[HN Gopher] The Typeset of Wall*E (2018)
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The Typeset of Wall*E (2018)
Author : drones
Score : 454 points
Date : 2024-07-11 09:28 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (typesetinthefuture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (typesetinthefuture.com)
| navaed01 wrote:
| I really enjoyed this
| eulgro wrote:
| Impressing how much detail went into things nearly all viewers
| never see.
| cchi_co wrote:
| That's the beauty of this masterpiece
| esalman wrote:
| Funnily enough, one of the viewers is my 3yo son. For the last
| few days, he's been watching it from the beginning every night
| at dinner time.
| monitron wrote:
| For sure! But just because you don't "see" it doesn't mean it
| doesn't have a huge impact on the feel of the movie, your
| impression of the characters, and on the storytelling, which is
| ultimately why these "invisible" decisions were made :)
| ben_ wrote:
| Cool article but this first bit threw me off
|
| > The interpunct is still in use today--it's the official decimal
| point in British currency (PS9*99)
|
| When the linked wiki specifically points out that it isn't:
|
| > In British typography, the space dot was once used as the
| formal decimal point.
| llimos wrote:
| And the government website doesn't use it [1].
|
| So hard to see in what sense it's "official".
|
| [1] https://www.gov.uk/passport-fees
| Sharlin wrote:
| To be fair, traditionally 95% of digital content has zero
| amount of typographical finesse and simply uses whatever is
| available in the local standard keyboard layout. Even the use
| of em and n dashes is a big deal.
| dcminter wrote:
| The decimal currency in the UK is essentially the same age
| as me - and I have _never_ heard this claim that an
| interpunct is somehow more official. So the claim stood out
| to me as being outlandish; not impossible, just super
| unlikely.
|
| To show I have no ill will toward outlandish Britishisms,
| this one applied in Parliament until relatively recently...
|
| "To increase their appearance during debates and to be seen
| more easily, a Member wishing to raise a point of order
| during a division was, until 1998, required to speak with
| his hat on. Collapsible top hats were kept for the
| purpose."
|
| https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-
| inf...
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, I don't doubt you, just meant that web copy is
| usually so typographically impoverished compared to print
| that it's not in itself much of evidence.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| Fun fact, Windows 8 changed the decimal separator for the South
| African locale from a period to a comma.
|
| My theory is that some academic or idiot government official
| told Microsoft they're not using the official separator who
| duly fixed it. But in practice every "normal" person in the
| country used a period as a separator.
|
| By default, Excel now uses a comma separator for decimals.
| Which unless I change it, makes it especially fun when I want
| to paste values into my banking website which (like most of the
| country) uses a period as a separator.
|
| Really, it would have been way more pragmatic if South Africa
| just changed its official decimal separator.
|
| It also caused some annoying issues on our .NET with SQL Server
| software project. For example SQL seed scripts inserting
| decimal values would break depending on if they were being run
| on Windows 7 or 8. On the upside, it did teach us all to have
| our code be properly locale aware.
| benjijay wrote:
| Tangentially reminds me of how, in an early build of Win11,
| the localisation team at M$ changed 'zip' to 'postcode' for
| the GB language pack
|
| People then had a lot of fun being unable to extract their
| .postcode archive files which suddenly came into existence...
| ygra wrote:
| AFAIR it was the localized name of the file type. File
| extensions would never go through i18n/l10n.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Stood out to me too, as was sure that was not true. I'm a
| native Brit, I'm on the wrong side of mid-40s, often read
| historical literature that uses pre-decimal currency (and
| notation), and have never seen an interpunct used at all, or
| heard it referenced in terms of British currency until today.
|
| Unfortunately, I'm the sort of pedant who on seeing somebody
| state an incorrect fact with such certainty, I doubt the
| veracity of the rest of what they have to say. I wonder where
| the author got this idea from?
| dspillett wrote:
| Born in the late 70s, so also mid-40s, I worked retail in the
| 90s and older pricing guns often used a raised * rather than
| one aligned with the baseline, so I didn't doubt that it
| might have been common, or even official, in the past, when I
| read it. Such guns would sometimes have "old style" alignment
| with the baseline for the numbers1 too.
|
| The "still in use today" part is quite definitely wrong
| though.
|
| ----
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numeral_variations#O
| ld-...
| adamomada wrote:
| Even in North America, old school cash registers printed
| their receipts with the decimal as the dot in that purple
| ditto ribbon colour. I'm also remembering ticker tape
| calculators were the same as well.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > "10^6" in the corner, and are marked "ten million dollars."
|
| Being a factor of ten off when writing out such a common SI
| prefix as Mega is a bit impressive.
| lowq wrote:
| Not to mention, 99^6 = 941,480,149,401 [?] 99,000,000 (which
| TFA also quotes). But who's to say notation didn't degrade
| along with the rest of society? :^)
| fhars wrote:
| Probably designed by one of those young whippersnappers who
| never used a slide rule and confused 10^6 with 10e6, because
| that is how you enter big numbers on a calculator.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Given that 99^6 is supposed to mean 99,000,000, it seem clear
| that the superscript is not meant to be exponentiation but
| rather just denote the number of zeroes following (ie. short
| for scientific notation a la the 99e6 syntax used in
| programming languages.)
| eesmith wrote:
| I think the idea is that in the financial world of 2100, _when
| on currency_ , 106 should be read as short-hand for 10E6, not
| 1E6.
|
| Thus, 996 should be interpreted as 99E6, hence 99 million, as
| the author says.
|
| We know already that SI isn't universally followed. As a rough
| comparison, if a food item contains 160 calories, we know
| that's 160 kilocalories - and calorie isn't an SI unit. Or, 1GB
| of RAM is often 1024^3 bytes, with relatively fewer people
| using GiB.
| adamomada wrote:
| If you look closely, kcal is always written Calorie not
| calorie. It's interesting that even in otherwise metric based
| countries, the joule is completely foreign. It must be what
| most Americans experience when they see Celsius
|
| RAM is always GiB - it's how it works. I'd love to see an
| example of it being mangled though
| sksksk wrote:
| The most interesting thing for me was the Iconian Fonts website.
| One guy who is a "commercial transaction attorney for a global
| software and service company", that makes fonts as a hobby.
|
| On his commerical use page, he just asks for a $20 donation if
| you use a font commercially. I wonder if he realised that his
| fonts would be used in billion dollar movie franchises.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Per user/seat, so if they were honorable about it, it's
| probably a decent amount.
| echoangle wrote:
| Would this be more than 100 seats? $2000 is still not a lot.
| Would you theoretically need a license for every employee
| involved in the movie or only those which would actually work
| with the font?
| qingcharles wrote:
| This man has created _six hundred_ fonts...!
| Log_out_ wrote:
| I wouldnt care about the money but i would care about the
| credits.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Fun fact: long credits at the end of the movie were invented
| by George Lucas for _American Graffiti_ in 1973 [1]. He didn
| 't have the money to pay everyone so he offered to put their
| names in the credits instead.
|
| And thus started a new chapter in the exploitation of film
| crews, where you don't get paid enough but hey, at least your
| name is in the credits. All the other producers were
| immediately like -- that's a _genius_ idea to pay the crew
| less! So now all movies (and even TV shows) are full of
| hundreds and often even thousands of names in the credits.
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069704/trivia/
| mottosso wrote:
| I still remember my first credit in a blockbuster
| production, after a first few years in TV advertising that
| name no names, and it was exhilarating. My name is since
| forever embedded into the artwork we all worked towards. I
| was also paid, but with that money now long gone I just
| wanted to highlight that there is value not just in money.
| a_e_k wrote:
| I also like that I can point to my production credits as
| public proof of employment history.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Didn't know the Lucas angle, but yeah you'll see the
| accounting team listed in a Marvel movie these days.
| jhbadger wrote:
| That's amazing. I always wondered about watching old
| (1930s-1950s) movies where they would give credits to the
| lead cast at the start and just end with a "The End" card
| with no credits. I always wondered if they just cut the
| credits off, but I guess they never existed!
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm just glad they stopped putting so many opening
| credits in films. It's basically insufferable to watch
| old movies with 10+minutes of opening credits. I'm
| annoyed by the 3-5 minutes of production credits at the
| start of movies today as it is.
| parpfish wrote:
| That's ALSO a George Lucas thing. Not having the
| directors name in the opening of Empire got him kicked
| out of the director's guild
|
| https://screenrant.com/star-wars-george-lucas-quit-dga-
| empir...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Wow, it never even registered to me until I read this
| comment that the Star Wars movies didn't have opening
| credits. They're usually so forgettable anyway, and after
| reading that article, it seems so silly and ridiculous
| that all the various Guilds and Associations and
| Hollywood Political Units got so butthurt over that
| decision.
| adamomada wrote:
| Seth MacFarlane nailed it
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ji5q3ICKPbY&t=345
| pvorb wrote:
| I'm always amazed by how long video game credits got over
| the years.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'm glad to see people recognized for their work, even in
| such a small way though. As they continue to scroll and
| you start to see titles like "2nd assistant to the HR
| Team Lead" I can't help but wonder how much is bloat and
| how much improved the games might be if the teams were
| leaner.
|
| I'm also torn on the concept of "production babies" which
| is basically just acknowledging that some parent was
| forced to abandon their family and newborn child for
| weeks-months of crunch because of bullshit arbitrary
| release schedules
| parpfish wrote:
| I assume that a large number of people in video game and
| movie credits just did part time work or a short project
| and they weren't exclusive with this particular project
|
| Like when you list the accountants, is it that those
| accountants were working ONLY on this project or was this
| one of a dozen things they were handling at the time?
| bityard wrote:
| Could the origin of Exposure Bucks?
|
| Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe these
| days the various film-industry unions essentially require
| individual credits for anybody who even tangentially had
| anything to do with working on the film or on the set of a
| film. E.g., I'm pretty sure I've seen the names of catering
| staff in movie credits.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| In my opinion dystopianess is transported, the more you hold the
| now as contrast against the old. Take bladerunner- the presence
| of mechanical animals -the holograms of greenery, the presence of
| once beautiful buildings (like the Bradburry) held against a
| industrial produced, soulless item, highlights the decay and
| despair.
|
| In this case, a caligraphy font
| https://www.1001fonts.com/calligraphy-fonts.html used,
| ocassionally on real signs, would be a great way to show the road
| into the dystopia.
|
| The Hello Dolly footage servers + trinkets serves a similar
| function.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| The book (<https://typesetinthefuture.com/2018/12/11/book/>) is a
| fun read, too! I think it was David Plotz who said "read more
| books with pictures." Interviews, gorgeous looking, and does a
| good job showing the whole world you can miss by just _watching_
| a movie once (or even twice) without really _seeing_ everything.
| It gives a good sense, too, of how movies first create the
| standards for "future" and then proceed to subvert or reference
| those standards.
| paol wrote:
| I second the book recommendation. It's great.
| java-man wrote:
| Thank you for recommendation, just bought one.
| jeegsy wrote:
| I just love the immersion that articles like these provide
| Terr_ wrote:
| > The interpunct is still in use today [...] decimal point [...]
| dot product [...] separate titles, names, and positions
|
| Some*times it is it al*so seen
|
| To cla*ri*fy the way
|
| That syl*la*bles and me*ter meet
|
| In things we say to*day
|
| Which ex*tends from hea*vy use
|
| In pla*ces not so mer*ry
|
| For proof of this phen*o*men*on
|
| Con*sult a dic*tion*ary
| agalunar wrote:
| Those aren't syllable divisions, they're hyphenation points!
|
| From the footnote on page 219 of _Word by Word_ by Kory Stamper
| (formerly a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster):
|
| > Here is the one thing that our pronunciation editor wishes
| everyone knew: those dots in the headwords, like at
| "co*per*nic*i*um," are not marking syllable breaks, as is
| evident by comparing the placement of the dots with the
| placement of the hyphens in the pronunciation. Those dots are
| called "end-of-line division dots," and they exist solely to
| tell beleaguered proof-readers where, if they have to split a
| word between lines, they can drop a hyphen.
| agalunar wrote:
| To save someone the lookup, this is: U+00B7
| MIDDLE DOT = midpoint (in typography); Georgian comma; Greek
| middle dot (ano teleia) * also used as a raised decimal point
| or to denote multiplication; for multiplication 22C5 is
| preferred
|
| But note there is a separate Unicode scalar value for the dot
| operator: U+22C5 DOT OPERATOR * preferred to
| 00B7 for denotation of multiplication
| eCa wrote:
| The most surprising place I've seen it in is in the name of a
| certain street[1] in Barcelona, where it is used for
| pronounciation purposes.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avinguda_del_Paral*lel
| nlawalker wrote:
| > BnL uses the exact same typeface and color scheme as real-world
| retail giant Costco Wholesale Corporation.
|
| Made my whole day, fantastic.
| dtagames wrote:
| The article's title really downplays how much terrific cultural
| analysis there is here. This write-up has great depth, not only
| on typography but also architecture, art styles, film, and music!
| Many links and reference images, too.
|
| A worthwhile read that I thoroughly enjoyed.
| niteshpant wrote:
| I thoroughly enjoyed reading this - so well done and thought out
| chefandy wrote:
| It's funny how big of a difference perspective makes. I think
| this is a neat portrayal of how differently designers and
| engineers reason about design topics.
|
| I was surprised to see an article about type that didn't involve
| code editors so heavily upvoted on HN, but as soon as I read the
| first few paragraphs, I realized why-- it was clearly written by
| an engineer that has learned a lot about design, and not a
| designer. There's nothing wrong with that! It's a cool and very
| well-researched design history deep dive that explores the
| network of references and roots of the type used, how it was used
| as a storytelling element, and that sort of thing.
|
| If this was written by a type designer, they'd have been
| discussing very different things-- why the letterform shapes hit
| like they do, what design problems they solve, the conceptual and
| emotional references these shapes make rather than which concrete
| symbols they relate to, the general rounded square shapes, their
| negative space, how the lack of stroke contrast makes it hit
| differently than similar less uniform characters, kerning
| concerns, etc.
|
| For example, here's Matthew Carter-- one of the more famous type
| designers-- digging into some of the more unusual type design
| he's done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RojKQ-w9zn8&t=745s
|
| The person that wrote this article knows a lot more about how
| this type is used from a modern art perspective, but there's a
| difference between knowing art history and being able to wield
| the underlying principles to work with these things as an artist
| or designer. I think a good example of this is film fans that
| spend a lot of time on TV Tropes an the like, which are rather
| like informal film critics. That knowledge is a base requirement
| for great critical analysis, but if I needed to hire someone to
| create a film, I'd favor an undergrad film student that was in
| diapers when the film fan started digging into TV Tropes. Why?
| It's just a fundamentally different way of reasoning about the
| same thing. The fan is more concerned with the "whats" and
| "whens", and the student is more concerned with the "hows", and
| that gives each of them have a totally different perspective on
| the "whys". I think creators need to watch out with this.
| Especially in the nerdier genres, if they're so focused on the
| film itself that they disregard factors like context and overall
| story continuity, watching that film is a meaningfully worse
| experience because they're often more invested in the
| universe/characters/etc. than they are with the making any give
| story arc or character pop for a given movie. On the other hand,
| if we hand too much control to the people primarily interested in
| the context and story continuity at the expense of any individual
| film's story and artistic value... well... have you seen the Star
| Wars prequels?
|
| Back to the article, I could see someone without education in
| type design reading this article getting the impression that they
| understand the typographical elements in this film. They
| definitely understand how the typography was used, but that's a
| lot different than being able to reason about these things like
| designers do. A more concrete example would be an in-depth
| article about the cars in the fast and furious movies, complete
| with the cultural references of each modification and the
| purposes they serve. It would be cool and informative, but it
| wouldn't bring the reader any closer to being an auto designer.
|
| A lot of developers, in particular, get annoyed when I push back
| against their misconceptions about design. It's not an insult--
| it's just not their area of expertise. Usually, they don't know
| enough about it to realize how little they know about it-- like
| anybody else with any deep topic they don't know. I've heard
| designers that have cargo-culted tutorial code into some
| wordpress plugin spew absolute nonsense about everything from
| data structures to network architecture with the confidence of
| someone that just got accepted to a prestigious CS doctoral
| program. That said, it's easier for non-technical people to see
| that they don't understand software development because it's easy
| to see they don't understand the terse error messages, stack
| traces, code syntax, terminology, etc. It's more difficult in the
| other direction. Visual design, broadly, is visual communication;
| for a design to be good, at a bare minimum, it must present
| cohesive messages or ideas to its intended audience. Many things
| that look the simplest while still solving all of their goals
| were the most difficult to make-- you can tell when non-designers
| copy it because it might look simple, but it probably doesn't
| effectively communicate everything it needs to-- and that's every
| bit as true for UI design as it is branding and identity design,
| and poster design. The complexity in that process is only
| apparent if you've tried to solve difficult, specific
| communication problems with a bunch of real-world constraints,
| grappled with the semiotics, tried to make it stand out, etc.
| etc. etc. and then had it torn apart by people who've done it a
| lot longer than you. I can see why someone that doesn't
| understand what's happening under the hood thinks a designer's
| main job is making things attractive, like an amateur interior
| decorator. In reality, that's not even always a requirement-- it
| often is a natural result of properly communicating your message.
| What we do is more akin to interior architecture: the
| functionality comes first. So the next time you see someone
| suggesting something like allowing custom color themes to your
| app to "improve UX," maybe consider consulting an experienced UI
| or UX designer to see what they think. If their suggestions
| revolve around making it prettier or hiding everything behind
| menus because functionality is ugly, I conceptually owe you a
| beer.
| stzsch wrote:
| "When art critics get together they talk about style, trend and
| meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where you
| can get the best turpentine."
| ant6n wrote:
| I am getting the book. But is there a pdf version somewhere? (I
| wish physical books would just come with a pdf version)
| agalunar wrote:
| The title of the submission should be changed to "Type in
| Wall*E", "Typesetting in Wall*E", or "Typography in Wall*E"; the
| word "typeset" is a verb or past participle, not a noun.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| In fact what they meant is 'typeface' , a fancy word for what's
| often (wrongly) referred to as 'font'.
| pvorb wrote:
| Really nice article!
|
| I'm not sure about the poster though. This is not necessarily
| communist, as this was just the style of propaganda posters of
| all kinds, that came up in the first half of the 20th century.
|
| Personally, it reminds me more of a Nazi poster for the army,
| which includes tanks that look similar to these robots:
| https://c8.alamy.com/compde/r90frb/ss-freiwilligen-panzer-gr...
| bityard wrote:
| A few of the claims were certainly a bold stretch, including
| this one. But yeah, it's a fun read regardless.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| A very interesting and enjoyable article.
| joering2 wrote:
| "A Wuppertal Schwebebahn monorail train arrives at the Werther
| Brucke station in Wuppertal, 1913."
|
| Somewhat off topic, but stuff like this always leads me back to
| this reconstructed video from 1902. It feels like you almost
| there. I cannot fantom all these people walking peacefully now
| are dead, and they never heard of silicon circuit, let alone
| internet or an iPad. Worth watching once or twice a year it
| always makes me appreciate my life just few inches more...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQfPyx_678g
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(page generated 2024-07-11 23:00 UTC)