
Fonts for Complex Data - privong
https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-complex-data
======
mmjaa
Shades of FF Chartwell, which is one of those amazing things you just think to
yourself "well, this is going to take over the world of design and GUI's and
so on", only .. for some reason, it doesn't:

[https://typographica.org/typeface-
reviews/chartwell/](https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/)

"FF Chartwell is a set of three fonts* that together create a remarkable set
of tools for creating bar, line, and pie charts. It uses OpenType ligatures to
perform its magic – a series of numbers can be transformed into clean,
perfectly rendered graphs, as you type."

Having used Chartwell for a few projects, I'm fairly convinced that this
ligature trick is the way _all_ GUI's should be done. In fact I've got this
hypothesis going, that every GUI toolkit/method is eventually just going to
re-invent ligatures and type... ;)

~~~
taeric
Why? That seemed a trick in search of a problem. I mean, I get having a small
dsl for describing charts. That is why we have quite a plethora of them. They
usually have more complexity than you'd hope, because it is a complex problem.

But spark lines, you might protest. Of ridiculous niche value and really need
to be super high resolution. The point is to pack a ton of density. If you are
just showing a few numbers, consider just showing the numbers.

And if you haven't used the likes of metapost, graphviz, etc., Give them a
try.

~~~
mmjaa
Yeah, I'm quite familiar with these toolkits. (Been at it 30 years, yo.)

The thing about the ligature trick, and fonts in general, and more
specifically the packing of known functional GUI elements into a broader
ligature description, is that its human readable/comprehendible without also
requiring a great deal of 'programming'. Well, in fact Chartwell "is"
programming, or at least coding (not Turing..) of information in a
reproducible way - and the fact that we use the language of glyphs as a GUI
metaphor, is also appealing. My affinity for this approach is that it is tied
to human symbol-making in an intrinsic, self-describing way; whereas a
technical GUI system might consists of a multi-variate collection of
abstractions, putting it all into glyphs and ligatures ties it into our most
basic of operational agilities, reading and writing.

Not, compiling, hacking, code, transmogrifying, mutating, extending,
abstraction, tool-pushing, etc., but rather "describe this in glyphs/ligatures
like every language ever, or GTFO>.."

I mean, WIMP has its thing, and touch and mobile too, but I do wonder if there
isn't something to a pure graphemes and symbols based mode of interaction...
which I would argue is where we are heading, with our multiple-gigabyte OS
updates, anyway .. when we could nevertheless be doing it in <128k.

~~~
taeric
I think you are seriously abusing "describe this in glyphs/ligatures". In
particular, there is a reason "a picture is worth a thousand words." :)

Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use
for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the
complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true
language" that can do everything.

~~~
mmjaa
Oh, no question there is abuse going on here - this thought experiment is
really reaching and extending beyond a certain horizon, which may or may not
be idiotic. ;)

Perhaps you're familiar with the wonderful and super-crazy TempleOS? There are
some great things about the way the UI is expressed there ..

>Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use
for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the
complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true
language" that can do everything.

Certainly a valid concern, and I acknowledge your conservatism, but I think
you might want to look at the cyclomatic complexity of the work required to
splash a modern GUI up on the screen, and compare it with the cyclomatic
complexity required to render a human-readable string of glyphs. There is a
lot of opportunity to optimise these processes - and I would wager that having
a font full of glyphs required to construct a UI paradigm, having those
primitive elements processed by the OS in a simple way, and giving those
elements to the end-user (who admittedly would need to learn something new for
it to be productive), may indeed produced a "simpler" interaction method for
future users. Yes, there is a certain fallacy to the "one true language"
approach - but if you pay careful attention, you'll notice that the OS's of
most common use in the last 10 years are on that road, anyway.

Break this out of the box a little, lets move from glyph/grapheme/font
territory - what if the entire OS was instead expressed with SVG files? I
think this is a viable thought experiment, personally.

~~~
taeric
Most modern gui toolkits bother me in ways that I can't adequately express.
All the more so because most fallback to thinking CSS is the answer. Often
completely ignoring what you can easily accomplish if you are willing to use
absolute positioning, oddly enough!

Seriously, I don't think CSS is the worst answer. However, trying to get
everything to work with some default flow behavior is borderline insanity.
More, it is completely unnecessary. My favorite example lately has been
[http://taeric.github.io/cube-
permutations-1.html](http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html) for how
you can layout using absolute positioning perfectly fine. (I similarly did
sudoku with minimal effort using similar markup.)

But the worst sin is the sheer instability of what we are building as our
foundation. The box and glue methods of TeX might not be the most intuitive
method, nor the most powerful. However, it is nice that they have been stable.
And not just in the "doesn't crash" sense of the word. In the, "I would feel
comfortable building on top of it" sense.

So, let me be clear that I'm skeptical, but I would be delighted to be proved
wrong.

~~~
mmjaa
I've been into GUI's and so on since before the birth of the web, and I've
always had this deep discomfort with where we have arrived here and now,
today. The Web and its UI is such a disastrous, convoluted mess of
abstractions and significance and conceptual complexity - yet, it works "well
enough" that a majority of the world can deal with it.

But this doesn't mean we can't think outside the box. Yes, I concur - TeX's
box and glue is another kettle of fish - but then so too are things like
Box2D's physics forces and contact mechanisms, which I personally believe,
were it integrated into a forward-thinking GUI framework, would open the doors
to very interesting and versatile interfaces - as has been demonstrated by its
application towards making those most intuitive interfaces of all times,
games. I would love to be able to say "[ the context of this independent
element has a gravity of -1. ]", and then watch as my sentence floats away to
the top of the screen, to function as a daily "Todo list" which, once I press
the '.' period at the end of the ToDo item, then sets the gravity to 1, and
the whole thing lands at the bottom of the screen, away from my attention.
There are many abstractions like this out there which could be applied to
human/computer interaction - we've selected a set of words, symbols, concepts
that are granted us by the designers of modern OS's, but I truly believe that
the effort of producing interaction symbology is far, far from where it could
be. As do many other people of course
([http://worrydream.com](http://worrydream.com)) .. there seems to be a
plethora of views about this. Almost as many views, as symbols in the world
there are to be read ...

------
saintPirelli
There is actually regulation in the EU (and I suppose other countries) that
requires a minimum height of the letters in the ingredient list. The wider
typeface would not satisfy these regulations.

[http://www.foodlabels.co.uk/food_information_regulations_201...](http://www.foodlabels.co.uk/food_information_regulations_2014.html)

~~~
tcfunk
I love examples of laws like this which, while well intentioned, actually do
harm to their own objective.

~~~
saintPirelli
I work in public pointless bureaucracy. Believe me there are more of those
than laws that work as intended.

------
firmgently
Wow their side menu (Apps, Branding, Choosing Fonts) has such horribly low
contrast (1.5 - 2, depending on where you measure the text colour; it's small
type so due to antialiasing there isn't really a single predominant colour
when you zoom in to a screen grab) it's almost unreadable.

Legibility is the most important part of typography. I'm not suggesting this
should detract from the article as the writer is probably not the person who
made that design decision (EDIT: I think the article's very good actually),
but it's pretty weak coming from a site called typography.com.

~~~
Hnrobert42
How do you measure the contrast? With a tool or by eye? Whst is considered an
acceptable amount?

~~~
sbr464
I've been using an app called Contrast for a while now, it's really
convenient.

[https://usecontrast.com/](https://usecontrast.com/)

If anyone ends up using it, be sure to check the support page, there are some
useful power tips

[https://usecontrast.com/support](https://usecontrast.com/support)

------
z3t4
Most dash-boards are not that useful, but damn they sell, so go with as much
eye-candy as possible. Use futuristic, 3d, moving, real time graphs, etc. If
it's something serious though, concentrate on formatting and spacing, and pick
a boring simple font. Make it neat and stylish, but don't add distractions.
Give focus on the content and what is important. Use spacing instead of
contrast.

------
baldfat
Legal status of fonts and typefaces is INSANE. The cost of some of these fonts
in $199
[https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview/](https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview/)
And well you can kind of have a strange position in copyright law in the US
and internationally.

The cost of these fonts are up in the hundreds of dollars. Yet in US we have a
mixed bag. Officially it is:

> Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of
> Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer). The idea
> that typefaces (rather than fonts, which are computer software) cannot be
> copyrighted in the United States is black letter law. 37 C.F.R. § 202.1(e).
> Under U.S. law, typefaces and their letter forms or glyphs are considered
> utilitarian objects whose public utility outweighs any private interest in
> protecting their creative elements.

BUT we have cases where judgement has been awarded to Adobe and Target is a
defendant in a lawsuit for their use of a unlicensed font in a video.

I am conflicted. I love having fonts and I love open source, BUT I also
appreciate the technical and artistic achievement these fonts produce.

The BEST font for me has been Cardo and it has had the best license ever
[http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html](http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html)
I studied several "ancient languages" and a font Cardo saved my academic life
by making an awesome unicode font for my languages. One font for English,
Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and others. Before that I had to write my papers
in Latex just to cover the languages or transliterate them (ugh).

Here is a font author that I have used and even purchased fonts from. She now
has a donation based price model. [https://www.dafont.com/kimberly-
geswein.d1468](https://www.dafont.com/kimberly-geswein.d1468)

Hoping she has success with this model and switches more to this model and it
works for everyone.

Microsoft's Font FAQ - [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/typography/fonts/font-faq](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/typography/fonts/font-faq)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces)

~~~
tptacek
It is incredibly difficult, time-consuming, highly-skilled work to create
typefaces in the ranges of weights at the scale discussed in this article.

At the same time, literally nobody _needs_ an fancy custom typeface; you can
accomplish any expressive task you have, competently, with the fonts
accompanying your OS.

Expensive typefaces are a form of fashion. If they light you up (they do for
me!), pay for them. Otherwise, use free fonts. There's really no insanity
here. People pay through the nose for mechanical watches, handbags, shoes,
furniture, orchids, and chefs knives, despite perfectly satisficing
alternatives at minimal cost.

It would be weird to complain about the insanity of regulations that allows
Sakai to charge $5,000 for a knife when equivalently functional knives are
available for $100. We all understand what's happening when people buy them.

Same with typefaces.

~~~
baldfat
> There's really no insanity here.

No the insanity is 100% the legal status of fonts and typefaces in copyright
law. They contradict each other.

> pay for them. Otherwise, use free fonts

I did state I have paid for some fonts. I wasn't mad about the idea of paying
money BUT the prices are extravagant.

TLDR for bellow: Things for creative people shouldn't be so expensive they are
then reserved for only the elite or corporate world.

I am an opinionated person and my career has been varied and one of my
favorite roles is being the "tech guy" who is also the "creative person" of
the company. So I take the official photos for my company and I also produce
videos. I use to do it with my own personal equipment but now I have much
better gear that the company has purchased for my job.

I have also owned my own recording studio and had a small record label. My
bands ended up touring the world, getting on MTV (When they use to still play
music videos) and move on to bigger Indie Labels. (Side note: the most these
guys made was $7,000 per person a year after touring cost).

I own expensive gear and I have thousands of dollars in plugins and programs I
personally own. Many audio plugins are $300+ and the software I have paid over
$1,000 for one program.

These plugins shouldn't cost more than $50. Applications should be free with
option of paying in for certain extra non-essential features. (Resolve was a
$3,000 video editor 4 years ago and now it is available for commercial use for
free and $299 for the professional features which I rarely use).

I want everyone to have the ability to fulfill their creative outlets and if
they have the ability to make a living awesome. People who make the tools
should also be able to make a living, but not so expensive and overpriced that
they cater to only those who have expendable income or corporate money to
spend.

Right now in music production the way these instruments are used by many is
through piracy. Heck Kanye West used a pirated instrument created by Deadmou5.
[https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/6897291/deadma...](https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/6897291/deadmau5-kanye-
west-pirate-bay)

The instrument Kanye pirated is a synthesizer called Serum. It's $190. So one
way that has changed is they have a rent to own model. You pay $10 a month and
you use it right away, but it also takes $10 off the price. You stop using it
and stopped paying for a few months no problem just start right back from
where you ended.

Another thing in music is now the plugin package I paid $1500 for in 1999 is
now $400 and on sale you can grab it for $180 and you have access to the same
plugins that Grammy Award winning artist use.

Why should it not come to fonts where people can pay $5 per font or say $50
for a complex font. Many of these $200+ fonts are initiative changes of a
dozen other fonts.

I believe fonts are awesome and well worth it BUT they shouldn't price the
vast majority of people from using them legally.

~~~
tptacek
A Sakai water-quenched sashimi knife will set you back $1200. A perfectly
adequate yanagi can be had for $60. A truly skilled, dedicated cook might own
the $1200 knife, because they work with it all day long and having the best,
most finely-crafted knife available to them might make the work more pleasant.
At the same time, rich morons who treat knives as Veblen goods are bidding up
the prices on the Sakais. Is it "fair" that only the elite and the wealthy get
the water-quenched sashimi knives, while plenty of serious journeyman cooks
make do with the $60 knife?

If the answer is "no, it's not fair", that's fine. But I'd be interested in an
argument about the insanity of font licensing that didn't depend on us
relitigating capitalism.

You are priced out of all sorts of things. Among them: very high-end
typefaces, which are licensed to ad agencies, Fortune 500 company marketing
departments, and major periodicals. You can shell out some extra cash to use
the same fancy typefaces they do, or you can use serviceable free typefaces.

I'm not seeing the insanity or the unfairness.

To me, typefaces are almost the platonic ideal of a good whose pricing can't
really reasonably be challenged. _Nobody needs them._ Every deployment of a
commercially licensed typeface is a vanity. Vanity is fine! But it's never an
entitlement.

------
Cthulhu_
I dig the article (mostly about small fonts, a lot of GDPR and cookie warnings
and such are written as notes / small fonts and are hard to read for example),
but at the same time I noticed the top logo, which read "Fontsby Hoefler&Co.".
Who's Fontsby? Bit of an odd name, bit posh.

oh wait, there's a space there.

~~~
lozf
It's a keming issue.

------
mrmondo
Im fairly sure it was typography.com is notorious for tracking your movements
around the Internet, obviously this is common behaviour from web font
providers but I seem to remember this group being especially intertwined with
ad tracking *citation needed but currently walking and typing!

~~~
lstamour
Their privacy policy implies it does
[https://www.typography.com/home/privacy.php](https://www.typography.com/home/privacy.php)
but their marketing claims otherwise [https://www.typography.com/cloud/the-
network/](https://www.typography.com/cloud/the-network/)

I haven’t personally investigated... and I’m not sure how one would go about
it, given how, at least without GDPR, I suspect more and more confirmation of
analytics data between parties will happen server-side for performance
reasons. Of all third-party content, SaaS and font networks would already have
to track everyone with unique IDs if invoicing based on usage, but it’s
damning if your paid service provider says it collects and shares data
(presumably about your users) with advertising companies in the privacy
policy. As if they aren’t making enough money from you? Or maybe it’s to
support tiers of service?

------
TimMurnaghan
Not really that much in the article except for some OK advice on sizes and
superscripts.

Overall I was left with an impression of how American it looked. It was like a
plastic woodgrain dashboard. I guess that shows how much design aesthetics
come into it - but that's OK if you know you want to look American.

~~~
MalcolmPF
Interesting! I don't immediately perceive anything distinctly American about
it, but I'm definitely biased. Could you provide any examples of what you'd
consider non-american data design, if only for my personal design curiosity.
:)

------
ktpsns
I enjoy typography and design, but I don't like the blind realisation of
obviously bad design decisions. Take
[https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/des...](https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/designing-
ingredients-3.png) \-- the ingredient list is sick itself, it should not be an
unformatted block of text but at least a proper list. They are designers, why
don't they invent an informative way to display ingredients? My feeling is
that they have to support the attempt of their client to hide information. I
would not want to do such a designers job, supporting bad intentions.

~~~
k3liutZu
I've never seen a (printed) product label with the ingredient list as a
formatted list. They are always a comma-separated free-flowing text chunk. I
guess this saves space.

~~~
bloak
A big fat bullet instead of a comma wouldn't cost much space, but I don't
think I've seen it used. People are perhaps scared of innovating when there
are legal requirements that they haven't referred to recently, while they are
fairly confident that what they've always done is compatible with the rules.

By the way, what is it with a large proportion of labels containing either an
asterisk but no footnote, or a footnote but no asterisk in the text for it to
refer to? I suppose it tells us something about the workflow they use for
producing these labels.

~~~
actionscripted
I think it's less about fear of innovation and more about other constraints
like space and readability.

A comma in most condensed sans serif collections like those used for nutrition
labels (Helvetica, Univers, et al.) takes up less space and is more readable
than a bullet or other glyph.

Here's a quick example using Roboto Condensed and the ingredients for Fruit
Loops. The bullets are longer or harder to read. (Using Roboto Condensed
because it's free so others can test with it and it's comparable to
Helvetica/Univers).

Sample: [https://i.imgur.com/HeYTdWr.png](https://i.imgur.com/HeYTdWr.png)

------
tracker1
Many of the fonts mentioned seem to be commercial. There are plenty of
free/floss fonts that have similar features. Montserrat, Roboto, Noto and Open
Sans are particularly good.

------
ggg9990
This is written by Jonathan Hoefler. Not reading it on principle.

~~~
jenskanis
For those who might not know everyone in the industry: why not?

~~~
panic
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-15/font-
war-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-15/font-war-inside-
the-design-worlds-20-million-divorce)

