> I call it Avería – which is a Spanish word related to the root of the word ‘average’. It actually means mechanical breakdown or damage. This seemed curiously fitting, and I was assured by a Spanish friend-of-a-friend that “Avería is an incredibly beautiful word regardless of its meaning”. So that's nice.
Ironically, I've been a typographer for decades, both for print and online. Averia might seem an odd choice for someone intimately familiar with typographic theory/history and the vast catalog of possible fonts. But there's a certain pleasure and comfort in a font that is not trying to stand out or do anything particularly special.
The trick is that there are two "averages" in play. Let's call them the "attractiveness average" and the "physical average". Your intuition concerns the attractiveness average: you know that there are beautiful people and ugly people, and "average people" must be somewhere in the middle, yes?
But when scientists average faces to create a perceived attractive face, they're averaging together the physical characteristics of each face: distance between the eyes, position of nose and ears on the head, size of mouth, symmetry, etc. The claim is that we have an intuitive, perhaps instinctual, notion of what humans "should" look like and our perception of attractiveness is roughly a measure of conformation to that standard. So an intuitively "average-looking" person is more correctly stated as having a medium amount of deviation from the human mean.
Somehow I was not aware of Averia and used Old Timey for exact same reasons in the past.
On the other hand, someone here mentioned "Lato", which to me looks exactly how two robots would write holiday postcards to each other.
It sort of suggests to me that there's a lot going on with typeface design that we take for granted.
Edit: on closer inspection, the letter forms are kind of all over the place. The humps on the 'm' are lopsided, letter heights are sort of random. I think it's an interesting idea but to make it a more useful font would take a lot of manual fine tuning.
It still looks a little funky but way more readable.
http://iotic.com/averia/preview.php
I think it would be really cool if a designer used these as a starting point for overall metrics, but then regularized and cleaned them up to exhibit consistent proportions and elements from character to character, without the wobbly parts. It really feels like it would become an ideal font family for reader mode, for journaling, just any time you want to focus on content and have a font that just "gets out of the way".
https://store.steampowered.com/app/957820/Across_the_Grooves...
What I really love about both of them is that they instantly give you the impression of a real print made with real ink. Especially Averia - which makes sense, since it was averaged from all sorts of different fonts - has a lot of, for the lack of better word, excess fat on it. Something that may happen accidently while pressing "precise" font letter on soft paper.
JoshTriplett•3mo ago
I'm reposting it here because I noticed that this looks a lot like the uncanny valley produced when an image AI tries to make text, which makes perfect sense: it's a statistical average of fonts.
Pxtl•3mo ago
DeathArrow•3mo ago
treetalker•3mo ago
ozim•3mo ago
helterskelter•3mo ago
Clamchop•3mo ago
ssl-3•3mo ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph
fsckboy•3mo ago
[2]: I just wanted to add the most unnecessary footnote formatting possible as a kindness, so yours would no longer hold the crown as worst
ssl-3•2mo ago
I've been called out previously here for having unknowingly introduced some undefined terms to readers, and which they found to be perplexing.
And I took that to heart, because I don't want my words to be perplexing. I instead want them to be clear and easily understood.
In my corner of the world, I haven't held a mimeographed document in my hands for ~35 years. I found it reasonable to assume that a non-zero amount of people here might find the term to be unfamiliar.
So I provided definition of the term on the basis that it may be unknown to some readers, and that more information is better than inadequate information.
In this instance I would have preferred to use hyperlinked text for visual brevity, but that's not a thing on HN. The normal and accepted style on HN consists instead of using footnotes.
And at this point, generating footnotes is nearly entirely muscle memory for me. So a footnote (with a URL) was included.
Thank you for your attention on this matter, fsckboy. I'm pleased to discover that you've found my footnote to be so unusually compelling.
fsckboy•2mo ago
i wasn't criticizing putting in a link; just put it in, it doesn't need layers of boiler plate [in this instance]
like, if i use the word sesquipedalian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sesquipedalian
[in this instance] the square brackets add nothing but noise
ssl-3•2mo ago
However, I have noted that you do not pay me. It therefore does not behoove me to try to emulate your particular writing style.
Kindest regards.
rkomorn•3mo ago
That combined with the magic of "Wow! Copies?!"
msla•3mo ago
rebolek•3mo ago
stavros•3mo ago
hajile•2mo ago