[charliecurran]

This is one of those times where as a working creative that frequently reads Hacker News I straight up face palm.

I have to imagine a lot of these commenters would say the same in regards to any sort of subjective artistic choice that isn't purely optimized for efficiency.

I would like to leave you with a quote by Briano Eno from a really good lecture he gave several years ago that I hope can provide a jumping off point for alternate ways to think about style, and why I think y'all are asking the wrong questions.

"So the first question is, why is any of that important? Why do we do it? And notice it’s not only us relatively wealthy people, in terms of global wealth, who are doing it - it’s everybody that we know of. Every human group we know of is spending a lot of their time – in fact almost all of their surplus time and energy – is spent in the act of stylising things and enjoying other people’s stylisations of things. So my question is, what is it for? In fact, my friend Danny Hillus, who’s a scientist, was asked by a well-known science website, along with about 300 other scientists, he was asked what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? A lot of the other people replied with things about the cosmological constant and Ryman’s Hypothesis and all these very complicated things. And his question was very simple: he said why do we like music? And if you start thinking about that, that is really one of the most mysterious things you can imagine. Why do we even have an interest in music? Why do we have preferences? Why do we like this song better than that one? Why do we like this Beethoven sonata better than that Beethoven sonata? Why do we like this performance of that same sonata better than that other performance? We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say." - Brian Eno

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/bbc-music-jo...

[shaan7]

Actually the content of the article makes this comment slightly unwarranted (unless I'm misreading the tone). The author has described, quite well, on how typography isn't about just subjective artistic choice but largely its functional implications. Oh and there is a reason why a lot of engineering folks have critical opinions about this. Some of us have worked with designers in the past that simply do not take the effort to explain why a certain design choice was made (even though they put a painful amount of thought into the process). At my office, it took our engineering and design team a lot of time to finally figure out what was missing. Now our discussions have designers going into details of choices which makes it so clear that most of them aren't subjective at all (some are, and that is fine).

[crispyambulance]

I think designers have the very challenging job of "threading the needle" between business considerations and aesthetics. Both can be critical depending on the mission.

Unfortunately, "subjective" is often used as a dirty word especially around here where some folks even claim to prefer html stripped of all styling. As you pointed out, there is a lot of thought and sweat that goes into the creation of a typeface. The artistic aspects deserve respect and attention not just from the practitioners but also from their users.

I think it's actually a good thing that there's a proliferation of typefaces. If a large company, wanting to avoid millions of dollars in fees to license a typeface, can pay a designer to create a new one that's a good thing. Even if the typeface is created for reasons of brand vanity, it puts someone to work and helps to further the development of typography in general.

[falcolas]

> The artistic aspects deserve respect and attention not just from the practitioners but also from their users.

As a developer and sysadmin: Let me know how that works for you. End users will rarely if ever recognize your contributions; will only really notice your contribution when it doesn't work.

Sorry.

[crispyambulance]

    > Sorry.

Thanks, but no need for the phony apology.

Typefaces, like other graphic elements, might not be felt to the point of the reader explicitly "recognizing" these contributions. Their impact is real albeit subtle. Designers are aware of that but still work really hard anyway.

[lobotryas]

How can you demonstrate or prove that the impact is “real”?

[simonh]

There’s a huge amount of research into this sort of thing funded by advertisers and marketers.

[reaperducer]

Add a CSS override to someone's browser that forces web sites to display in Comic Sans.

[bunderbunder]

Assuming (with a tip of the hat to misterbwong) that you want to demonstrate the impact is real by measuring it, A/B testing would be one of the more popular ways to do it nowadays. The kinds of questions you can ask with it are somewhat limited, so you've got to be worried about the trap of searching where the light is better. But it is so very cheap and easy.

If you have more resources and need to ask questions A/B testing doesn't handle well, you can also do it with good old-fashioned surveying. Take (say) a few hundred people sampled as representatively as possible from your target market. Randomly show half of them a version of the design that uses one typeface, and the other half a version that uses another. Ask them to rate how well they liked the design. See if there's a difference. Or ask them to recall things they saw, and see if there's a difference.

[misterbwong]

I think you're confusing real with measurable.

[H1Supreme]

I worked in graphic design before I made my way into programming full time. My first job was building desktop apps with a team of programmers with very little design sensibilities. As such, there was lots of plain grey, haphazard interfaces. While they functioned fine, they left nearly everything to be desired aesthetically.

I received immediate, positive feedback on my initial contributions. Applying basic design to otherwise "undesigned" interfaces, made a big difference to our users.

While that may be an extreme example, it does highlight the need for design. Whether or not someone can "respect" it, as the OP suggests, is debatable. But, the effectiveness of something designed well, isn't.

[Consultant32452]

When I think of design I think of two very different definitions. The first is as you describe, putting some basic aesthetics and usability on an otherwise "undesigned" page/app/etc. The other definition is how I worked on a team that spent over a week rebuilding buttons because the designer didn't like the way native buttons worked in browsers.

When someone complains about how superfluous "design" is, I always assume they mean the latter definition. But I could be wrong.

[walljm]

agreed. the opportunity for huge gains are only available when the starting point is really bad, so then the change is huge and thus obviously recognizable. when you're already operating at near the top of the game, differences are very small. but those small differences are what make the difference between really good and insanely great. and its worth striving for that.

[lobotryas]

The biggest problem is that after this initial, high value work is done the designers are still on the payroll and they still need to demonstrate their value/be doing something. That’s how you get un-necessary UI redesigns and, arguably, custom typefaces.

IMHO, designers just don’t know when to stop.

[dceddia]

I think the same could be said of developers. Or, maybe in both cases, it's the companies that don't know when to stop.

As a developer, and maybe more relevant here, a user of software, it's kind of surprising how development efforts often continue well past the point of shipping something useful. Now, I'm not arguing that this applies to every software product, or that people should stop at the bare minimum like "welp, we shipped v1, let's pack it up everyone."

But this underlying belief that things must be continually improved is very pervasive in software and even moreso in open source. ("Last commit was 6 months ago? This project is obviously dead!")

I don't know that anything can or should be done to "fix" this, but it's an interesting observation. Think about it next time there's an "upgrade" that breaks something or changes a workflow you liked. Why did that happen?

[dcow]

I don’t think your comment is fair mostly because the sysadmin-developer rarely gets to inject aesthetics into their work. When they do, it’s not targeted at end users it’s targeted at other developers.

However let me offer a counter anecdote: I love the BSD man pages. Do I think BSD is objectively better than other systems? That’s debatable. But I sure do appreciate the meticulous care with which the BSD manual is maintained. I don’t remember names off the top of my head but I always read the authors section of a BSD man page.

If you’re really seeking end user appreciation I’d suggest you try your hand in a relatively more creative context, like writing a user interface. The amount that people care matters enough that a program with fewer features, or that is less stable, or inferior on an “objective” technical level, but with a snazzier, more refined, UI will often be preferred to a technically superior one by users.

[unethical_ban]

As a sysadmin and scripter/micro-framework-user: Assuming a UI's design doesn't get in the way of its function, an attractive UI is much more enjoyable to work with than an ugly one.

[msla]

> Unfortunately, "subjective" is often used as a dirty word especially around here where some folks even claim to prefer html stripped of all styling.

Because so many other things designers come up with are less readable and less usable in general, even as they protest that their designs have manifold improvements over the previous status quo and that we're just too philistine to see them.

I appreciate good styling, I merely disagree that gray text on a gray background with 80% of the screen eaten up by margins qualifies as such.

[PMan74]

> Actually the content of the article makes this comment slightly unwarranted

I don't think his/her frustration was with the article, rather with some of the HN comments on the article.

[username3]

What was missing?

[theoh]

This isn't really about some kind of caricature of functionalism that HN commenters subscribe to. It's clear that many tech companies have been commissioning fonts they don't really need, and those fonts are often very similar.

See this tweet and the responses: https://twitter.com/kodform/status/996447044100386816?s=19

Digital fonts changed the economics of typeface production. There's a glut of independent typeface designers now, creating fonts that I suppose count as valid self-expression. Far more typefaces are being created than are actually needed. It's as if creating a typeface is like performing music; it was one thing for many performers each to play live to a small audience, it's something totally different when all their recordings are available in the same marketplace. The best performances will obviously get a large share of the market, and recordings that take a lot of resources to produce (like a corporate typeface) will exist in a different category to the homemade ones.

As I see it, most of these corporate typefaces lack authenticity. They're typically not a meaningful part of corporate design strategy. It is a cosmetic activity. The exception is those which cover larger that unusual chunks of Unicode.

[ardy42]

> This isn't really about some kind of caricature of functionalism that HN commenters subscribe to. It's clear that many tech companies have been commissioning fonts they don't really need, and those fonts are often very similar.

*And often functionally inferior to the standard fonts they're aesthetically derivative of, because they were hinted poorly to save development costs.

[montalbano]

On why science is 'important', I would add this Poincaré quote:

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful."

I definitely see beauty in music, science, typefaces and many other aspects of the universe.

[mbesto]

> I hope can provide a jumping off point for alternate ways to think about style, and why I think y'all are asking the wrong questions.

Except that quote has nothing to do with business decision making around aesthetics. It's about arts & entertainment and an existential pondering about human thirst for creativity. For profit software (which is the topic we're talking about here) is about providing a solution to a real world problem.

That being said there is some research around aesthetics from a usability perspective: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aesthetic-usability-effect/

    Summary: Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can prevent issue discovery during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as well as listening to what they say.

[jimmaswell]

Simple hypothesis re: music: our evolutionary advantage was our better brains that let us use pattern matching to understand things, so the brain evolved to reward pattern matching, and listening to music presents it with an easy exercise in pattern matching by predicting when the chorus will repeat, expecting chord progressions to be resolved, etc.

[dotancohen]

Your post really hits the mark for me. One of my favorite compositions is Beethoven's fifth, and I sometimes find myself identifying a new motif or combination of motifs in that work, even after decades of listening to it. It is a very rich piece, and the motifs develop slowly, simple at first but getting more complex in time. Not more complex motifs, mind you, but the same motif gains a few notes here and there, and sometimes shifts slightly. Very rewarding to find new ones, and only by reading your post do I discover that that piece challenges me actively, as opposed to more passive music.

The Wall and The Downward Spiral have similar elements of challenge, now that I think of it.

[gowld]

A custom typeface isn't just "style". It's someone else messing with how my documents look.

Why we like music is pretty well studied.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/04...

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection_in_humans#Geo...

[SilasX]

Art is good, therefore the choice of this vs that typeface is life-or-death? That doesn't follow, I'm afraid, and the quote is very uneconomical with words relative to the point its making.

[113]

"And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say."

That's exactly what the quote says. You're being very uncharitable with your interpretation.

[SilasX]

Either way, it's not thing that would come close to justifying the extreme importance these tech companies are placing on it.

If you disagree, can you articulate the point in your own words so that others can see the subtlety it's missing?

The point of clear communication is so that someone can understand your argument without having to squint and struggle.

Edit: To which I would add, the point of quoting someone else's thoughts is because they ostensibly communicate it better than you yourself can. I think this quote fails that.

[everdrive]

We like music because it's an abstraction of the different sounds, tones, and emotions in voice. Dogs might as well have "smell symphonies."

[msla]

Yes, it's all so stylized that all these bold new bespoke fonts... all look the same.