Iron Sans

I don't read the Economist much but I was curious as I'm always down for punny headlines, found this collection: https://www.ironicsans.com/2007/06/the_best_and_worst_of_the_econ.html

Last link (http://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/) probably makes the greatest point here. After coming back to HN from that site, I've been seeing text superimposed everywhere.

I've been following his blog for a few years now. He's done some other really neat stuff like histogram work (http://www.ironicsans.com/2007/09/idea_the_histogram_as_the_imag.html) and sort of an inverse Tetris (http://www.ironicsans.com/2009/01/i_wrote_it_you_made_it_montris.html)… Then there are the inventor profiles (http://www.ironicsans.com/interview/).

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but here's a random sampler: http://www.ironicsans.com/2007/06/the_best_and_worst_of_the_econ.html

No idea which one it was but I found this one and got a perfect score. The difference is pretty obvious... https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/index.php

That is the joke in the community ;) See also https://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html https://fuckyeahkeming.com https://www.reddit.com/r/keming/

No comment on your website, sorry - but at first glance I thought there was bad kerning ("keming") involved and your domain name is actually "pornostudy.io"... maybe a slight name variation would help to reduce that confusion. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keming and https://www.ironicsans.com/2011/11/keming_revisited.html

It is a bit ironic that the website has white text on black background which is no-no on screens as the very high contrast creates ghosting and eye strain / hurt for many people. Carefully read the text, then look at anywhere else and you'll see ghost lines everywhere for a few minutes. So the text should at least be gray-ish to decrease the contrast if you want to go that way. This works pretty well on paper, but sucks on screen. Whenever I see such content, I send them this link which demonstrates the issue in a fun way: https://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/

There's some design inexperience going on. #FFF text on #000 background for starters [0]. Images of text used as a background for content text is an unusual choice. The #FF0000 red underlines for links look a lot like spellcheck highlighting. Storing still images as .gif can be a lack of experience thing, as in not knowing what default to select after drawing red squares over sensitive information, or not knowing to avoid image types that support layers. [0] https://ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/

I find Arial slightly discomforting, because the kerning is not as nice as with Helvetica. Helvetica feels "denser". But more to the point, for a corporate logo, Arial feels like a cheap knock off to the more polished Helvetica. You can see this yourself, by looking at corporate existing corporate logos designed in helvetica and then redesigned in Arial. https://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ Admittedly this is personal preference in the end, but I feel like if HR is going to give someone bad news, they're going to do it in Arial. If Apple is going to release a life changing technology, they're going to do it in Helvetica.

On a tangent re: immortality: reminds me of the names you'd see in splash screens of various products. After one too many years of seeing “Seetharaman Narayanan” in the Photoshop splash screen, I just had to look him up. https://www.ironicsans.com/2006/09/interview_seetharaman_narayanan.htm…

Edit- Also a fun old quiz that helps beg the question, do you really need to add a fancy font over a system font? - http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

Almost like I typed it with bad keming, huh? http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html

> I know I'm older than most here (and have the tri-focals to prove it) but did anyone else read this as "modem outrage"? http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html

Line ghosting [0]. Which can be alleviated with more spacing between lines and a larger font size, but even then I still find it problematic personally. "Ghosting" is a lot less noticeable on light backgrounds, which I think is just how the eyes "work". [0] http://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/

> The human eye sees light. So reading illuminated text on a dark background is generally easier. The scientific literature on readability does not back this up. Results show large individual variability with a small overall preference for dark-on-light. Some old papers cited here: https://www.joedolson.com/2006/08/on-the-readability-of-inverted-color… EDIT: Also here is a good example of how reading white on black is hard: http://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/

Keming! http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html

Similar: the creation of an image that is it's own histogram. http://www.ironicsans.com/2007/09/idea_the_histogram_as_the_imag.html

The linked colour pictures are also pretty neat. http://www.ironicsans.com/2007/09/idea_color_photos_with_the_gam.html

This will probably help: http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/ It really stands out in e.g. logos, but less so in body text. I don't understand this author's vehemence against them though...

One service that I like from this site is the shorter thesaurus [0]. You enter a long word and receive shorter synonyms. [0] http://www.ironicsans.com/thsrs/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_burial Note that some of them only have sub-orbital "burials" and end up back home. Personally I'd be cool with being buried on the moon. Preferably in a giant monolith. Perhaps through http://www.ironicsans.com/2011/01/idea_crowdfund_a_mission_to_pu.html

I had a free weekend, and the thsrs idea by Ironic Sans [1] looked like something too cool to let it go (and http://thsrs.com/ didn't work too well for me). Also, it was a chance to implement my very own instant search ;-) The thing is done in Django+PostgreSQL+jQueryUI and uses the Wordnet 2.0 thesaurus which comes with OpenOffice. My wife was kind enough to make it look not ugly. [1] http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/07/idea_thsrs_the_shorter_thesaurus.htm…

Take the Helvetica vs. Arial quiz[0] at Ironic Sans. The final logo should help further convince you as to the importance of good typographic design. [0]: http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ I was hesitant to click that link due to the name of the directory, but then I just realized my eyes were experiencing keming... http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html

For a kick: http://www.ironicsans.com/helvarialquiz/

{Arial) It's just a bad copy of Helvetica - a really bad one. It's just ugly. The author mixes personal preference whilst aiming to clarify technically which I am not very fond of. As a designer, if there's anything I learnt, all this doesn't matter. These are basically tools. A good designer will make even the stupidest font (if such a thing exists!) look beautiful. A bad designer will make bad designs no matter what. Remember, a lazy carpenter will always blame his tools. Sure, good fonts give you that extra 'edge'. But remember, right now we don't have a very good way of displaying custom fonts over the web without some kind of Javascript hack or increasing the page loading time by directly loading the font file and/or without having alignment issues across various browsers. Also, there are uneven artificats rendered across font edges in some browsers which only worsens the User experience of using a custom font. Thus you'd be much much better off using arial or the likes of it. Upon reading the author's article you might be convinced that one font is better than the other, but given the time, I can lead you on an infinite loop comparing various fonts side by side saying something is better than Helvetica and something else is better than this something, and so on. The real fact is, when you read content, the font doesn't matter much unless it is pretty bad. So if you read a lengthy article on a blog and if I just asked you what font it was, I'm sure you wouldn't have…