosh lab and I never used a Leroy set.
I've seen this font everywhere for my whole life and never looked into it's history. It's a fascinating account and I'm glad Marcin wrote it down.
Emotionally, what I feel when I see text using it is: "This information is serious and if you don't pay attention to what this says someone could get hurt"
There's nothing playful about it at all, which makes sense in how it was used for industrial controls, military signage, elevators, and the like.
And yet, according to the author, it has some quirks.
The idea is that the font itself is not particularly serious, but we are used to see it in serious contexts, so we make the association.
And there is also the support, when some text is engraved on metal, there is some permanence to it, some commitment. The one who wrote this really means it. It is not like a sheet of paper, or worse, a computer screen where everything can vanish at the push of a button.
I think the titles summarizes it perfectly. It means hard work. When we see this, we imagine industrial machinery and professionals, because that's where it is used. In an alternative world where Comic Sans would be used for this purpose, it would be seen as serious.
For a time I wrote code for BMS/BAS systems for many prominent commercial buildings in the NYC area, control rooms in basements and on rooftops and all the secret in-between rooms, in-between. (A fascinating job not without its exposure to asbestos, among other hazards.)
And, as someone born and raised in the south, I was thoroughly enamored with this ubiquitous font that implied the seriousness and purpose of each control implement, to include the priority of the functionality said implement represented, on countless panels I engaged with.
This deep dive was pleasing to my soul and I'm immensely thankful to the author for taking the time (and the photos) to indulge in traversing this wormhole for us.
I'm afraid the author has it backwards. This style of writing didn't start as a font from some company.
This is just how you used to be taught to do lettering in a drafting class. The straight lines and simple shapes make it easy to do lettering with pencil or a pen, which is also why all the lines are the same width and all the line caps are rounded.
Later on these turned into stencils, which let users do lettering quickly by tracing the pen inside the stencil - and then turned into fonts for use in print. But all that came later. What we have here is just lettering people learned in drafting classes, and which was later used to make stencils and templates.
> This style of writing didn't start as a font from some company.
TFA doesn't suggest that, at all. A font is a concrete instantiation of a writing style, and TFA is about the history of one such concrete instance - not the general style it's an instance of. Also the connection to drafting and lettering stencils is discussed in some detail midway through.
(Also more generally: kind of amazing to imagine reading an article of this depth, that mentions years of obsessive research and links to the author's 1200-page book on the history of typing, and thinking: "yeah this guy probably doesn't know about drafting".)
Of course I read the details on stencils and patterns in the text. But you misunderstand what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that there are many "concrete instantiations" of drafting lettering style, that all look basically the same, because they all came from the same source, and Gorton is just one of them. So what we're seeing in elevators and on plaques is not "Gorton" specifically. While in contrast we do see Helvetica specifically on NYC subway signs, Johnston in the London tube, etc.
Too fine of a point? Perhaps. And also, it doesn't take away from the quality of the essay which is a delightful romp through the history of draftman's lettering showing up in all sorts of forgotten utilitarian places.
(But I've got to ask - what's with the ad hominem at the end? We should be above that.)
Playing cards use this style of lettering. Not sure how far back that goes but I kind of doubt they all derive from Gorton's specific engraving machines.
> And here's A TEXT-BOOK OF FREE-HAND LETTERING, part of the TECHNICAL DRAWING SERIES, first published in 1895:
Called out in the article - "but I know simple technical writing standards existed already, and likely influenced the appearance of the newfangled routing font. [photograph captioned: From a 1895 “Free-hand lettering” book by Frank T. Daniels]"
I know it was a long essay and I skimmed most of it myself. But the author definitely mentions this and even has a picture from the 1895 book you linked to.
After reading such a beautiful piece about an interesting topic and researched for hundreds of miles on end, I can rest assured that somebody on HN knows better. No doubts, no nothing... "just" knows it better.
Edit: The above might sound too harsh, sorry. You're probably right, but after reading such a beautiful piece, your reaction was really a buzzkill for me.
I learned that style of writing in school (German: Normschrift). I think this is where the origins of the font lie, but having read the article I don't see how the author is wrong here.
This is just a thing they failed to emphasize — maybe — considering the credentials, because it was blaringly obvious to them.
This feels more like a detrctive story about figuring out the origins of one concrete manifestation of a font and not a text about where that family of fonts comes from.
I think it's worth calling a font when there were likely cases of the font being transmitted, by copying from one source to another. E.G. Gorton being made by machines licensed from another company, then the output of those machines being used for lettering guides.
This was also pointed out in the article, but the point at which it became a physical standard, and not a lettering style, was with the Gorton engravers.
(The tail of the Q is a tell -- not a straight line, not a simple shape, but identical in lettering systems based on the engravers.)
Yeah -- my dad's lettering template had letterforms like this. As the article mentions, the Simplex characters from the Hershey set, used in CAD applications, are based on this font, probably for consistency with how drafting was traditionally done.
Thank you so much for writing this. I am a solo game developer working on a vintage-styled spacecraft simulator, tearing his hair out over the cockpit typeface problem. I recognized the classic Apollo spacecraft from the sign engraving tools I'd seen in use on the job about 40 years ago, but I couldn't figure out the name for it or identify a font that recreated it properly.
Add this to the list of wonderful things I never expected to wake up to on HN!
Came for the typography geek-out, stayed for the machine tools and ANSI Y14 refs.
Had no idea the rabbit hole went this deep. Work with CAD standards and on my to-do list is adding rendering for IFC text notes to a GL application and was wondering what default font to use. Haven't checked STEP yet, but IGES defined a special font code (FC2) for "LeRoy", so these things percolate through technology like the apocryphal Roman Cart/Railroad Gauge story!
I don’t mean this as a slight, but this has to be written by a post-millennial. As a late gen-Xer, nothing about these letterforms were unusual or “ugly” to me as they were practically ubiquitous. They were just as common and valid as standard printed forms.
I suppose it’s something like how a modern reader might react to seeing a “long s” — ſ — for the first time.
Again, this isn’t meant to insult anyone, just that it’s really fascinating to see a different generational perspective here.
The author isn't saying he finds the style unfamiliar - the entire article is about how ubiquitous it is. He's a typographer, so I think he means "ugly" in the sense of having features that modern typographers consider to be flaws - e.g. he mentions the off-balance G, being monoline, etc.
Also the author's CV lists working at google from 2006, so he's not exactly a youngster.
> I don’t mean this as a slight, but this has to be written by a post-millennial.
You could’ve looked him up. He’s not hard to find and definitely not post-millennial. Design director at Figma and previously worked at Medium, Google, and Code for America. Started his master’s in the late 90s.
Even if he were, these types of generational comments are trite, like the “only 90s kids will get this” memes. It is naive to assume someone’s age from an opinion; the tapestry of human diversity is considerably more complex than that.
> nothing about these letterforms were unusual or “ugly” to me as they were practically ubiquitous.
Ubiquity has nothing to do with beauty. You can live with something all your life and still find it ugly. Or you can develop your taste and change your opinion. You can even have nuanced opinions. Like the author, who mentions liking the font after the initial reaction. He called this post “a love letter”.
Look at the length of the post—that is more research on the subject than most of us will ever do. Let’s perhaps give the benefit of the doubt that a long time professional with the passion to do this amount of research has some basis for their views which go beyond when they were born.
> like how a modern reader might react to seeing a “long s” — ſ — for the first time.
There are a plethora of reactions to that: “how strange”, “how intriguing”, “how beautiful”, … Most people don’t think every old thing they encounter for the first time is ugly.
I read that "ugly" not as a "what is this yesrerdayish mess, was life in the twntieth really that unrefined?", but as a "technically, it's breaking all the rules", a judgement from typography knowledge, not from generational identity. And I read it as an expression of surprise, because they spent so much time with that ubiquitous type in sight without ever noticing it, until one day they stopped not noticing it. No trace of generational shifts.
Marcin is definitely Gen-X. His LinkedIn says he started his master's degree in 1997. Assuming a typical education that'd put his birth year around 1974. (Note he grew up in Poland, so a different Gen-X experience than from the US.)
Perhaps what you're interpreting as generational perspective is Marcin's analytical perspective as a professional designer. He's got a very keen eye for both historical design and modern. Also I read this post as a sort of fond irony, "look at this unusual and ugly font it's actually a thing of beauty, let me show you."
I don't know if it's generational or a matter of background. For me, as the sort of person who knows exactly where to find the SCE power switch, it would be impossible to conceive of this font as ugly. So much ingenuity has been expressed, so much craftsmanship given material form, so many feats of industry and exploration and mundane utility accomplished through those shapes that I find them definitively beautiful.
If some community teaches Rules of Beauty which these characters contravene and are thereby deemed ugly, that says more about the merit of such Rules than anything else.
That ampersand, though... okay. You can have that one.
Marcin looks to be perhaps in the same age bracket as you, but with a different context for letter forms. I believe that people with skillsets that are heavily aesthetic driven - all aspects of graphic design included - see things that non designers don't. A lopsided ampersand that wouldn't raise your eyebrow could be considered laughable to a font designer, keming that doesn't bear mentioning a crime against the written form.
as another gen-xer i was similarly bemused by the repeated references to the font as ugly, so it did kind of make sense to think that the issue was the author not having grown up with it quite as ubiquitous
The author keeps referring to the font as ugly, but I really enjoy it. The variety of signage I've seen it on (national parks, placards, industrial applications and schematics) evoke a sense of awe in me.
I also like it, in the same way I like DIN even though the author considers DIN to be better designed. I have, like the author, often seen this font when it's carved into metal, and I suppose the fact that it's on metal helps evoke that feeling of industry at its best, like a well oiled machine. I also instinctively associate it with the post-WWII period when technology seemed to be progressing faster than today and when technology was unequivocally a good thing.
Agree completely, I quite like the look of the font.
I sometimes feel who are deep in a subject sometimes are too entrenched in their world with rules and guidelines, that to me don't seem all that important to judge quality in the real world; or at least how I perceive things.
Another example also comes from the world of typography: text figures (non-lining numerals). To me they're ugly and difficult to read. Typographers like them because they fit better into the appearance of text, and that's true, but of low importance to me. Numbers are not words, and I feel they don't have to look the same. I like them to look different. I want them to be easy to read, which text figures aren't. (I actually went to the effort of creating custom CSS using Firefox's Stylus add-on to force lining numerals on all websites I visit.)
> The author keeps referring to the font as ugly, but I really enjoy it.
“Beauty”, as they say, “is in the eye of the beholder”. It is not a value judgement to call something ugly, but a subjective opinion. And the author does mention they came to appreciate it:
> My first thought was: What a mess. Is this how “grotesque” fonts got their name?
He's a font nerd. As a font nerd, it's definitely really ugly to me. But art is personal, so if you like it I'm happy for you :)
I get the "ick" when I see terrible typography. I can barely stand to look at American highway signs, it's almost physically painful how horrific they are to me:
What timing! I'd just worked out* the "stickfont" or "open-path font" or "stroke font" that one of my favorite defunct games rendered with GL_LINE_STRIP, and it seems to be from the Hershey glyph set. If you haven't heard of it, it's a remarkable achievement of one individual contributor, essentially a career engineer applying vector graphic rendering to technical lettering.
"In older [keyboards] – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding the key around the letter."
This makes me want an old keyboard. Amazing how hardy keyboards were back then.
A bit of a meta-comment. Something about this piece hits exactly the sweet spot of length and complexity for engaging but still accessible prose, which I feel like has become rarer over time, replaced by the modern writing of instant gratification. (Whether less is being produced, or it's less prominent, or whether the other kinds have become more prominent, I can't say for sure.) I really appreciated it, independent of the subject matter.
Great essay, really enjoyed it! In particular all the beautiful photos!
Typography is a bit of mystery to me. I can somehow recognize "bad" or "strange" fonts, but often I can't put my finger on it. I was immediately put off by the font of the essay, but I kept reading, and right in the middle came the big reveal (spoiler alert):
> (This essay is typeset in a strangely-spaced version of Century put together for Selectric Composer typewriters and recreated for on-screen use. If that didn’t bother you before, it will bother you through the rest of this article.)
Yes it's highly legible at distances, but you'd never want to use it for body text. The letterforms are not well balanced -- e.g. the bowl of the 'R' is uncomfortably high, same with the top half of the 'Y'. It would be tiring to the eye to read long text in.
A lack of styling does not mean a good sense of balance.
It is ugly but highly legible. Which is just fine for the kinds of functional engraving it's meant for.
> it also facilitates legibility, especially at a slight distance, as well as distortion (squishing, stretching) if necessary
Except for the terrible, terrible ‘0’, which looks more or less identical to the ‘O’. IIRC sometimes similar fonts had a strike-through 0 for legibility; I think the BBC Micro keyboard did, for instance.
It's funny seeing Letraset described as popular through the 1960's. They were still available in most stationery stores well into the 1980's at least, and commonly used because they provided better headlines etc. for small newspapers and the like than dot matrix printers for anything you wanted to photocopy rather than sending to have typeset by a professional printer.
It’s so great to read something interesting, well written, well supported and researched, and totally engrossing. This could have been a paid piece in a magazine, but was given to us all for free. Thanks for that!
"Gorton is a decidedly toy-like, amateurish font deployed to for some of the most challenging type jobs: nuclear reactors, power plants, spacecraft. More than most other fonts, Gorton feels it’s been made by machines for machines – but in its use, it’s also the font that allows you to see so many human mistakes and imperfections.
"...Gorton also feels mistake-friendly. The strange limitations of Gorton mean that some of the transgressions of other fonts don’t apply here... Sure, there are really bad renditions that are inexcusable. But most of the time, the imperfections and bad decisions are what makes Gorton come alive. They don’t feel like a profound misunderstandings of typography, typesetting, or Gorton itself. They don’t feel like abuses or aberrations. No, they feel exactly how Gorton was supposed to be used – haphazardly, without much care, to solve a problem and walk away...
"The transgressions are not really transgressions. They all feel honest. The font and its siblings just show up to work without pretense, without ego, without even sporting a nametag. Gorton isn’t meant to be admired, celebrated, treasured. It’s meant to do some hard work and never take credit for it."
Plenty of parallels here to software work and the seasoned advice you hear about our craft. "Worse is better". "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good". It's about loving your trusty tools, imperfect as they may be.
It's a long time since I thought about doing Leroy lettering, so I was delighted to see the tiny clip of someone doing that. My thoughts on Leroy were a bit divided, I have to say.
When I was young we were first taught how to letter by hand, so when we were allowed to use Leroy, it felt a lot like cheating. I suppose it was great that perfect results were easy to achieve, but replacing skill with pattern-following was not necessarily an improvement.
To this day, I linger over old research articles that have maps and graphs that had been lettered by hand. Many papers written in the 1800s have beautifully clear line drawings of apparatus that can be much more useful than the photos included in newer papers.
Yes and: Lettering guides (sort of) allowed multiple people to maintain drawings. Even then, individual skill and technique allowed team mates to recognize each other's work.
I knew one person who had perfect hand lettering. And could mimick other people's lettering. Alas, they eschewed forgery, embracing jazz instead. (They hand lettered their own liner notes, natch.)
Source: I was a truly terrible draughtsman.
> Alas, they eschewed forgery, embracing jazz instead.
Neil Caffrey would be proud!
Leroy sets was something that would set my dad off on a rant of his struggles with a Leroy lettering set. These would come on in quiet moments of contemplation. When I entered design school his first question was regarding Leroy lettering. We were the first class to go through the curriculum with a Macintosh lab and I never used a Leroy set.
I've seen this font everywhere for my whole life and never looked into it's history. It's a fascinating account and I'm glad Marcin wrote it down.
Emotionally, what I feel when I see text using it is: "This information is serious and if you don't pay attention to what this says someone could get hurt"
There's nothing playful about it at all, which makes sense in how it was used for industrial controls, military signage, elevators, and the like.
And yet, according to the author, it has some quirks.
The idea is that the font itself is not particularly serious, but we are used to see it in serious contexts, so we make the association.
And there is also the support, when some text is engraved on metal, there is some permanence to it, some commitment. The one who wrote this really means it. It is not like a sheet of paper, or worse, a computer screen where everything can vanish at the push of a button.
I think the titles summarizes it perfectly. It means hard work. When we see this, we imagine industrial machinery and professionals, because that's where it is used. In an alternative world where Comic Sans would be used for this purpose, it would be seen as serious.
For a time I wrote code for BMS/BAS systems for many prominent commercial buildings in the NYC area, control rooms in basements and on rooftops and all the secret in-between rooms, in-between. (A fascinating job not without its exposure to asbestos, among other hazards.)
And, as someone born and raised in the south, I was thoroughly enamored with this ubiquitous font that implied the seriousness and purpose of each control implement, to include the priority of the functionality said implement represented, on countless panels I engaged with.
This deep dive was pleasing to my soul and I'm immensely thankful to the author for taking the time (and the photos) to indulge in traversing this wormhole for us.
I'm afraid the author has it backwards. This style of writing didn't start as a font from some company.
This is just how you used to be taught to do lettering in a drafting class. The straight lines and simple shapes make it easy to do lettering with pencil or a pen, which is also why all the lines are the same width and all the line caps are rounded.
Later on these turned into stencils, which let users do lettering quickly by tracing the pen inside the stencil - and then turned into fonts for use in print. But all that came later. What we have here is just lettering people learned in drafting classes, and which was later used to make stencils and templates.
> This style of writing didn't start as a font from some company.
TFA doesn't suggest that, at all. A font is a concrete instantiation of a writing style, and TFA is about the history of one such concrete instance - not the general style it's an instance of. Also the connection to drafting and lettering stencils is discussed in some detail midway through.
(Also more generally: kind of amazing to imagine reading an article of this depth, that mentions years of obsessive research and links to the author's 1200-page book on the history of typing, and thinking: "yeah this guy probably doesn't know about drafting".)
Of course I read the details on stencils and patterns in the text. But you misunderstand what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that there are many "concrete instantiations" of drafting lettering style, that all look basically the same, because they all came from the same source, and Gorton is just one of them. So what we're seeing in elevators and on plaques is not "Gorton" specifically. While in contrast we do see Helvetica specifically on NYC subway signs, Johnston in the London tube, etc.
Too fine of a point? Perhaps. And also, it doesn't take away from the quality of the essay which is a delightful romp through the history of draftman's lettering showing up in all sorts of forgotten utilitarian places.
(But I've got to ask - what's with the ad hominem at the end? We should be above that.)
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I think you're right.
I also believe that it's more likely that the font was informed by what was commonly taught as good lettering for technical drawings in that era.
For example, consider the one-stroke gothic lettering in 1883's Standard Lettering, published by the Columbia School of Drafting:
https://archive.org/details/standardletterin00claf/page/42/m...
And here's A TEXT-BOOK OF FREE-HAND LETTERING, part of the TECHNICAL DRAWING SERIES, first published in 1895:
https://archive.org/details/textbookoffreeha00daniiala/page/...
Consider the "single-stroke lettering" suggested in that texbook:
https://archive.org/details/textbookoffreeha00daniiala/page/...
https://archive.org/details/textbookoffreeha00daniiala/page/...
Also consider the model forms for pre-penciled gothic lettering:
https://archive.org/details/textbookoffreeha00daniiala/page/...
It seems that such lettering was already common when the machines were introduced to produce similar lettering.
The 3 with a flat top is a "banker's 3", an anti-forgery measure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3
Playing cards use this style of lettering. Not sure how far back that goes but I kind of doubt they all derive from Gorton's specific engraving machines.
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> And here's A TEXT-BOOK OF FREE-HAND LETTERING, part of the TECHNICAL DRAWING SERIES, first published in 1895:
Called out in the article - "but I know simple technical writing standards existed already, and likely influenced the appearance of the newfangled routing font. [photograph captioned: From a 1895 “Free-hand lettering” book by Frank T. Daniels]"
I know it was a long essay and I skimmed most of it myself. But the author definitely mentions this and even has a picture from the 1895 book you linked to.
After reading such a beautiful piece about an interesting topic and researched for hundreds of miles on end, I can rest assured that somebody on HN knows better. No doubts, no nothing... "just" knows it better.
Edit: The above might sound too harsh, sorry. You're probably right, but after reading such a beautiful piece, your reaction was really a buzzkill for me.
> The above might sound too harsh, sorry.
Perfectly accurate though.
I learned that style of writing in school (German: Normschrift). I think this is where the origins of the font lie, but having read the article I don't see how the author is wrong here.
This is just a thing they failed to emphasize — maybe — considering the credentials, because it was blaringly obvious to them.
This feels more like a detrctive story about figuring out the origins of one concrete manifestation of a font and not a text about where that family of fonts comes from.
You need to actually read the article before commenting.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42688981>
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I did...?
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Nah, I just tried and it works fine.
I think it's worth calling a font when there were likely cases of the font being transmitted, by copying from one source to another. E.G. Gorton being made by machines licensed from another company, then the output of those machines being used for lettering guides.
> The straight lines and simple shapes make it easy to do lettering with pencil or a pe
I'm guessing these letters are also easy to create with a CNC machine.
(Now that the page has loaded I see he identifies engraving machines.)
This was also pointed out in the article, but the point at which it became a physical standard, and not a lettering style, was with the Gorton engravers.
(The tail of the Q is a tell -- not a straight line, not a simple shape, but identical in lettering systems based on the engravers.)
Also, 7 usually has a straight line in technical lettering, but in Gorton is curved in a specific way.
Yeah -- my dad's lettering template had letterforms like this. As the article mentions, the Simplex characters from the Hershey set, used in CAD applications, are based on this font, probably for consistency with how drafting was traditionally done.
Thank you so much for writing this. I am a solo game developer working on a vintage-styled spacecraft simulator, tearing his hair out over the cockpit typeface problem. I recognized the classic Apollo spacecraft from the sign engraving tools I'd seen in use on the job about 40 years ago, but I couldn't figure out the name for it or identify a font that recreated it properly.
Add this to the list of wonderful things I never expected to wake up to on HN!
Came for the typography geek-out, stayed for the machine tools and ANSI Y14 refs.
Had no idea the rabbit hole went this deep. Work with CAD standards and on my to-do list is adding rendering for IFC text notes to a GL application and was wondering what default font to use. Haven't checked STEP yet, but IGES defined a special font code (FC2) for "LeRoy", so these things percolate through technology like the apocryphal Roman Cart/Railroad Gauge story!
I don’t mean this as a slight, but this has to be written by a post-millennial. As a late gen-Xer, nothing about these letterforms were unusual or “ugly” to me as they were practically ubiquitous. They were just as common and valid as standard printed forms.
I suppose it’s something like how a modern reader might react to seeing a “long s” — ſ — for the first time.
Again, this isn’t meant to insult anyone, just that it’s really fascinating to see a different generational perspective here.
The author isn't saying he finds the style unfamiliar - the entire article is about how ubiquitous it is. He's a typographer, so I think he means "ugly" in the sense of having features that modern typographers consider to be flaws - e.g. he mentions the off-balance G, being monoline, etc.
Also the author's CV lists working at google from 2006, so he's not exactly a youngster.
> I don’t mean this as a slight, but this has to be written by a post-millennial.
You could’ve looked him up. He’s not hard to find and definitely not post-millennial. Design director at Figma and previously worked at Medium, Google, and Code for America. Started his master’s in the late 90s.
https://mastodon.online/@mwichary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w
Even if he were, these types of generational comments are trite, like the “only 90s kids will get this” memes. It is naive to assume someone’s age from an opinion; the tapestry of human diversity is considerably more complex than that.
> nothing about these letterforms were unusual or “ugly” to me as they were practically ubiquitous.
Ubiquity has nothing to do with beauty. You can live with something all your life and still find it ugly. Or you can develop your taste and change your opinion. You can even have nuanced opinions. Like the author, who mentions liking the font after the initial reaction. He called this post “a love letter”.
https://hachyderm.io/@mwichary@mastodon.online/1140043864696...
Look at the length of the post—that is more research on the subject than most of us will ever do. Let’s perhaps give the benefit of the doubt that a long time professional with the passion to do this amount of research has some basis for their views which go beyond when they were born.
> like how a modern reader might react to seeing a “long s” — ſ — for the first time.
There are a plethora of reactions to that: “how strange”, “how intriguing”, “how beautiful”, … Most people don’t think every old thing they encounter for the first time is ugly.
I read that "ugly" not as a "what is this yesrerdayish mess, was life in the twntieth really that unrefined?", but as a "technically, it's breaking all the rules", a judgement from typography knowledge, not from generational identity. And I read it as an expression of surprise, because they spent so much time with that ubiquitous type in sight without ever noticing it, until one day they stopped not noticing it. No trace of generational shifts.
Marcin is definitely Gen-X. His LinkedIn says he started his master's degree in 1997. Assuming a typical education that'd put his birth year around 1974. (Note he grew up in Poland, so a different Gen-X experience than from the US.)
Perhaps what you're interpreting as generational perspective is Marcin's analytical perspective as a professional designer. He's got a very keen eye for both historical design and modern. Also I read this post as a sort of fond irony, "look at this unusual and ugly font it's actually a thing of beauty, let me show you."
If you think that's all they said about it, you didn't finish the article. That was the introduction.
I don't know if it's generational or a matter of background. For me, as the sort of person who knows exactly where to find the SCE power switch, it would be impossible to conceive of this font as ugly. So much ingenuity has been expressed, so much craftsmanship given material form, so many feats of industry and exploration and mundane utility accomplished through those shapes that I find them definitively beautiful.
If some community teaches Rules of Beauty which these characters contravene and are thereby deemed ugly, that says more about the merit of such Rules than anything else.
That ampersand, though... okay. You can have that one.
I love the casual "If that didn’t bother you before, it will bother you through the rest of this article" thrown in there
Marcin looks to be perhaps in the same age bracket as you, but with a different context for letter forms. I believe that people with skillsets that are heavily aesthetic driven - all aspects of graphic design included - see things that non designers don't. A lopsided ampersand that wouldn't raise your eyebrow could be considered laughable to a font designer, keming that doesn't bear mentioning a crime against the written form.
It’s weird to immediately assume it’s a matter of age. Do you have any basis for that?
as another gen-xer i was similarly bemused by the repeated references to the font as ugly, so it did kind of make sense to think that the issue was the author not having grown up with it quite as ubiquitous
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The lower cases letters are certainly ugly as hell, though.
Getting hugged: https://web.archive.org/web/20250214221951/https://aresluna....
The author keeps referring to the font as ugly, but I really enjoy it. The variety of signage I've seen it on (national parks, placards, industrial applications and schematics) evoke a sense of awe in me.
I also like it, in the same way I like DIN even though the author considers DIN to be better designed. I have, like the author, often seen this font when it's carved into metal, and I suppose the fact that it's on metal helps evoke that feeling of industry at its best, like a well oiled machine. I also instinctively associate it with the post-WWII period when technology seemed to be progressing faster than today and when technology was unequivocally a good thing.
Agree completely, I quite like the look of the font.
I sometimes feel who are deep in a subject sometimes are too entrenched in their world with rules and guidelines, that to me don't seem all that important to judge quality in the real world; or at least how I perceive things.
Another example also comes from the world of typography: text figures (non-lining numerals). To me they're ugly and difficult to read. Typographers like them because they fit better into the appearance of text, and that's true, but of low importance to me. Numbers are not words, and I feel they don't have to look the same. I like them to look different. I want them to be easy to read, which text figures aren't. (I actually went to the effort of creating custom CSS using Firefox's Stylus add-on to force lining numerals on all websites I visit.)
As a kid (first, maybe second grade) I wrote lining numerals at a time when kids were taught to write numerals all at x-height, for similar reasons.
> The author keeps referring to the font as ugly, but I really enjoy it.
“Beauty”, as they say, “is in the eye of the beholder”. It is not a value judgement to call something ugly, but a subjective opinion. And the author does mention they came to appreciate it:
> My first thought was: What a mess. Is this how “grotesque” fonts got their name?
> Then, the second thought: I kind of like it.
He's a font nerd. As a font nerd, it's definitely really ugly to me. But art is personal, so if you like it I'm happy for you :)
I get the "ick" when I see terrible typography. I can barely stand to look at American highway signs, it's almost physically painful how horrific they are to me:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MUTCD_Sign_Assembly_...
They did say they like it, despite it breaking so many "rules".
You'll enjoy Marcin Wichary's work. He recently travelled Australia and found instances of Gorton everywhere.
https://mastodon.online/@mwichary/111700218511462472
https://shifthappens.site/
Aresluna is Marcin :-)
LOL. Really? Presumably there’s a term of art for that.
Ah yeah his name’s right there at the top... :facepalm:
What timing! I'd just worked out* the "stickfont" or "open-path font" or "stroke font" that one of my favorite defunct games rendered with GL_LINE_STRIP, and it seems to be from the Hershey glyph set. If you haven't heard of it, it's a remarkable achievement of one individual contributor, essentially a career engineer applying vector graphic rendering to technical lettering.
http://www.whence.com/hershey-fonts
* with the help of others ^_^
If you liked this article, you might also like this one about a typeface which got tossed into the Thames river:
https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/blog/doves-type-thames-myste...
Does anyone else have cool font/typeface stories?
"In older [keyboards] – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding the key around the letter."
This makes me want an old keyboard. Amazing how hardy keyboards were back then.
you can still get them like that - the search term is "double shot" for using two molds. very popular and durable for custom keycaps.
Brass Mono [0] is a digital alternative to "Gorton".
[0]: https://github.com/fonsecapeter/brass_mono
This is a phenomenal, 6100-word love letter to possibly the world's first industrial typeface.
It was a really great article. A lot of work went into writing that and making it look good too. Peak Internet.
> I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love.
I'm relieved to find I'm not the only person who wanders around photographing the typography.
> I'm relieved to find I'm not the only person who wanders around photographing the typography.
There are N of us!
I only do it to photograph Comic Sans and Papyrus to send as jokes in a family group chat.
A bit of a meta-comment. Something about this piece hits exactly the sweet spot of length and complexity for engaging but still accessible prose, which I feel like has become rarer over time, replaced by the modern writing of instant gratification. (Whether less is being produced, or it's less prominent, or whether the other kinds have become more prominent, I can't say for sure.) I really appreciated it, independent of the subject matter.
Great essay, really enjoyed it! In particular all the beautiful photos!
Typography is a bit of mystery to me. I can somehow recognize "bad" or "strange" fonts, but often I can't put my finger on it. I was immediately put off by the font of the essay, but I kept reading, and right in the middle came the big reveal (spoiler alert):
> (This essay is typeset in a strangely-spaced version of Century put together for Selectric Composer typewriters and recreated for on-screen use. If that didn’t bother you before, it will bother you through the rest of this article.)
Well played!
This is not an ugly font. It’s incredibly legible and IMO the lack of styling is pleasing to the eye.
Yes it's highly legible at distances, but you'd never want to use it for body text. The letterforms are not well balanced -- e.g. the bowl of the 'R' is uncomfortably high, same with the top half of the 'Y'. It would be tiring to the eye to read long text in.
A lack of styling does not mean a good sense of balance.
It is ugly but highly legible. Which is just fine for the kinds of functional engraving it's meant for.
it also facilitates legibility, especially at a slight distance, as well as distortion (squishing, stretching) if necessary.
Both of which are objectively desirable qualities of a font with massive control panels as its native habitat.
> it also facilitates legibility, especially at a slight distance, as well as distortion (squishing, stretching) if necessary
Except for the terrible, terrible ‘0’, which looks more or less identical to the ‘O’. IIRC sometimes similar fonts had a strike-through 0 for legibility; I think the BBC Micro keyboard did, for instance.
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It's funny seeing Letraset described as popular through the 1960's. They were still available in most stationery stores well into the 1980's at least, and commonly used because they provided better headlines etc. for small newspapers and the like than dot matrix printers for anything you wanted to photocopy rather than sending to have typeset by a professional printer.
This blog post presents the best of Internet
WOW that took a long time to load.
https://i.imgur.com/SsH1DHt.png
Excellent article though.
Where can we download this font?
You can get Marcin Wichary’s version from https://shifthappens.site/store/
Routed Gothic is a fairly good free version https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/
The national park typeface is another pantograph router style font https://nationalparktypeface.com/
The article links to an ‘appendix’ of known digital versions, though it's easy to miss: https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/r...
https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/
Also links a number of variations.
Another font is “Simplex”, which I think is often still found in CAD products.
The ANSI Y14.2 committee has a version of the font available for download here, created by Peter Karnold.
https://cstools.asme.org/csconnect/CommitteePages.cfm?Commit...
Gorton Digital (https://github.com/drdnar/GortonDigital) seems like a faithful reproduction.
i took this
https://github.com/dakotafelder/open-gorton
But as anyone who finished the article knows, that's Gorton Modified. Check the 3, 7 and Q.
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The text is the material. The medium is the message!
So the Gorton font is as American as apple pie?
…i.e. British! :P
(Sorry couldn’t resist)
I think I have this font indelibly burned into my brain from a childhood of using 8-bit computers.
This is a beautiful article. Absolutely fascinating.
Honestly it feels like it ought to be a coffee-table book. I'd buy it.
The author wrote a whole coffee table book called “Shift Happens”. But it was a one and done kickstarter.
The author has a brilliant presentation on pixel fonts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w&list=PLXDU_eVOJT...
Sad, images stopped loading, reloaded the article half way through and site is down :(
It’s so great to read something interesting, well written, well supported and researched, and totally engrossing. This could have been a paid piece in a magazine, but was given to us all for free. Thanks for that!
A related font, Routed Gothic, linked and discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30190397
This was a great read and I especially liked the photos and how they were chose and edited so precisely for the content.
On the RTFA theme:
Gorton sold machines that solved problems.
Typography today is a celebration of self.
Nice article though, an interesting anthropological dive and perhaps the starting point for some research.
Don't miss the interactive demo about 7/8 of the way down the page ("TYPE SOMETHING"). Really clever design.
As someone who only recently retired my IBM model F, those are some hot and spicy keyboards. I wish I'd learned about his book sooner.
looking at those "3"s.. reminded me of these old digit-showing tube lamps.. but their font is slightly different, esp. the 6/9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube
I love how image-centric the blog layout is...
Too bad it needlessly hijacks the history.
Wonderful read. I loved this passage:
"Gorton is a decidedly toy-like, amateurish font deployed to for some of the most challenging type jobs: nuclear reactors, power plants, spacecraft. More than most other fonts, Gorton feels it’s been made by machines for machines – but in its use, it’s also the font that allows you to see so many human mistakes and imperfections.
"...Gorton also feels mistake-friendly. The strange limitations of Gorton mean that some of the transgressions of other fonts don’t apply here... Sure, there are really bad renditions that are inexcusable. But most of the time, the imperfections and bad decisions are what makes Gorton come alive. They don’t feel like a profound misunderstandings of typography, typesetting, or Gorton itself. They don’t feel like abuses or aberrations. No, they feel exactly how Gorton was supposed to be used – haphazardly, without much care, to solve a problem and walk away...
"The transgressions are not really transgressions. They all feel honest. The font and its siblings just show up to work without pretense, without ego, without even sporting a nametag. Gorton isn’t meant to be admired, celebrated, treasured. It’s meant to do some hard work and never take credit for it."
Plenty of parallels here to software work and the seasoned advice you hear about our craft. "Worse is better". "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good". It's about loving your trusty tools, imperfect as they may be.
Who else clicked on 'feel' in the last paragraph?
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