[dberlow]

Wow, thanks for all your comments. I even clicked on the Drag sign myself. We can make it that way too.

Ugliness vs Beauty, is a subjective judgement, and if one person, or 1,000 thinks it either way, the type designer is usually trying to please just one person.

In this case, the designer is trying to please a range of tastes, in both print and animation, from subtle stroking of the style, barely perceptible like the sound your fingers make parting to drop a pin, which is one whole tradition in type use, to making your eyes bleed, the range of which variations are all about, and has been for centuries.

We'd certainly appreciate the Hacker News hackers' perspective on Use! User Interfaces! CSS, and how applications should continue to support variations, in more sensible ways.

You can do that here, and also there are several other places you can sound in if you start hacking around. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and many others will be offering pretty fonts soon. I felt it'd be good to make sure to get people's eyes to bleed first, to open them up. Thanks for that confirmation.

[j-pb]

Font is about readability. You can use it to convey emotion and style as well but readability must come first. It takes carefull tuning to achieve that in a stylistic font and I doubt it is possible at all in a font like this. The kerning in this thing is just painful. Additionally the rendering engine has to be even more complex then that stuff already is.

This entire thing is an anti feature, it looks worse and is less readable, makes the implementation of stuff harder, and nobody needs it, but hey some people can feel smug.

[webmaven]

> but readability must come first.

Not so. Typefaces are (as with most two dimensional design) about communication. Legibility is merely the most straightforward means by which a typeface enables communication (of the text), but there are many other things that can be communicated (emotions, age, time, place, personality, intellect, attitude, sanity, ideology, and on and on).

Sure this typeface has some pretty extreme variations, and the interface certainly encourages the use of the entire gamut, but nothing says that you can't be subtle. Remember when drop-shadows were new and everything looked like it was levitating at least a half-inch off the background? Ignoring for the moment the "flat design" interregnum, we've used dropshadows ever since, but over time in a much more restrained way.

Anyway, this particular typeface is clearly meant as an eye-catching demo of the technology, and even a lighter touch still leaves you with an all-caps display font. Less overt and garish variations (along the lines of the older Multiple Master fonts) are possible and are clearly in the works: https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-fonts...

[webmaven]

dberlow, I am finding this really interesting (as well as your essay[0] on the work-in-progress that is Amstelvar[1]).

What tools are you using for the design process? Anything like Metapolator[2]?

Personally, I feel that the critiques here concerning "ugliness" are overblown, as will most who recall the work of designers such as David Carson[3] and publications like Emigre[4]. It actually isn't that hard to find combinations that "work" as a display typeface, although I would probably want to tweak them manually a bit before use.

BTW, if David Jonathan Ross and Alexandre Saumier Demers are taking feature requests for the Decovar demo page, it would be nice if the URL reflected the skeleton/terminal combination currently on the screen (and it was bookmark-able).

[0] https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-fonts...

[1] https://github.com/TypeNetwork/fb-Amstelvar

[2] https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer...

[4] http://www.emigre.com/EMagView.php

[davelab6]

The fonts are made with freshly written extensions to the RoboFont editor; notably, the original source drawings are made in quadratic bezier splines, not the typical cubic ones.

Metapolator (a project I co-founded) uses Hobby splines and has not been used so far to develop Variable Fonts AFAIK.

I filed an issue for your nice suggestion, https://github.com/TypeNetwork/fb-Decovar/issues/6

[tyingq]

>Ugliness vs Beauty, is a subjective judgement

To some degree. I can't imagine, though, how this is useful: http://imgur.com/a/82c9w :)

[davelab6]

I could see that being used in an advertisement where it taking a moment to figure out the text is intended

[j-pb]

Rule 1 of advertisement. If your customer can't understand the message while flicking through a magazine, skimming through webpages or driving past a sign nobody will buy your stuff. Most buy desicions are even made unconciously. I see a lot of artsy advertisement and packaging from people fresh out of school amd that stuff simply wouldn't fly in the real world.

[davelab6]

That's a narrow definition of effective advertising. Consider https://www.google.com/search?q=equation+billboard+ad&tbm=is...