>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.
>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.
>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
Uh, no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_font
>So minimalism is literally shallow.
"It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry