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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.
Make everything Comic Sans, problem solved!
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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".
your != you're
Force OCR-A on everyone now; this'll make it easier for our new robotic overlords to interpret our welcomings...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
... Font Nazi...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I don't know. What if you couldn't read a sign or a label and drove off a cliff or poisoned yourself?
At the bottom of the
This article is just trashy, nothing to see here. So, everything with an old English/German font means "Nazi" now, does it? It couldn't possibly just reflect medieval culture, or Frankenstein, or Dracula, or harken back to any number of other things more mundane in the past several hundred years. Nope, it's Hitler. I guess, if you're really that shallow.
But nothing is more telling of the actual SJ undercurrent and intent of this article than these last few paragraphs, strangely comparing Clinton's and Trump's campaign logos:
I guess even fonts offend these people now. They're losing their minds.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
no no no, its just a different font. totally correct the way it was
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I have a 'wooden eye', you can have five different fonts on a page and I wont notice it, unless it is wingdings...
love is just extroverted narcissism
My favorite font: Hack
I thought the world was moving to the use of emojis for all communication.
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"?
Anyone who has read any historical Nazi-era documents will tell you that Fraktur, the Nazi's favorite Blackletter (gothic) typeface, is headache-inducing. Fraktur is ugly. All of those embellishments make it a struggle to differentiate between letters – kind of the opposite of what written text is supposed to do.
Oh, and Arial is a terrible font.
It's not always the font - it's frequently the historical baggage that goes with it, as demonstrated by his early examples of typography associated with Nazi Germany.
Sometimes it is the font. "Sharp, pointy" fonts like some of the Nazi-era examples he used may convey sharpness, strong boundaries, or even authority in many readers. A simple font that looks like a child's less-than-perfect crayon manuscript will likely remind people of children and all of the emotions that come with that.
It's not just fonts either. Pictures that remind people of a time and place that the racist wants to glorify can have the same effect. Hitler at the Berlin Olympics, famous Nazi scientists being given world-class awards, etc. do the trick.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
There was a recent article in the Economist about publishing in the Arab World. With the turmoil in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, Arabic publishing is dying. In Beirut bookstores, 40% of the books are in English, 40% in French, and only 20% in Arabic. Part of this is because Arabic is designed to be written by hand, and not printed. The shape of individual "letters" depends on the preceding and following "letters", much like English cursive, except even worse.
Chiropractors think all your ails are due to spinal problems, journalists think everyone uses Apple products, and graphic designers think which font used is very important.
I noticed a lot of "parodies" of Trump's hat around. And almost exclusively from people that would not be admirers. When I saw this "MAKE AMERICA RAGE AGAIN" cap, pretty much straightforward and unironic in its copying, I thought Trump's messaging might be on point.
There was even a girl attacked because her "make bitcoin great again" cap was apparently mistaken for the real deal.
Dark Reflection
Honestly, in a time when UI "designers" insist that text be just a shade or two grayer than a light gray background, you're lucky to make it out at all.
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.
"I'm with Her" struck me as having something of a feminist conceit to it, as if you were a Hillary supporter just because she was a woman and not because of her ideas.
Handwriting? What's that?
BTW, SIL (an international missionary organization that does Bible translation) has produced many free fonts (you may even have heard of the "SIL Font License", which some other free fonts use). Because Bible translation is usually done for pre-literate or newly literate cultures, the Andika font (https://www.sil-lead.org/blog/2013/8/18/andika). I don't know how it compares with Comic Sans in your list of desiderata, though.
For the record, SIL produces a wide variety of other fonts, including Cyrillic, Greek and fonts for other non-Roman scripts (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php). They're Beta testing a Nasta'liq font--if you know anything about Nasta'liq, you probably know that it's one of the hardest styles in the world to typeset. SIL (through a former member, Jonathan Kew) is also the creator of XeTeX (now maintained by others).
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...)
Or, maybe native Arabic speakers just prefer to read in French?
This is one of the points made in the cited Economist article. Books written in Arabic mostly use a formal and archaic version of the language, that is so different from the informal vernacular that it is almost like a foreign language. Many parents do indeed think that their children's time is better spent learning French (in Lebanon, Algeria and Morocco) or English (everywhere else).
As fewer people learn formal Arabic, fewer Arabic books are published, which reduces the incentive to learn to read it even more. So it is in a death spiral.
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.
"Correct" has a cognate of "right" as it's root. They both imply value judgements, be they alethic (the right thing to believe, i.e. truth) or deontic (the right thing to do, i.e. good). And FWIW, both of those kinds of judgement can be either "black & white" or "shades of grey".
("Right" as in the direction comes from that same root too; your "right hand" is literally your "good hand". All of them come from an even older sense still found in "right angle", a sense meaning "straight", which in turn also comes from the same root. A bunch of other roots share this same pattern: social norms vs surface normals, orthogonal vs orthodox, a ruler as in a king vs a ruler as in a straight edge, etc. ["Regal" and "royal" and other words relating to kings come from the same root too]. And "regular" and "normal" both originally meant right/normative/correct long before they meant common/typical/average).
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This is a solved problem. Unicode defines 5 code points for each Arabic letter, one for each specific form (initial, medial, final, isolated) and one general form. Software that supports Arabic takes the general form as input, and uses a simple algorithm to determine which of the 4 specific forms has to be used depending on where in a word the letter occurs.
Lots of software supports Arabic (I've used Word and InDesign to create cursive Arabic and Farsi).
One comment I got from Arabic translators is that the font matters: Arial Unicode MS contains all the Arabic glyphs, but they are rendered as geometric shapes: perfect constant-radius arcs, vertical lines. This looks alien to them.
They much preferred SeriaArabic, a font that looks more like handwriting (with e.g. subtle variations in line thickness, not-quite-vertical lines, variable-radius arcs).
Comic Sans is wonderful. Three reasons.
First, as to its general appearance, it's fun and playful, and (duh) highly reminiscent of comics, which can truly be an art form. This would be enough, but also:
Second, the letters are highly distinct from one another, so it's quick to comprehend. That actually makes it a good idea to use.
Third, it annoys the heck out of fashionistas, and that just makes me smile. Nothing makes the self-important highlight their phony-balony more than a completely unimportant issue where they've stupidly jumped on the bandwagon and now don't know how to get off.
To try and justify their position, they make up utter nonsense like "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." That's not an analysis; that's pompous, hyperventilating argle-blargle.
The danger is in the ideas expressed. The ideas are carried by recognition: Not which recognizable symbols, just the recognition of an association between the symbol and the idea. It doesn't matter if the symbol is a swastika, Ye Olde Englife Font, or a happy puppy. If the idea is "let's gas anyone we don't like", there is your problem. Not the stupid font.
The "blame the font" stupidity is the same kind of thinking that says "guns are the problem." No, guns aren't the problem. The problem is that society is sick, specifically because education has failed to socialize the population well enough, and if you take away guns (or fonts, etc.) you will not have solved the problem, you're just moving the goalposts. In a circle.
To solve a problem you have to address it at its source. Fonts (guns, drugs, sex, etc.) are not the source. That should be obvious if you just rub a couple of wet brain cells together for a second or two. If you attack the symptoms, you're just engaging in a round of whack-a-mole. The moles are still there. Your satisfaction that your latest particular mole is down is not in any way indicative that a solution has been found. You want to solve the mole problem, you need to blow up the machine that's popping them up.
To belabor the point even further, if all text was written in a nice, safe font with round edges and well-behaved descenders, these ideas would still exist, still flourish, and would still be communicated just as well. Ergo: fonts are not where a smart person would look for problems. Because they aren't the problem.
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