How typography reflects the past and future
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away,” wrote French poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
I thought of that maxim while reading the story behind Microsoft Design’s new default font, Aptos, a minimalist Swiss-inspired sans-serif typeface. (Goodbye Calibri, we hardly knew you.)
Si Daniels, who led Microsoft Design’s efforts to land on this new typeface (he announced it in an open letter on Medium last summer), leads us on a journey through the history of human typography. Did you know that serifs — small lines attached to the ends of letters, like the ones you’re reading right now — originally mimicked the handwriting of Renaissance scribes? Or that the first sans serif typefaces — precursors to Arial, Helvetica, and the most notorious font of all, Comic Sans — were developed for 19th-century advertising?
When they came on the market, sans serif fonts were decried as “dehumanizing” “typographical monstrosities.” They were seen as robotic, industrial, and contained none of the handwriting-esque humanity of a serif. Hundreds of years later, we use sans serif fonts to communicate with each other every day — in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and on our phones. (Not on Medium, though; our default story font is Charter, a very human serif typeface with a few hidden quirks.)
What else we’re reading
- It’s been 10 years since the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. Kyra Dempsey, analyzer of plane crashes (aka Admiral Cloudberg), has an exhaustive look at the general research consensus and where the plane might ultimately be found.
- In Ancient Greek, there are two words for time: chronos and kairos. One represents numerical time, the other represents our qualitative perceptions of time. On Medium, artist and professor Kevin Walker (aka increasingly unclear) explores how our phones encourage us to disregard kairos (qualitative time) and focus instead on chronos. If you feel like you perpetually don’t have enough time, he says, try thinking of time in terms of quality, not quantity.
- Writer and photographer Maria Garcia shares a visual meditation on the Portuguese word “saudade,” a non-translatable word that means something between “melancholy” and “nostalgia.” The only way to understand the word’s true meaning is to travel to Portugal, or to browse Garcia’s immersive photos of the Portuguese hillside and coast.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom about creativity
The next time you’re overthinking a new creative project, remember “the First Pancake Principle.” You can’t mess up a first pancake — or a rough draft, or a minimum viable product — because it’s not meant to be good. It’s meant to teach you something that makes the next version better.
Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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