Comment by pimlottc
9 months ago
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
Ubiquity has nothing to do with beauty. It is perfectly possible for an individual with taste to find something they deal with frequently to be ugly. Especially if they find a flaw early on and it never goes away.
The lower cases letters are certainly ugly as hell, though.