Slashdot Mirror
How Fonts Are Fueling the Culture Wars (backchannel.com)
Reader mirandakatz writes: Typography is having a bit of a moment: Suddenly, tons of people who don't work in design have all sorts of opinions about it, and are taking every opportunity to point out poor font choices and smaller design elements. But they're missing the bigger picture. As Medium designer Ben Hersh writes at Backchannel, typography isn't just catchy visuals: It can also be dangerous. As Hersh writes, 'Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.' Don't believe him? He's got ample visual examples to prove it.
I thought the article was going to be about how a capital "I" and a lowercase "L" look the same in some fonts and really messes up your code. I've had it happen before... Il
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
My favorite font: Hack
It was supposed to represent "moving forward". The irony of it pointing to the right wasn't lost on Bernie supporters. It also looked like a house that fell over between the Twin Towers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's not funny, just pretentious.
Comic Sans has an actual use in the classroom for young readers and writers. It is the only font that has all of the following features at the same time:
a. It's widely available, installed on pretty much any computer some random Word or PowerPoint file might find itself.
b. The lower case "a" has a single loop and a small tail, the way it's usually taught for handwriting.
c. The lower case "g" has a single loop and a hook, the way it's usually taught for handwriting.
d. The "I" and "l" characters are easily distinguished (see what I did there?).
e. The "U" and "u" characters are easily distinguished.
I don't know what to say about Trump's "logo" other than it was just a generic slogan, but maybe that said "genuine" to some people.
I liked Trump's slogan because it actually told you to do something. It immediately involves the listener in the process. You can respond by agreeing ("I would like to help Make America Great Again"), or by disagreeing ("I don't want to make America great again") or by rejecting the premise ("America already is/never was great"). But it contained a call to action that forces one to engage. Compare this to other slogans:
Clinton: "I'm With Her." There's no direct call to action there. There's no goal. There's no evaluation of the current situation or a possible future. It's empty.
Jill Stein: "It's in our hands." No shit. There's nothing to really disagree with there, but also nothing for you to do. There is no engagement.
Marco Rubio: "A New American Century." What the fuck does that mean, Marco? What am I supposed to do with the new American century?
Ted Cruz: "Reigniting the Promise of America." Well that sounds nice, but there's nothing to engage me or call me to action. Also it's passive. The "promise of America" sounds like asking what my country can do for me, not what I can do for my country.
Carly Fiorina: "New Possibilities. Real Leadership." Now that's generic and meaningless.
Jeb Bush: "Jeb!" Man, fuck you Jeb. Low energy.
So, I'd say Trump's slogan was far less generic than anybody else's, and at least it said something, and required the listener to evaluate the call to action and accept or reject it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
That's what the early Arabic fonts did, but those who know Arabic well (I don't) tell me it didn't look good. And that's the Naskh style, which Arabic and many other languages that use Perso-Arabic script use. There's also the Nasta'liq style, which is still more calligraphic, and much harder to encode as a font. Urdu and Punjabi use Nasta'liq, and maybe others as well. (Persian used to.) Indeed, it wasn't long ago (a decade?) that some Urdu newspapers were written out by calligraphers before being printed by photo-offset. (I hope I have my terms right...)
You see a lot of Blackletter neo-Gothic ... in Gang Tattoos. Most people associate the Blackletter fonts (though they don't know the name) with Latino Gangs like MS-13, Mexican Mafia, and the like from the pictures of tattooed criminal defendants in the media or the various gang members it is simply impossible not to meet in daily life in Southern California with heavy, heavy Blackletter tats.
Indeed Blackletter tats like the ones pictured here:'
http://latinoprisongangs.blogspot.com/2010/04/mexicanhispanic-gang-tattoos.html
Are found with non-gang meanings often among Working Class Latinos. Most of whom have barely heard of Hitler and certainly are neither neo-Nazis or remotely White (instead being very Indio/Mestizo).
So the article is full of garbage. There is a growing interest in abandoned, and revived, "heritage" fonts from Poland, England, France, etc. as people get tired of Diversidystopia Globalism and want to celebrate their distinctiveness and rebel against international corporate sameness. Hillary's soul-less corporate logo was arguably worse and more muddled than Trump's short and direct message. Hillary's design had all the passion of a corporate mission statement and all the romance and intrigue of HR Mandatory Diversity Workshop.
Most fonts today coming from the corporate sphere are fairly totalitarian, it was no accident that the Village in "the Prisoner" used a derivative of Albertus to show the soft face of a Western tyranny as oppressive as the Eastern one. The endless droning of the Corporate Managerial class and their constant virtue signaling is tiresome.
Local Arab leaders like Nasser modernized Arabic fonts for printing half a century ago -- and Muslims rebelled. Ataturk modernized the Turkish fonts for Western printing and reading nearly a century ago -- and Muslim Turks rebelled. Heck Muslim mobs in Cairo, Alexandria, and Istanbul were smashing up printing presses and burning books and newspapers in the 1830s. Muslim just HATE literacy, freedom of expression, pretty much anything that is rooted in modernity and would rather live in filth and retain their Sixth Century tribal values than give some of it up to live prosperity. The Japanese and Chinese writing system is far more complex and demanding than Arabic and they managed just fine with first print and then computers. More managerial class virtue signaling -- Muslims are backward and violent because they embrace a total way of life they like -- they want to live like a character in Game of Thrones and are unhappy when people try to move them into an Episode of Friends. Fonts have nothing to do with it save Virtue Signaling.