Ohno Type School: A (2020)
ohnotype.co203 points by tobr 7 days ago
203 points by tobr 7 days ago
A sentence I wouldn't have expected to encounter today:
"A failure to really dig in to the buttcrack creates a bold spot, but even worse, it de-emphasizes the B-ness."
It's a very colorful way to describe the phenomenon, but it is a real problem with the "Y" part of the B.
you're not even mentioning the "can't get a finger in there!" text with the arrow that comes in above. i love it. it feels like humor is finally coming back again in the public discourse, and i'm here for it.
Not too long ago there was a submission of a font-editor[1] and I gave it a shot trying things out, just to realize, that my creations looked off and ugly, not really understanding why. This helps a lot. So much nuance to so many things....
As someone who has designed multiple type families, I might be biased, but this is wonderful. I'm going to send this to any aspiring type designers I meet, or anyone who's curious about what goes into shaping letters.
Ooh, recognize this domain!
Oh No created the official typeface for one of my favorite bands, Vulfpeck
https://ohnotype.co/fonts/vulf
There's some great lyrics animations in a lot of their music videos[1] done by Rob Stenson using an open-source library he authored called Coldtype[2]. I played around with it a few years ago, it's quite neat. You can animate variable fonts with python, and even hook it into midi tracks and a lot more.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2_CJ_nx-l4
[2] https://github.com/coldtype/coldtype
Bonus link, Rob also did the visual for this video, hooking into midi tracks to visualize a synth cover of a Bach fugue
Did not expect Sesame Street for fonts. Excellent.
This is pretty great. Might have been better to see before my typeface layperson's implementation of these guys: https://letterspractice.com/dbg/lp
(note: root site not actually ready for publish. don't click too many things or you could ruin my life (mostly a joke about the ruination))
(2020), check https://ohnotype.co/blog/tagged/teaching for letters other than A.
Also by this guy: Futurefonts.com Lots of great cheap in-progress fonts with documentation of the process of creating them.
Not the type theory we wanted, but the type theory we needed.
It's very interactive and pretty!
The designer obviously knows a thing or two. I enjoyed the fun presentation that others seem to dislike.
Where I ran into trouble was the readability of the annotations on the visuals. The tiny font combined with the low contrast was too much for me. I found myself squinting and trying to get close to my monitor. Eventually I had to move on, even though I was enjoying the content.
> What we want is a balance between the top and bottom negative spaces.
One thing I never understand is why they say "negative spaces" instead of just "spaces".
In visual design, it is things that occupy space. The areas left unoccupied by things are called negative space.
So if you hang a massive painting, that painting takes up positive space. The parts of the wall that are not covered by that painting make up the negative space.
I've just never encountered a situation where that's a necessary distinction. If I say "the painting takes up too much space on the wall" I don't need to say "the painting has too much positive space" nor "the painting removes too much negative space".
Just last week I was hanging photos with my wife in our home and after she had proposed a placement I told her "I don't like the balance of the negative space there". I could have said "I don't feel like the parts of the wall not taken up by photos are balanced there" but "negative space" is a convenient abstraction. (Note that this is different from the photos themselves being unbalanced, which is also a concern but was not a problem then.)
Think of it like a foreach loop. Sure, it's equivalent to the corresponding for(;;)-style loop but it's also a convenient mental shortcut.
If you are doing visual design, if you want to call out the parts of the space you are working in where you _aren't doing anything_, that is the 'negative space'.
If you are producing a letterform, all the parts of the object you are producing which is not filled by letter is the 'negative space'. The "space" is the whole area, including the letter.
People intentionally play with the distinction in optical illusions:
https://inthewhitespace.com/2021/11/17/what-it-means-to-be-i...
I think there is a very large difference between saying, e.g., "there is too much space" (the total area is too large) vs "there is too much negative space" (there are not enough things in the area). I think there's a better argument that "negative space" is redundant with "empty space", but personally I don't mind the term so I will not make that argument.
Henry Moore is a sculptor that uses the negative space a lot. It can be useful to refer to the "holes" in the sculpture
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moor...
I think this is a good example of the specific, limited way in which this phrase is useful. It's similar to the - very specific - phrase "price point", which people often use to just mean generic "price" now when they want to sound businessy.
I guess one reason is that adding "negative" turns the generic noun "space" into a specific term of art. A shibboleth, if you will.
Communities don't generally invent jargon for no reason, and a lot of things that people see as gatekeeping and shibboleths are just terms that save a lot of time in communication between people who know what they mean.
If you are a programmer, terms like "imperative" or "declarative" are extremely opaque to outsiders, but convey a lot of information efficiently if you know what they mean.
To clarify, I didn't mean it in a disparaging way. I'm a hobbyist photographer and have used the term a plenty of times myself. I'm also interested in graphic design and typography :D
[stub for offtopicness]
All: please note this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Yes, sites that don't work on your device are annoying—but uninteresting, offtopic, irritable threads are the closer-to-home annoyance here.
Please don't let the comments deter you from giving the site a try! Ok navigation is finicky on mobile but this isn't a blog post, it's quirky, I find the humor funny and the subject matter deserves some artistic liberty on the presentation side
Sorry—I feel bad about moving this one because you were on the downhill (good!) side of the contrarian dynamic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45542904), but the subthread mostly reverted to the uphill (bad!) side, in keeping with this sequence of sadness:
1. objections
2. objection to the objections (<-- you were here)
3. objections to the objection to the objections
Its notable that on desktop, the navigation is excellent. Custom navigation is rarely great, but this fits the content so well.
I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?
"Custom navigation" means I as a reader need to split my focus between learning how this thing works, and consuming the information presented, which is presumably the goal of this page. I can't say for sure because the instant my screen started scrolling the opposite axis I smashed the back button.
Pick a lane: this kind of stuff is fine as a "design" showpiece, but if the goal of a page is to convey information, why introduce distractions over sticking with familiar patterns?
> I can't say for sure because the instant my screen started scrolling the opposite axis I smashed the back button.
> I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?
This is a you problem. Its self-evident to anyone willing to explore their world in an incredibly low-stakes manner, and its pretty much pointless to describe or debate the merits to someone able but unwilling to experience it themselves.
"This is a you problem" is quite a nothingburger of a statement. Every single problem every single person has is personal. Hence why I asked a good faith question -- to try and understand someone else's perspective. You should try it some time.
We're all talking about our preferences here. Do you mean to come off so aggressive and dismissive?
I firmly disagree the discussion is meritless; I'm autistic, and it's much more taxing for me to navigate the page in a completely non-standard way. Avoiding overstimulation is not "low stakes" for me.
Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way, and surely there's someone who could commiserate or at least willing to have a dialogue or otherwise value my experience. If you don't value it -- well that's a "you" problem.
Snapchat is the ultimate example of how intuitive UX doesn't matter as much as we get carried away thinking. Of course it matters. But not as religiously as we think.
in other words, it's not that deep. The site is fun and you can figure it out.
Sorry to say I've never used snapchat, so I'm not able to understand your comparison.
Sure, I am perfectly capable of figuring out the site. But I won't trouble myself with it. My loss it seems!
And lastly, the person I was replying to claimed the design "fit the content so well" or something to that effect, which communicates a certain depth, contrary to your claim. I was genuinely trying to understand what I'm missing out on.
Fair points. in rereading the comments, I think "fits the content so well is in relation to the comment that comment replied to: the content being quirky and comical. So the navigation being non-standard is on brand.
and this is different from your point which maybe is "how does this help me understand fonts better?" which is fair.
Thanks for the added context. I obviously missed the nuance because I ragequit the page, so your perspective does help answer my question.
I can understand the perspective that something whimsical might appeal to a certain group and even enhance the experience; in fact I usually enjoy non-standard game designs, and in general I really appreciate subversion in most media I consume. I think however when it comes to educational or info-dense resources, I prefer the UX to be minimally distracting.
> I ask genuinely: what is the value -- in what way does it "fit" so well?
So, the key here is simply the horizontal layout: roman-alphabet letters naturally sit as "siblings" on a horizontal line, and — at least on desktops/laptops [which is pre-assumed here, since the site is just broken on mobile] — people's screens will almost always be much wider than they are tall.
Giving the type examples (a bad "A" glyph, vs a different bad "A" glyph, vs a good "A" glyph) all baseline-aligned on a horizontal line — packed together just closely enough to see multiple of them at a time (to visually contrast them) while also having room for notes in between — allows the eye of an English (or other LTR alphabetic-language) reader to intuitively pick up the same point that's being made explicitly in the notes, implicitly, just by looking at the successive examples next to each-other.
This wouldn't work with a vertical layout. Not just because on desktop there wouldn't be enough room (multiple example glyphs and their notes wouldn't fit together within the viewport), but more fundamentally because said English reader's eye isn't trained to compare things that are juxtaposed vertically nearly as well as it is trained to compare things that are juxtaposed horizontally. (Heck, part of that is inate in our biology: people with regular binocular vision can cross their eyes to superimpose things that are juxtaposed horizontally!)
---
The arbitrary viewport navigation on vertical scroll, is a technique commonly employed by a modern "web experience designer" when what they want to show you is some kind of animated presentation, but one that is so information-dense that there is no "correct speed" for that presentation to automatically play at. Instead, they put the control of the animation into your hands, having you manually scrub through it, by giving the document a large height, and having your Y scroll offset translate to the animation's timeline position.
In other words: this webpage could have (and with a lazier team, would have) been a video presentation. But instead, they went to the extra effort to give you a "video" that plays as you scroll it in a way that feels intuitively similar to scrolling through a webpage; where that interaction "affords" scrolling in fits and starts, to give yourself time to read the content. And where, when you're not scrolling, it is just a webpage, where you can highlight and copy the text, click citation links, hover over things, etc.
---
And sure, in this case, all the "animation" is doing here is moving you horizontally when you scroll vertically, and fading things in and out a bit. And you could accomplish that without hijacking the semantics of scrolling, by just making the page very, very wide.
But even today, it's still a bad idea, accessibility-wise, to ship a "very very wide webpage", because even in 2025, the OEM mice that come with Windows desktop PCs still don't give you any way to scroll horizontally. Which means that any "wide webpage that you are actually expected to navigate by scrolling horizontally" would effectively lock out the average office worker from consuming the content on their work computer (unless they realize that the browser gives them a horizontal scrollbar — which is unlikely, due to the non-discoverability of modern scrollbars.)
(And this first-order effect creates a second-order chicken-and-egg problem: nobody ships very wide webpages [or any other kind of UX views, other than maybe spreadsheets]; so few people even realize it's possible to scroll horizontally, even when they have a mouse or touch surface capable of emitting horizontal-scroll gestures. [Or they know that it does something, but only seemingly bad things — pulling at the edge of the view rather than actually scrolling — so they train themselves out of ever giving any diagonality to their scroll gestures and never intentionally try it.] ...and so we all avoid shipping wide webpages, because it would confuse those people.)
In other words, "hijacking the semantics of scrolling" in this way is an accessibility aid: both for the desktop users with one-scroll-axis mice, and for the people who just plain don't realize they can or should ever scroll/swipe horizontally.
---
Though, I should note that even on this page, which is nearly a perfect case for "just let the user scroll horizontally", there's still the potential for users "getting lost" in a contentless void if you remove the "guardrails" imposed by the single-axis timeline-scrolling mechanism.
There's a bit of this page where you scroll vertically "normally" before and after the scroll-offset animation-timeline sync happens. If the page was literally translated into a wide canvas, there'd still be a bit at the top and bottom that'd just be empty on the right. A user could wind up scrolling down, then right, then up (or more likely, up-right or down-right, which new touchpad-users often do by accident)... and wind up in a blank nothing space.
There's no settled solution for this "getting lost in the empty-space parts of a large canvas" problem on the current web.
That's not to say that it couldn't be solved. Video games have had "camera-lock bounding boxes" for forever. Browsers could allow you to specify a "valid scroll boundary" [probably as a CSS shape, ala clip-path] for a given scrollable container, where the viewport of that container would "run into a wall" if any part of it would collide/intersect/exit the inner boundary of the shape. Then the "wide part" of the document would have a "low ceiling" and "high floor" compared to the beginning and end of the document. (Also, to replicate the current experience, the footer would exist only on the far right of the canvas; and the with-header zone on the far-left would probably also have a "high floor", while the with-footer zone on the far-right would have a "low ceiling.")
But there's no real demand for this kind of fine-grained viewport control... because of the second-order chicken-and-egg problem. Even though it'd be hella neat and many designers [who almost all have two-axis-scroll-capable devices] would love to play with it.
> on desktop, the navigation is excellent
https://files.catbox.moe/kzqxcw.png
How am I meant to use this? None of the sidebar text is clickable.
Fancy navigation isn't worth a damn to me without graceful degradation.
Is this with JS disabled? I don't think we should expect interactive, fun sites to work well that way.
Yes.
Websites are supposed to have basic functionality without JS.
They are supposed to earn my trust before I grant them the right to run JS locally.
I use NoScript on desktop and was confronted with a complete jumble of words overlaying each other, each individual piece apparently word salad. I can't even understand what the intended purpose of the page is. My best guess is that it's trying to demonstrate a font... ?
”I completely broke the website and now it looks completely broken.”
Websites should not be broken without JavaScript. Viewing and scrolling text content does not require it.
This is kind of a seminal resource for a lot of new type-designers. This appearing on hn only for everyone to moan about how the mobile site is lacking kinda makes me feel like I should spend less time on here
Don't despair! Threads, in their early stage, are subject to a contrarian dynamic. Fortunately this usually (often? sometimes?) gets corrected, as it did in this case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45530593
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I wouldn’t expect nuanced takes on typography from HN. As a long time user the comments are entirely expected - and actually skew more positive than I would have guessed. Respectfully.
Ridiculous scroll jacking on mobile. Sure it's quirky but it's also so disorienting I gave up.
It is too annoying to carefully scroll to the small ranges at which texts are visible, with a custom horizontal scroll, to fish out small bits of text, which do not even seem to be written well. And that is after enabling JS, without which it is broken, yet not obviously (not much more than with JS). Websites about design and typography tend to be broken and illegible, but this one seems to stand out even among those.
But as with quite a few of other such websites, disabling CSS actually renders it easily legible and navigable, even without JS.
I do find this kind of analysis fascinating, and yet (personal choice in creative outputs aside) I also find what seems to be the increased use of swearing in blog posts/website copy to be, frankly, lazy.
[flagged]
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
Its not even just mobile. Scrolling down on my desktop using the scroll wheel... Page goes down, then right, then down. I find it disorienting and completely turns me away from the site. I've seen it before and every time, it's a net negative to the site in question; sometimes a lot.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the author does not in fact specialise in web design, and thus its quite expected that when they do something unusual that it won't work for some portion of the audience.
It works fine on some mobiles.
I tried scrolling right and left and reloaded the page a couple times.
Turns out scrolling down is translated to scrolling left.
This could have easily been a youtube short or whatever 'vine offshoot' is your particular favourite flavour.
On one hand, videos are terrible for accessibility. On the other hand, by being a website, in theory this stands a better shot. And yet, someone on a mobile phone probably has a much worse experience trying to consume this content than the equivalent as a series of shorts, one for each letter.
I don't know what conclusions we are meant to draw. I just found it an interesting realisation.
It's not immediately intuitive but hardly unusable. Reminds me of apple.com (and that's not a compliment).
This page works beautifully in my iPhone. As I scroll down, the content slides and animates. I actually came here to say that I’m stunned that this effect can be good in mobile, only to find out your comment :D
I'm on iPhone too; I'm referring to the way scrolling down with your finger animates the content sideways, which I really don't think works well — it would have been better to just be able to scroll sideways.
As I scroll down, the content moves side to side which is vomitous and disorienting.
