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Story
Designing for the Eye: Optical corrections in architecture and typography
"People seem to think that having the internet at their finger­tips means they no longer need to know anything themselves. But in order to understand things, you need a lot of knowledge readily available in your head. Only then can the mind make the connections between the different points of data and come to new insights. This cannot happen when that knowledge is external, in a book or on some Wikipedia page that you have to look up first."

Or in an AI model.

I disagree with respect to Microsoft. Steve hated everything that worked but was ugly. Windows and Office had a brutalist beauty to it that you could fully customize if you desired to do so. Today with O365 and Azure it is a parody of its former design. Only after its default UI changed from 'dentist office' to 'parade of clowns with toasters' did everyone else decide they hated it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

I would argue that the Windows 95-2000 era SOTA application design, where Windows and Office arguably truly established themselves (and became highly customizable), was less brutalist than the preceding Windows 3.x design. Incidentally, the Steve Jobs quote is from an interview in 1995, so preceding that era.
Yes, WordPerfect and Lotus 123 were the top dogs until MS was finally able to eat into their sales. Office wasn't the king until '98 or even the 2000 version.
Borland's DOS IDEs represented what we might call brutalism in interface design. Windows (after 2000) arbitrarily became more like favelas with dozens of unnecessary panels in every application, a great example of when features win over rationality.

I just realized that I'm not sure if it's Borland or Norton who brought the blue interface to DOS first. Does someone remember who was first?

For some whom miss this deep blue and cyan. https://play.tirreno.com/game

This made me thinking about broader optical corrections. I got an iPhone 16, and the photos look overprocessed. There is a cartoonish HD-like feel to them. I understand where developers are coming from: our eyes have higher dynamic range than cameras so HDR is closer to what we see but still... it doesn't sit right with me. I still remember when my family switched from black and white TV to a color one. It was an instant improvement and no adjustment period was needed. But HDR as a default looks strange.
No mention of the Taj Mahal, which famously is not square so it appears square.
  • pcrh
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Very interesting, thanks!

I am also curious about the relative popularity of typography on HN... it seems to gain the interest of HN readers more than most other forms of design or art....?

My humble guess is because typography is really just a (mostly non-political/religious) form of psychological and philosophical debates.

Look at the discussion surrounding the typography on Pope Francis' tombstone to see how the typography conversation/debate easily transcended the religious background it originated from, which seems atypical to me.

OK, can someone please explain to me how the 'arena' swimming wear brand chose the kerning for their logo 50 years ago to be the way it is now? This 're' combination is killing me every time I see it.
  • cpa
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  • 3 hours ago
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I don’t know why but nerds love typography. I sure do :)

Maybe something about the fact that it’s familiar for people working with computers. It’s approachable (needs a keyboard and some fonts), familiar (we spend our time typing and reading), well defined (it’s a succession of a finite number of shapes that are also well defined, not as Freeform as a drawing).

There's still people that don't know the difference between serif and sans-serif. That's shocking to me, yet just another sign of how deep a rabbit hole I find myself with fonts. I've done desktop layout and graphic design for print, video, web, so working with fonts is without a doubt something I absolutely hate. When it comes to computers the top two things on my hate list is 1) printing, 2) fonts. PTSD from the bad ol' days getting fonts and printers to install, then getting the printer to actually work as expected. The amount of time I've spent looking over fonts with clients and listening to them discuss pros/cons. It all just sends shivers up and down the spine.
Come on, I know some EU newspapers that put ads in print with DPI below 300. No one care, not the publishers, not even the advertisers who pay for that.
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I'm reminded of how the developers of LilyPond noticed that because of the asymmetric appearance of musical notes, they needed to be spaced asymmetrically in order to convey the sense of "equal spacing" between them to the eye. LilyPond is full of little beautification details like that to render scores that are pleasing to the eye and read the way musicians expect.
Any link? Sounds interesting!
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This was a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing!
Great article, too bad they had to include Steve Jobs.

"The only problem with Micro­soft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is – I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way – in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. "

All those original ideas they lifted right from Xerox Parc.

Edit: Sorry, forgot we were talking about design ideas. All those original ideas they lifted right from Braun.

  • wpm
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  • 24 minutes ago
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Except the Alto looked and worked nothing like the Lisa OS nor the Mac OS.

Its like saying Xerox just lifted it all from the Mother of All Demos.