Hidden in plain sight

It is a well-known fact that the subject of an experience can have as big an influence in the perception of the experience as the experience itself. If you ask the passengers of a plane after just a normal flight some will be simply satisfied, others with be delighted with the attention that one particular attendant has provided, others will be annoyed with the baby that was crying. The experience was probably very similar (if not the same) among many of the passengers, but their mood at the time, their personal histories and many other circumstances can contribute to provide a huge dispersion in terms of how it was felt.

Unsurprisingly, the same happens to the simple act of looking. In a simple photograph of a city street a father might see a small kid in danger of being run over by a car, while a mechanic will see a 1968 Ford Mustang, an architect is likely to see the brick facade of a building, a city official will probably point out the condition of the garbage cans. And there are good reasons for that: as I mentioned yesterday, you cannot recognize the things that you do not know. The architect might like the Ford Mustang, but they will probably not appreciate it in the same way that the mechanic would. It takes a lot of training (when not a life-long dedication) to gain deep knowledge in any domain, so most of us limit ourselves to one or a few at most. But it is still remarkable how, when properly instructed on what to look at, anyone can suddenly see a lot of the underlying richness that was previously invisible. In my case, this kind of "secret knowledge" gives me such an elation that I sometimes end up checking it out over and over. For instance, this happened to me many years ago when I was told that double open end spanners come in 12 and 13 mm or 14 and 15 mm, but not in 13 and 14 mm. For months, every time I had a chance to inspect a toolbox I went in a wild goose chase looking for the 13 and 14 mm just in case.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The domain that has blown my mind today are the typefaces. I never followed any formal studies within the printing industry, but I got acquainted with computers from a very young age, in particular with the early word processing tools. I remember using an old PC application called Wordframe 3 (although I have not been able to find any reference to it anywhere on the internet) which I used for a couple of years before my father finally got the DOS version of WordPerfect 5.1 which we continued to use for many, many years. In that version editing a text was much more similar to creating a web page, because you typed the content in a window with no relation to the final output and then "salted" the text with meta-codes to create bold or cursive words, or to make a heading out of a line. Then you had to "preview" the text and that gave you a idea of what the text actually looked like, spacing, pagination, etc.

Even in those early stages, every book (there were no online courses yet) I read about text edition stressed the importance of using serif fonts for bulk text, because that made it more comfortable to read, while headings were allowed to use sans-serif fonts, which are easier to read, and for wall signs this use is even strongly encouraged. These concepts, along with line spacing, alignment or indentation were well known to me and I have worked with them for decades, but I was far from being knowledgeable. There were many things that I was not seeing yet.

Some years ago, a cousin of Karen, who is an industrial designer, send around this web challenge about kerning. If you are scratching your head, that is exactly what happened to me: kerning is the adjustment of the separation between the characters to achieve a pleasant visual result. Doing the game you will see the discomfort that wrongly adjusted characters can induce. And yet, I was completely oblivious of this principle. I did know that the monospace fonts, where each character takes the same amount of horizontal space, tend to look a bit "naked" around the i and the l, but I did not go any further. Playing the game really opened my eyes and for many months after that I looked at any sign, book cover, logo and tried to judge how the kerning was.

Today I found in my email this article from the 1843 magazine reporting the fact that industrial typography is changing, and the pandemic has only accelerated the trend. For many years publishers and advertising agencies had a very strong preference for the so-called geometric fonts because they are tidy and functional, but then also remarkably plain. Designers had already started to make timid attempts at using more creative fonts, but now, thanks to the pandemic, printed (or computer-rendered) content is becoming even more important and the trend is accelerating. All over the place straight lines and angles are being replaced with curves and round shapes. As the article phrases it, the Scandinavian functionalism has been OK for a while, but the new generations are looking for something more personal, warmer, with character. In the end, they are the generation of hygge.

So now you know about the rounded fonts you cannot unlearn it. If you are anything like me you will spend days or weeks inspecting the font of everything that falls into your hand, trying to find all those aspects that are hidden in plain sight. I hope you have a nice evening.