A: Because they need to be legible on a mobile device.
It’s no coincidence this trend started in the 2010s with the arrival of the smartphone. Brands need a consistent look that work across mediums. With over 50% of e-commerce sales happening on mobile, and the dominance of social media in the marketing of, for example, high fashion, a brand mark must excel in these kinds of treatments. Perhaps we’ll find another design trick to facilitate legibility at smaller scales but until then, those marks that looked great in print, aren’t fit for purpose.
Funnily enough, many phone displays have much higher pixel densities than notebook, desktop, and TV displays, and thus would have little problems rendering the serifs, ligatures, and other fancy bits of digital serif typefaces compared to the old 72/96 DPI displays from the late '90s and early 2000s.
Semi-unrelated rant: why do many entirely digital web typefaces have ink traps? They look terrible. On paper, they were meant to be filled in by overflowing ink and thus render the glyphs as intended, but they just look weird and bad on a high-resolution digital display.
I’m aware. But when you’re trying to set a tiny brand mark over a photo in the corner of some social media thumbnail, a screen’s fidelity is not the limiting factor, it’s the human eye.
The pixel density might have increased, but phone screens fit less information than desktop screens, so the logo can't take up as much space. The goal isn't good reproduction, but rather improving legibility and recognisability at small physical sizes.
I have written two blog posts that sort touch on this subject. The increase in screen pixel density has had a much larger impact on web design as a discipline than is commonly acknowledged.
True about the definition, but portrait consumption remains a problem, the horizontal space on the header is much smaller, and many old school logos that worked on stores and websites would end up on two lines on mobiles.
Sure, a restricted subset of serifs and typically when you’re reading a run of text i.e body copy. But the typical neoclassical serifs used in high fashion (think the Vogue logo) with their hairline serifs will look awful scaled to the sizes needed on mobile – regardless of screen definition.
But your corp very likely wants to look young and fresh and not like a very serious, but ultimately boring lawyer agency.
Serif fonts are still existant, with newspapers, lawyers, notaries and aimilar professions. Most modern corporations just don't want to go that direction, because this isn't how they want to be perceived.
Thank you for putting into words something that's I've been wondering about.
Offtopic:
I switched from MPlus Code font to Iosevka just this week for my terminal, VSCode, and Emacs use. Partly due to finding Iosevka more pleasing, its support for ligatures, and liking its italics.
Looking at it now, MPlus is a little simpler while Iosevka has a bit more... Personality?
Serif fonts read fine on any screen with at least a pixel density of Apple's Retina displays. Subjective preferences are another matter, of course. I prefer serifs even on worse displays, because my brain decodes them better. And I will basically refuse to read sans serif in print, or rather, my brain refuses to comply anyway.
It’s the same reason all UX Design went super flat. Flat geometric shapes and text are easier to display at various widths and size’s across a lot of different types of devices. Doing anything more complicated than colored in wireframes is too expensive to produce especially when time to market is important.
As a UX designer I hate this but that’s the reality of why every site has the same boring flat design.
Text is also going out of fashion because supporting multiple languages is expensive compared to just a single set of hieroglyphs for everyone everywhere in the world.
It started before then. My school switched from a rather elegant 19th century (I think) design to something more streamlined that I never really liked around 2000. But I don't really disagree in general. I know when my company did a rebrand, one of the drivers was that the old logo had a lot of fine detail. (It also had some aspects that you couldn't unsee once someone mentioned them and it basically got the company's name wrong--which still gets people confused to this day.)
I'm not sure what you're doing to get into deadlocks, but when used as prescribed, I personally haven't run in to these issues.
Swift concurrency is still in a transitory period, and with that comes some warnings about how you can mix it with legacy concurrency primitives. i.e. not holding a lock across Task boundaries.
However, it's fairly well documented. There's a talk 'Swift concurrency: Behind the scenes' [1], that goes into detail on this. View from around the 25 min mark.
You realise the 'anachronistic monarchy' is just a tourist attraction/diplomatic lever at this point, right? Britain is a parliamentary democracy. I'm pretty confident Charlie doesn't have a hand in enabling sweeping snooping powers. More hacking scandals are the last thing his poor family needs!
> You realise the 'anachronistic monarchy' is just a tourist attraction/diplomatic lever at this point, right?
It's not. It still has power, and it's still costing tax payers a shitton so one family can live above everyone else. More importantly there are plenty of royalists who support it.
the royal family costs the UK tax payer ~100m a year[0], which is about the cost of the three nuclear bombs in the US or less than one of the ill-advised F-32 purchases Australia is making. it's also maybe a 1/10th of the amount of money stolen by Tory mates for their various PPE crimes during the early pandemic.
every country has very very dumb shit they piss money up the wall over, but it's not a game changing amount of money.
They are net contributors even before tourism. (Massively so after it, but I suppose it'd be hard to say how much of that would remain, especially in the short term, if we had no current monarchy but still the history, buildings, military, etc.)
You can argue that even greater than the tourism revenue they generate (which is significant) it's the soft power they yield; all the heads of state want to grab a selfie with Lizzie, less so with Rishi. (Time will tell with Charles.)
I don't doubt you're well intentioned, but there's probably more useful things to be fighting over. Especially as what you're fighting for will generate negligible incomes at best and negative incomes at worst. The last thing the UK needs after Brexit is a referendum on becoming a republic.
> I don't doubt you're well intentioned, but there's probably more useful things to be fighting over. Especially as what you're fighting for will generate negligible incomes at best and negative incomes at worst. The last thing the UK needs after Brexit is a referendum on becoming a republic.
I disagree. The UK is still backwards in many ways, hell, they still have an unelected upper house. Getting rid of the monarchy sends a strong message and allows other reforms to follow in its wake.
I'm also skeptical the monarchy generate any tourism. People come to see the palace that would remain regardless, and the funny guards that trample over children. They don't come to the UK for that stuff, they see it while they are there, and they certainly don't come hoping to see a member of the royal family.
Banking in the US had quite a few surprises for me. Often masked as 'for security' when it's anything but. A few examples spring to mind.
1) Chip and pin took the US forever to adopt. I've heard arguments that this is because chip and pin is 'insecure'. Insecure compared to a signature or magnetic stripe? Really?
2) SSL certificates. A lot of the retail banks use the cheapest grade SSL certificates. No extended validation. So you don't get that reassuring green padlock. No idea why. Something about compliance I read once. Bizarre.
3) ACH payments take three days to wire. Again, I've heard the argument for this is that it helps security as it gives you a chance to cancel the payment before it finally completes. More plausibly though, I think it helps the banks generate fees. Granted, it took legislative intervention in the EU to get this right, but clearly it's a net win for the economy.
A lot of people buy the arguments, too. Banking in the UK/EU is like living in the future when compared to the US.
EDIT: Oh, and I forgot about cheques (checks). The US still loves a check. The banking equivalent of the Penny Farthing.
> So you don't get that reassuring green padlock. No idea why. Something about compliance I read once. Bizarre.
All major browsers have removed the green padlock for EV certificates. It did not improve user security behaviour. There are some arguments that it had a detrimental effect.
You can still distinguish certificate types by clicking on the small padlock icon in the URL bar. But of course no one does that.
Consequently there is no current reason to pay (in cost and time) for an EV certificate.
The impression I get (from friends, I’ve never lived there myself) is that London is great if you are rich (discretionary money/time) or young snd single (discretionary time with low expenses). For those in the middle, workers with families, its a slog with low enjoyment.
Again, just what I've heard.
> Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance.
Yes. Backend engineering is completely immune to hype and increased complexity.
laughs into a cloud of micro services
But, more seriously, both front and backend architecture has increased in complexity. I think it’s more than condescending to say it’s because front end engineers base their decisions solely on website aesthetics.
A lot has to do with the fact that for a long time JavaScript has been the only game in town, and engineers have had to work hard within the constraints to afford the same programmer ergonomics available within other environments. This has led to a proliferation of tooling and frameworks which are a nightmare to manage.
No one is picking webpack because ‘it make pretty’.
Micro service makes perfect sense in a company with large number of teams. Ofcourse it would be stupid to use microservices if you are a small company with a handful number of devs.
I’m happy for the initiative – but only if it’s actually backed up with genuine resources. My fear is the typical ‘fanfare and forget’ approach. Plus I’m concerned that this format makes finding good answers to problems completely unsearchable. Lost in the focus on a 1-on-1 format. That seems unsustainable.
I’d be happier if they gave proper resources to the existing dev forums. That means: Ditch the custom format, use discourse/stack exchange as the engine, but then actually answer questions and foster a community. It’s possible. Look at the Swift forums.
A: Because they need to be legible on a mobile device.
It’s no coincidence this trend started in the 2010s with the arrival of the smartphone. Brands need a consistent look that work across mediums. With over 50% of e-commerce sales happening on mobile, and the dominance of social media in the marketing of, for example, high fashion, a brand mark must excel in these kinds of treatments. Perhaps we’ll find another design trick to facilitate legibility at smaller scales but until then, those marks that looked great in print, aren’t fit for purpose.