Comment by oktwtf
6 days ago
Typography nerds are some of my favourite nerds.
Font specimen pages are so often screaming with design language and intention, they push and prod to evoke and present.
Maybe the secret has something to do with the lack of priority to the actual content; just present the font gosh-darn!
Looks nicely executed within the confines of the inspiration. very cool
Andrew Glassner's Notebook: Recreational Computer Graphics is a really neat book (I especially like the tiles that can add numbers). The author's site is https://glassner.com/computer-graphics/
Chapter 6 in the book ( https://archive.org/details/andrewglassnersn0000glas/page/98... ) Signs of Significance starts with 7 segment displays to the 14 segment and 5x7...
He then goes on to the 66 segment Vienna underground font and an 83 segment font he saw in an elevator at a Siggraph conference in Orlando ... and then concludes with his own 55 element mosaic.
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Also, Adam Savage's Tested - https://youtu.be/eKCcqlJnZcA (3 days ago) looking at https://www.kellianderson.com/books/alphabetinmotion.html
At 7:00 into the video is C & D pages looking at the modularity of a font.
(the section "U & V" about 3/4 down the page has the modular components for Kombinations-Schrift https://www.moma.org/collection/works/2724 which was also looked at at 22:00 into the video.
Someone made a JavaScript version of Glassner's 55 segment design along with a dozen others that's fun to play with:
https://aresluna.org/segmented-type/
The six segment one... if you get going with it, it's not too difficult to read. There are some odd ones there, but it's surprisingly readable (some are easier than some of the seven segment letterforms).
This is soooo cool! Thanks for sharing.
> Typography nerds are some of my favourite nerds.
A very detailed summary for another font (by the creator of the font), including ancient materials as well: https://mass-driver.com/article/md-nichrome-on-spacing-and-s...
Many of these seem to be on HN if you come to think about it as every post about fonts skyrockets immediately in popularity. Or STEM people are generally inclined to adoration of nice looking glyphs...
Yes! I've always been interested in seeing what arcana and niches (like fonts) fairly predictably rise to the top here, kind of a Bizarro World third rail (not including AI and cryptocurrency, which seem to have/had their own subworlds).
In no particular order, after nearly 10 years of paying attention (the past five or so multiple times daily):
fonts
autism/ADHD
diet supplements/vitamins
surveillance and privacy
outages (e.g. Cloudflare)
Apple hardware/software (new)