typography

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Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI
2 months ago
- Type designers have created ShieldFont, a free web font that hides text from AI scrapers and contaminates AI datasets.
- ShieldFont is open-source and provides a toolkit to apply its protective system to any font.
- Unlike Ghost Font, ShieldFont uses no optical illusion and is highly legible to humans, while altering text in source code for AI scrapers.
- ShieldFont changes select words in HTML to alter sentence meanings while keeping them grammatically coherent.
- In testing, 55.8% of shielded passages no longer made the same factual claim as the original, and it could survive filtering to enter AI training datasets.
- The creators emphasize ShieldFont is not anti-AI but aims to enforce opt-out from scraping, as robots.txt is often bypassed.
- ShieldFont is designed to slow down mass scraping, making it harder and more costly, though not unbreakable against determined scrapers.
- It can be implemented via online encoder, React component, CSS, CDN, or custom font builder.
Manual: •.,:;?·
2 months ago
- The period marks the end of a sentence and is used for initials, abbreviations, decimal separators, and time notation; its design affects typeface intonation and spacing requires careful kerning.
- The comma separates sentence parts and serves as a thousands or decimal separator depending on locale; its shape often mirrors apostrophes, but Czech/Slovak caron must differ from a regular comma.
- The ellipsis consists of three dots for indicating omissions or pauses; it has specific rules when combined with other punctuation and may vary in spacing from three separate dots.
- The bullet is a large centered dot for list items, while the interpunct is a smaller dot used as a separator or mathematical symbol; Unicode has multiple variants with different usage contexts.
- Colon and semicolon may require spacing in French and are normally not case-sensitive; lifting them can improve appearance in all-caps or time notations.
- Exclamation and question marks are usually cap-height; inverted forms exist for Spanish; the interrobang combines both but is rarely used; keyboard shortcuts are provided for typing these symbols.
The hardest working font in Manhattan
2 months ago
- Gorton is a monoline routing font used in engraving machines, originating from Taylor, Taylor & Hobson in 1894 and later licensed to George Gorton Machine Co.
- It is ubiquitous on keycaps, signs, intercoms, military equipment, nuclear facilities, and even the Apollo spacecraft, but remains largely unrecognized and unnamed.
- The font has many variations and names, including Leroy, Wrico, and others, and has been used for over 135 years.
- The author walked over 100 miles in Manhattan to photograph Gorton, documenting its widespread but overlooked presence.
- Gorton is characterized by its imperfect, weathered, and honest appearance, which the author finds appealing and endearing.
- The article serves as both a historical tribute and a eulogy for a disappearing font that is no longer widely used in new installations.
Aresluna
2 months ago
- AreslunaMarcin Wichary is a designer, writer, and typographer known for a book on keyboards and a photo essay about the Gorton font.
- His work covers tech and design history, including topics like the hardest working font in Manhattan and Charles Babbage's mouse pointer.
- He has a strong focus on keyboards, with projects like Shift Happens, a typewriter simulator, and collections of 50 keyboards.
- Typography essays and talks discuss pixel fonts, line height in Figma, and OpenType, with interactive elements like Typit.
- Bug and detective stories include bending the universe, Figma bugs, and the story of the disappearing Polish S.
- Travelogues explore tech museums, Japan design details, and urbanism, alongside UX design insights like link underlines and dark themes.
- Public speaking experiments cover pixel defense, keyboard magicians, and the making of Four Laps.
System shock
2 months ago
- Medium's design team experimented with using system fonts for their UI typography refresh.
- They included the CSS value 'system' as a future-proof entry in the font-family stack.
- After launch, users on Windows reported seeing a pixelated, retro font instead of modern system fonts.
- The culprit was the old Windows 3.0 bitmap font named 'System', still present in modern Windows for backward compatibility.
- The fix was simply removing the 'system' entry from the CSS font list.
- The author found the bug delightful, recreated the vintage font in vector format, and created a secret version of Medium to showcase the retro look.
Preventing line breaks in <code> elements
2 months ago
- The author uses non-breaking spaces/hyphens in body text to prevent awkward line breaks for phrases like '5 cm' or 'New York'.
- They extended this practice to <code> elements to avoid unhelpful line breaks in code snippets, such as splitting '--multiline' or '(?-u:…)'.
- To prevent line breaks, they add the 'nowrap' class to short <code> elements (15 characters or less) that contain hyphens or spaces, using a Python regex.
- A CSS rule with 'text-wrap: nowrap' is applied to the 'code.nowrap' class to enforce no line wrapping, though it's a minor improvement.
Decoy Font
2 months ago
- Decoy Font is a TTF font that prints a decoy for every letter to make it harder for AI to read text.
- It uses separate spatial frequencies to display two letters in the same space: thin outlines in the foreground and low-frequency blurred background.
- AI systems focus on the foreground text, but from a distance or with squinting, the hidden message becomes readable.
- The font is free for personal, commercial, and client projects, derived from DejaVu Sans Mono.
- Decoy Font is part of anti-AI fonts to protect information from AI scrapers, using hybrid image techniques.
- It can trick advanced LLMs like ChatGPT, GPT Sol, and Gemini 3.5, and exists as an installable TTF file for typing text.
- Future applications could include CAPTCHA, private messaging, and extending to character-based languages like Chinese.
We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes
2 months ago
- Letters are the result of millennia of evolution, tracing back to ancient symbols like the ox-head representing 'aleph' which became 'A'.
- The design of modern typefaces, such as asymmetrical shapes and serifs, originates from historical human practices like Roman brush techniques.
- Generative AI lacks human experience and creativity, unable to invent new techniques or understand cultural nuances, risking the stagnation of visual culture.
- AI tools are limited by training data up to 2021, potentially overlooking underrepresented traditions and ideas, and may not support diverse languages or cultures.
- The author advocates for human-driven type design to preserve innovation, support new designers, and avoid a future where AI dominates and stifles creativity.
Backtrack-Free Cursive
3 months ago
- The author finds English cursive writing less enjoyable due to frequent backtracking needed for dots and crosses, unlike Russian cursive which rarely requires backtracking.
- An analysis of Crime and Punishment shows English requires backtracking in 51% of words (0.68 per word), while Russian only needs it in 6.4% of words (0.066 per word).
- To address this, the author designed a new cursive script based on SmithHand, modifying letters like x, t, i, and j to eliminate backtracking and improve flow.
- Key modifications include drawing x as two mirrored c's, adding a loop to t for continuous strokes, and creating a fused loop-and-stem design for i and j.
- The script has been used for months, making English writing as enjoyable as Russian, despite some inconsistencies in letter formation.
The Proportional Web
3 months ago
- The author created a new side project, The Proportional Web, inspired by Robert Bringhurst's 'The Elements of Typographic Style', as a sequel to The Monospace Web.
- The design uses the Alegreya font for body text and headings, with Courier Prime for code, and bases all sizes on a root font size of 16px for scalability.
- Text is justified with hyphenation controls to avoid spacing issues, paragraphs are indented, and the design is monochrome (black on white) for minimalism and focus.
- The stylesheet supports semantic HTML5 elements like headings, side notes, blockquotes, figures, lists, and tables, and is geared towards prose-heavy web documents.
- It is responsive, with adjustments for smaller viewports, and is available for reuse under an MIT license, with setup instructions for Pandoc and quick-start guidelines.
The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters
3 months ago
- Fleurons are decorative typographic elements that have been incorporated into digital fonts via Unicode, including symbols like the Manichaean Punctuation Fleuron.
- The Manichaean fleuron () is a right-to-left (R) character, which can cause unexpected rendering issues in bidirectional text, such as rearranging adjacent numbers.
- Unicode's Bidirectional Algorithm determines text direction based on character types (strong, weak, neutral), with R-type characters taking precedence over weak types like European numbers.
- To fix rendering problems, wrap the fleuron in the <bdi> HTML tag or use the CSS style 'unicode-bidi: bidi-override;' to isolate its directionality.
- Manichaeism was a historical world religion that declined due to persecution, competition from other religions, and the collapse of supporting empires.
- The post highlights practical solutions for web developers using decorative characters in mixed-direction text environments.
The Fonts of the U.S. Federal Courts
3 months ago
- The Ninth Circuit court uses Times New Roman font for its decisions, which is a median typographic choice.
- Several U.S. circuit courts, including the Third, Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh, use Times New Roman, while the First Circuit uses Courier New with full justification, and the Second and Seventh use Palatino.
- The Fifth Circuit upgraded to Matthew Butterick's Equity font in 2020, improving typography and margins, setting a higher standard.
- The U.S. Supreme Court uses Century Schoolbook font, maintaining consistent typographic style for over a century, as required by court rules for submissions.
- Historical comparisons show older Supreme Court documents had better use of small caps and more vigor, inspiring current courts to aim for similar quality.
- Judge Don Willett emphasized that clear presentation of opinions is crucial, as it impacts real-world lives and livelihoods.
- The author advocates for all federal courts to improve typographic styles to reflect professionalism and clarity.

typography

Type designers have created a free font that "poisons" AI

Manual: •.,:;?·

The hardest working font in Manhattan

Aresluna

System shock

Preventing line breaks in <code> elements

Decoy Font

We don't use AI in any of our design or production processes

Backtrack-Free Cursive

The Proportional Web

The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters

The Fonts of the U.S. Federal Courts