[HN Gopher] Ohno Type School: A (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
Ohno Type School: A (2020)
Author : tobr
Score : 200 points
Date : 2025-10-06 10:18 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ohnotype.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (ohnotype.co)
| x187463 wrote:
| 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."
|
| Sites like this are fun. I don't have the actual knowledge to
| tell if the commentary is insightful or informative but it's
| usually a good time when you get to look closely at something you
| take for granted.
| munchbunny wrote:
| It's a very colorful way to describe the phenomenon, but it
| _is_ a real problem with the "Y" part of the B.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| 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.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > 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".
| kqr wrote:
| 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.
| philipallstar wrote:
| 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".
| mejutoco wrote:
| 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...
| philipallstar wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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...
| hatthew wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I guess one reason is that adding "negative" turns the generic
| noun "space" into a specific term of art. A shibboleth, if you
| will.
| philipallstar wrote:
| I agree.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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
| flobosg wrote:
| (2020), check https://ohnotype.co/blog/tagged/teaching for
| letters other than A.
| polyamid23 wrote:
| 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....
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347072
| turnsout wrote:
| 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.
| NiloCK wrote:
| 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))
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Did not expect _Sesame Street_ for fonts. Excellent.
| seanw265 wrote:
| 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.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Also by this guy: Futurefonts.com Lots of great cheap in-progress
| fonts with documentation of the process of creating them.
| upghost wrote:
| Not the type theory we wanted, but the type theory we needed.
| hbn wrote:
| 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
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJfiOuDdetg
| dang wrote:
| [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.
| niek_pas wrote:
| [flagged]
| huem0n wrote:
| It works well for me on mobile
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| 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.
| rzwitserloot wrote:
| 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.
| blahgeek wrote:
| 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
| niek_pas wrote:
| 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.
| wpm wrote:
| As I scroll down, the content moves side to side which is
| vomitous and disorienting.
| dfee wrote:
| I tried scrolling right and left and reloaded the page a
| couple times.
|
| Turns out scrolling down is translated to scrolling left.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| It's not immediately intuitive but hardly unusable. Reminds
| me of apple.com (and that's not a compliment).
| dang wrote:
| " _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._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sltr wrote:
| swiped to scroll down. page scrolled right. did not appreciate
| psini wrote:
| 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
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Its notable that on desktop, the navigation is excellent.
| Custom navigation is rarely great, but this fits the content
| so well.
| jahsome wrote:
| 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?
| apsurd wrote:
| 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.
| jahsome wrote:
| 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.
| apsurd wrote:
| 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.
| jahsome wrote:
| 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.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| > 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.
| jahsome wrote:
| "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.
| derefr wrote:
| > 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| > 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.
| servercobra wrote:
| Is this with JS disabled? I don't think we should expect
| interactive, fun sites to work well that way.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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... ?
| tobr wrote:
| "I completely broke the website and now it looks completely
| broken."
| zahlman wrote:
| Websites _should not be broken_ without JavaScript.
| Viewing and scrolling text content does not require it.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| I use NoHTML on Firefox 56 and it's just a blank white
| page?
| dang wrote:
| 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
|
| ...so it veered further off topic. (and yes I suppose my
| comment here is a 4-th order objection)
| JadoJodo wrote:
| 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.
| Ecco wrote:
| Great content, _terrible_ form.
| defanor wrote:
| 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.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| 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
| perchard wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Well done, and thx!
| steezeburger wrote:
| Ridiculous scroll jacking on mobile. Sure it's quirky but it's
| also so disorienting I gave up.
| jojobas wrote:
| Imagine taking design advice from someone doing _that_ to
| scrolling.
| Alchemmist wrote:
| It's very interactive and pretty!
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