In last week’s post, I made an off-hand comment about Vercel’s Geist Pixel announcement, and I thought it might be interesting to turn this into more of a full-fledged critique.

I don’t think it’s a good announcement, but its flaws are pretty universal, so I want to put words to these flaws. This will extend to a lot of other writing about design, not even necessary even just about typography.

Here’s my advice that I believe would make announcements like this better:

• Write like a human being would. This is famously hard, and takes practice. Here, we see stuff like “unapologetically digital,” “a functional tool within a broader typographical system,” “the result feels both nostalgic and contemporary,” and “constraints weren’t a limitation, they were the design tool.” No one talks like this. I think people believe font releases have to use these kinds of words and phrases, as a way to bring legitimacy to the project. I do not subscribe to that way of thinking. I think it leads to writing that’s optimized only for admiration, which is not as much fun for anyone.
• Show a specific example of a problem you solved. This page hints at some things – “They don’t scale properly across viewports, their metrics conflict with existing typography, or they’re purely decorative.” – but that feels altogether too vague to be useful or even interesting. These are actually fascinating and hard challenges, yet I know as much at the bottom of the page as I did at the top.
• Show details you are proud of. Zoom in literally or figuratively. “Each glyph was manually refined to avoid visual noise, uneven weight distribution, and awkward diagonals.” I would love to see a few examples.
• Show work in progress! Show stuff you discarded. This will be hard, but why not? It’s good practice and I believe this, more than anything else, will have people appreciate what you did. Plus, everybody loves a blooper reel.
• Related: talk about struggle. But don’t just motion in the direction of challenges, or performatively announce that this was the hardest project of your life. Actually talk about something that was hard, and why. Be vulnerable. Be honest. People didn’t care that Rocky lost in the first movie, because people cared about Rocky.
• Talk about your inspiration or history. What we all do here is part of something much bigger. Why a pixel font to begin with? Why is this interesting to you? Is that because Vercel is filled with nerds, or because you got bored with bold and italic, or because it just seems visually interesting in a new way?
• Let me type! Immediately and on every relevant page. I don’t think any modern font announcement/​tester can exist without this. This is the easiest way to getting to know the font and explore specific things that matter to you. (To do this here, you have to go to the font page, switch to Geist Pixel at the top, and then scroll all the way to the bottom. This feels entirely too far away.)
• Show, don’t tell, generally. The Geist Pixel announcement feels rife for an avalanche of “show,” but has so little. I mentioned above wishing to see examples of manual refinements. There is a visual for “seamless mixing,” but it’s really a marketing photo, not a real-use example – it visualizes what, but you want to visualize what and why at the same time. I would love to see the spread of variants, specific examples of how the font is not “breaking in production” and “scaling properly across viewports.” I don’t know what is a “semi-mono approach” and I would like to learn.
• Motion is okay, but it has zero nutritional value. If you have limited resources, don’t spend it on motion. Anything interactive is better. (But again, the best interactive thing is letting you type.)
• The “Already shaping what’s next” is a narratively unsatisfying section, as it promises stuff that you cannot see yet. Either show those, or skip the tease altogether.

I know the elephant in the room here is “how big companies do things.” A lot of redesign announcements and font unveils exist chiefly to make the execs who championed them happy, and perhaps as fodder for future promotion – I bet the whole “Already shaping what’s next” section isn’t really written for external audience – and they get chewed by the big PR machine that often files away whatever personality and quirkiness might have been there. Your job is to fight that machine! But I acknowledge that it might be hard.

However, I’ve also seen all this seeping into personal font announcements, which is unfortunate. (I don’t want to link to specific examples, since that’d be punching down.)

Also, this is not just about the joy of reading or some general notion of “craft” – although they are important, too. This is also purely informational. I feel I haven’t learned enough from the Geist Pixel announcement for the amount of time I spent with it. I don’t understand “multiple variants for different densities and use cases” or “semi-mono approach” or what stylistic sets are included. (My general goal is to write in a way that people can learn something new from any design announcement, even if they don’t have any prior context, and if they never actually use the font.)

It‘s a shame, because the work itself seems thoughtful and excellent, deserves a better intro, and could help others interested in typography as a jumping off point, particularly because this feels like a typeface off the beaten path.

Just to round up this post, some recent counterexamples:

• Fran Sans announcement post by Emily Sneddon (complements the font page) – personal, distinctive, talks about the process, shows interesting artifacts.
• I feel that every small essay from David Jonathan Ross’s Font Of The Month Club teaches me something new – pick a font you like on that page, then click Notes next to it.
• Departure Mono font page by Helena Zhang doesn’t use a lot of words, but still says a lot.
• Shantell Sans process post by Shantell Martin (complements the font page) – already talked about it before.

Here’s a 2002 story from a younger internet, by programmer Trey Harris (link to the original and if you don’t like the classic Usenet formatting – my browser’s reader mode can’t even prettify it! – here’s a nicer-looking format):

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

It would be easy to assume this is a classic case of pebkac, “problem exists between keyboard and chair,” the derisive term used (supposedly!) by support people, describing naïve public who had a tenuous grasp of technological reality. But the story goes to an unexpected place.

This might be the most widely-shared computer bug story of all time I’ve seen – I just saw a comment from 2008 calling it “oldie but a goodie,“ and it even has an FAQ page that’s actually a really great read. There’s quite a bit of chatter inside about something important to me: the balance between the needs of good storytelling and going deep into technical details:

In the story, I make it sound like it took all of ten minutes from being made aware of the 500-mile email limit and determining a 3 ms light-speed issue. In fact, this took several hours, and quite a bit of detective work. The point is, eventually I came up with that figure, ran units, and gagged on my latte.

You can sense author’s frustration with every nerd trying to “gotcha” him instead of just enjoying the story. Even a younger internet wasn’t without faults.

A reader asked me this, and I thought I will answer here:

One bit of challenge with [where I work] is that my audience isn’t already almost-guaranteed to be into design! They’re hopefully interested in making good software in general, though, and probably curious about the app [I’m building] they could be using. I’m also afraid that developers sometimes confuse “easy to use” with “beginner-only, limiting”, which makes it harder to write about streamlining UIs; there’s only so many times you can invoke “reducing mental load.”

I love this question because it gets to the core of why I started this blog. I’m perennially unhappy with the conflation of “craft” with “delight,” and the subsequent narrowing of “delight” into “cute strings and slow animations.” In the famous words of Steve Jobs, “Design is not how it looks. Design is how it works. What’s tricky is that they’re sometimes related, and even if you learn how to tell the difference, your exec team probably never will.”

I am quoting from memory.

Anyway, I hope spending time on Unsung – please like and subscribe – helps with examples of what to talk about and how to talk about them. But, just to list some alternatives to “reduces mental load” for well-made software that come to my mind:

• is more efficient
• gets you home earlier
• will allow you to spend more time on things you enjoy
• will allow you to choose which parts of the problem to spend time on
• reduces tedium
• understands and practices progressive disclosure
• understands you
• speaks your language
• learns your preferences
• meets you where you are
• is made by people like you
• respects you
• will make you better at what you do
• rewards mastery
• doesn’t dumb things down
• will teach you concepts helpful in other software
• never takes control away from you
• is easy to customize
• adapts to you
• doesn’t disobey you
• will make you look good in front of others
• respects history and legacy of the space
• is built well
• is conceptually/​systemically beautiful
• is well-considered or thoughtful

There’s more, and I am curious what comes to your mind and how you all connect with developers! But maybe just going through a list like this will provoke some ideas.

(Of course, if you cannot honestly claim some of these about software you’re working on, and you think they’re important – I guess you have some work to do.)

An excellent 17-minute video from The Art Of Storytelling that analyzes the now-infamous 2021 Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse introduction video:

What I liked about it is that the author goes beyond cheap shots and deeper into both storytelling aspects (drawing from his experience)…

Now, as you can tell, the big problem with the design and execution of this video is that the producers failed to recognize the importance of point of view in telling this story. Now, perspective is already very important in any film, but it’s doubly important in a film for which one’s point of view in reality is also the subject. But this failure is present even in some of the more mundane parts of the film like the interviews that Mark does with various meta staff members. Now, as it’s plain to see, these are not real interviews. They’re fully scripted and staged – again, a classic mistake in corporate film. You can even tell that they’re not looking at each other. They’re clearly reading from a teleprompter. Yikes.

Of course, the entire premise of an interview is that two people are speaking candidly. So watching an obviously fake interview can be deeply unsettling as the speakers try to act out natural conversation and inevitably fail. This is why so many people in this video, including Mark, seem to not know what to do with their hands while speaking. It’s because they’ve been told to act naturally in a social situation that does not normally exist.

…and the meaning of these kinds of propaganda-esque announcements:

They are joined by some friends who are calling from Soho to tell them about some cool augmented reality street art that they’ve just discovered. […] And with a wave of his hand, Mark teleports the artwork into his spaceship so that he can appreciate it for himself, thus extracting this street art from any sense of place and context, which is the point of street art. I know this might sound like a nitpick, but I think it’s just worth lingering on the fact that, you know, in this high concept tech demo about how this technology will empower people to appreciate art in new ways. Nobody paused to ask what the social and cultural function of street art actually is.

The entire introduction video comes across as thoughtless and careless – “It’s not a product launch or even a demo. It’s just a cartoon about the world Mark Zuckerberg is telling you that you will one day live in.” – and some of the observations here will be relevant to other things, even in other mediums: UI redesign minisites, the font announcements articles, rebrand unveils, and so on.

I would love similar analyses of Apple’s stuff – not just the most obvious parallel which would be the 1987 Knowledge Navigator vision video, but some of the more recent scripted virtual keynotes, too.

I linked to this opaquely on Thursday, but it deserves its own entry. Michael Bierut’s 2005 essay called “On (design) bullshit” is one of my favourite design essays:

It follows that every design presentation is inevitably, at least in part, an exercise in bullshit. The design process always combines the pursuit of functional goals with countless intuitive, even irrational decisions. The functional requirements — the house needs a bathroom, the headlines have to be legible, the toothbrush has to fit in your mouth — are concrete and often measurable. The intuitive decisions, on the other hand, are more or less beyond honest explanation. These might be: I just like to set my headlines in Bodoni, or I just like to make my products blobby, or I just like to cover my buildings in gridded white porcelain panels. In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth — “I don’t know, I just like it that way” — simply won’t do.

So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; unprovable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals. As [Harry G.] Frankfurt points out, it’s beside the point whether bullshit is true or false: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.” There must only be the desire to conceal one’s private intentions in the service of a larger goal: getting your client it to do it the way you like it.

“I don’t know, I just like it that way” is such a tricky part of craft.

I read Mike Monteiro’s book of pre-pandemic essays called The collected angers. The book has less to do with the subject of this blog, but I grabbed a few quotes that resonated with me and seemed relevant.

In order not to make it too reductive, I’m also linking to the original essays for those who want to follow up:

The worst feedback you can get from a client is “Wow. It looks like you worked really hard on this!” Stop using your work like a time card. If you did it right, it looks like it was effortless. It looks like it’s always existed. And the client will probably be irritated that they paid you for 30 hours of work to do something that looks like it took an hour. Which it did. They’re just not seeing the 29 hours of bad design that got you to that one hour of good design. And for the love of god, please don’t show them those 29 hours of bad design. A presentation is a shitty place for a sausage-making demonstration, and you’ll just come across as a defensive, unsure person needing validation.

—from 13 ways designers screw up client presentations. This sounds like a version of “My kid could’ve painted that” argument.

Learn how to steal. Be aware of your history. Design is the oldest profession in the world. You’re not the first person to tackle whatever design problem you’re tackling. See how others tackled it. Take the best solutions you find and improve on them. Don’t burn time solving things from scratch. Make use of what others have learned.

—from 10 things you need to learn in design school if you’re tired of wasting your money

The world needs fixing, not disrupting.

—from 8 reasons to turn down that startup job

And:

“The way you get a better world is, you don’t put up with substandard anything.”—Joe Strummer