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jsnell 15 hours ago [-]
I don't know that I got anything out of this other than that it took a long time. I think there is an interesting article to be written on this. Like, what were the concrete requirements? Why were those the requirements? Maybe show how one letter evolved over time as the project went on, and explain why.
But instead the article is effectively the Gravitational Pull of Pepsi[0].
Hmm. I would have appreciated more depth and details, but it did cover requirements to look good and maintain identity across print, screen, merchandise, etc.
Which makes sense but that alone sent me spinning. Not easy.
seanhunter 7 hours ago [-]
That seems pretty standard to me. Consider the counterfactual: How many design briefs do you think contain one or more of the following:
1. Totally ok if it doesn’t look good.
2. Identity is not important. It’s fine if it looks totally generic
3. I don’t care about print/screen/merchandise so it can look terrible in that medium
In general, people want things that look distinctive and work for digital and physical media.
micromacrofoot 9 hours ago [-]
some people will spend a lot of money on bullshit
and oddly if you instead told them "I was very diligent and spent a lot of time thinking about this" they won't give a flying fuck
RobotToaster 15 hours ago [-]
Is it me or are typeface designers some of the most pretentious people in tech? And that's a really high bar.
Fraterkes 11 hours ago [-]
Most typeface designers are pretty normal (excepting their choice of one of the most simultaneously precarious and work-intensive creative careers). David Rudnick is (in my and many others opinion) infamously pretentious. He is a prolific designer though, and even many people who dislike his work acknowledge that he's quite good at what he does.
dzonga 4 hours ago [-]
yeah pretentious bunch. but can't lie though that typeface reflects the history of the club. I say that even if I don't support the gunners.
tyrabound 11 hours ago [-]
That is indeed a really high bar I don’t think they meet. I don’t see them pitching some nonsense as a multibillion dollar investment opportunity.
I think they’re just doing what is smart, talking about what they contribute and what their craft is, because underlying it all, the truth is they design for legal reasons, because you can only trademark your brand that is a word, which you want to license for merchandising to sell to the mindless sports masses, if you also own the typeface. You can’t really trademark or copyright Arsenal the word written in Times New Roman.
stoneman24 13 hours ago [-]
Yep, reading the article just revealed the designer’s self centred view of the project.
Surely the design aims, the evolution of the typeface and how it meets those aims are more important.
I do have good vision but for me (sample size 1) it’s really hard to read (especially the riband variant). How does it look for people in different environments ?. Is the aim to look iconic rather than communicate information.
I wish Arsenal well as my father was huge fan and would always look for the results.
pndy 11 hours ago [-]
Dug out these discussions for your amusement; might shed additional light on this:
I remember watching a whole documentary about Helvetica.
Font people, logo designers and sushi makers.
brookst 10 hours ago [-]
That’s not “a whole documentary”, it’s a spectacular documentary.
Documentary films are like nonfiction books: any subject can be fascinating when done well, any subject can be awful and banal when done poorly. I’m not even a huge non-fiction / documentary fan but I’ll die on the hill that telling true stories with depth and passion is much harder than doing great fiction.
walthamstow 10 hours ago [-]
To be fair, the same guy also made a really great documentary about urbanism as part of that trilogy
whywhywhywhy 12 hours ago [-]
I’d argue they’re not really in tech.
estearum 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah typeface design is a deep craft that predates anything we'd call "tech" by centuries.
dofm 9 hours ago [-]
You can make a credible argument that typefaces are the original information technology: the first technology that encoded and distributed information and whose coding limitations changed the shape of the information itself.
(Not least on the basis that they changed the requirements of paper, which before typefaces was a rather more ad-hoc, per-project process)
micromacrofoot 9 hours ago [-]
you have to be because otherwise no one gives a shit
sailorganymede 15 hours ago [-]
Never thought I'd see my team on HN but I really love the changes Arsenal has done. I remember only 10 years ago, we were super corporate and quite trend chasing (with our captain Aubameyang et al. doing reaction videos and sweg sweg) and you could really tell the messaging was supposed to be sanitised and generic. I noticed esp. when Arteta got in, we started to actually have an identity of our own with the typefaces and a brand new song and all the focus on our history etc.
youngNed 11 hours ago [-]
Completely unrelated thought - are Arsenal the only club in England to not have a placename in their name?
I know they were originally Woolwich Arsenal, but they dropped the Woolwich when they moved from there.
And, of course, the big problem is, they always try to walk it in.
walthamstow 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, the club name bears the shame of having moved across town for money. The MK Dons of the 20th century.
Port Vale is the only other one without a place name but they never moved, I don't know where the name comes from.
jameshart 9 hours ago [-]
Crystal Palace is also a bit weird - named after a building that was moved, then burnt down, which also gave its name to an ill defined area of London that straddles three boroughs, which is not where the club plays any more…
walthamstow 8 hours ago [-]
Most areas of London are ill-defined, I think it's fair to say.
Crystal Palace is a made up place but the club is authentic to that place, if that makes sense?
jameshart 7 hours ago [-]
It’s more that both the club and the area are independently named after the site of the stadium where the club used to play. The club would still be called Crystal Palace even if the name had died out for the area of town.
By "borderline impossible" they mean at the end they needed to be able to describe it using a bunch of opposing adjectives and I guess thats kindof difficult but I think its generally accepted that in the world of PR you can now get away with whatever adjectives you want so I guess contradictory ones aren't that hard anymore.
"At the top of this system we needed something completely unique and borderline impossible, typographically. Somehow it had to be this contradiction, that was forever dynamic and new and somehow felt eternal and had always been there; that it somehow felt English, but also transcended that and became universal."
It works as the basis of a logo, but as a typeface it's very hard to read and clashes with almost every other font it could be paired with.
notfried 11 hours ago [-]
MyFonts (I'm not affiliated to it) has a visual search for fonts, and searching for this design yields 94 results that are not identical but collectively share the same patterns. Now, fonts are horrible when it comes to licensing. Like, in this case, a font I picked has a 2M page view limit per month and you pay $660/year for that highest tier, so I get why a company would find a custom font a reasonable decision, visually and/or financially. But 4.5 years is absurd.
citbl 15 hours ago [-]
Forget the typeface you can't even get the website with this monstrosity of cookie selection panel.
dbbk 14 hours ago [-]
It's nice that he got work for four years, I guess
cormullion 8 hours ago [-]
What does “designed in terrain” mean?
jl6 11 hours ago [-]
Speaking of ludicrous displays, it kinda looks like Fraktur.
flir 14 hours ago [-]
White on red, with a stripe of red through the white.
Obviously a Spurs supporter.
brod_ie 17 hours ago [-]
COYG!
16 hours ago [-]
gadders 13 hours ago [-]
"The ask was this: How do you make a typeface for when Arsenal shows up in culture? For those moments when football leaves the frenetic energy of the match, when it then collides and harmonises with the worlds of fashion, art, music and more."
Arsenal fans are insufferable.
pirates 6 hours ago [-]
You know Arsenal does collaborations with different fashion designers and labels right?
And every online fanbase is insufferable. It won’t get you traction to bitch about it like it does on /r/soccer
IshKebab 12 hours ago [-]
Whatever typeface they're using on this website is kind of awful. It's got totally random weights on different parts of the letters. Look at the bottom of the e for example.
jstanley 11 hours ago [-]
That's how you know they're serious about typography.
If it just straightforwardly looked good and was easy to read then you wouldn't be sure they'd put any effort into the choice.
But instead the article is effectively the Gravitational Pull of Pepsi[0].
[0] https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
Which makes sense but that alone sent me spinning. Not easy.
1. Totally ok if it doesn’t look good.
2. Identity is not important. It’s fine if it looks totally generic
3. I don’t care about print/screen/merchandise so it can look terrible in that medium
In general, people want things that look distinctive and work for digital and physical media.
and oddly if you instead told them "I was very diligent and spent a lot of time thinking about this" they won't give a flying fuck
I think they’re just doing what is smart, talking about what they contribute and what their craft is, because underlying it all, the truth is they design for legal reasons, because you can only trademark your brand that is a word, which you want to license for merchandising to sell to the mindless sports masses, if you also own the typeface. You can’t really trademark or copyright Arsenal the word written in Times New Roman.
Surely the design aims, the evolution of the typeface and how it meets those aims are more important.
I do have good vision but for me (sample size 1) it’s really hard to read (especially the riband variant). How does it look for people in different environments ?. Is the aim to look iconic rather than communicate information.
I wish Arsenal well as my father was huge fan and would always look for the results.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719987
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19756123
Font people, logo designers and sushi makers.
Documentary films are like nonfiction books: any subject can be fascinating when done well, any subject can be awful and banal when done poorly. I’m not even a huge non-fiction / documentary fan but I’ll die on the hill that telling true stories with depth and passion is much harder than doing great fiction.
(Not least on the basis that they changed the requirements of paper, which before typefaces was a rather more ad-hoc, per-project process)
I know they were originally Woolwich Arsenal, but they dropped the Woolwich when they moved from there.
And, of course, the big problem is, they always try to walk it in.
Port Vale is the only other one without a place name but they never moved, I don't know where the name comes from.
Crystal Palace is a made up place but the club is authentic to that place, if that makes sense?
"At the top of this system we needed something completely unique and borderline impossible, typographically. Somehow it had to be this contradiction, that was forever dynamic and new and somehow felt eternal and had always been there; that it somehow felt English, but also transcended that and became universal."
edit: Wikipedia has a whole section on the crests and typefaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_F.C.#Crest
Obviously a Spurs supporter.
Arsenal fans are insufferable.
If it just straightforwardly looked good and was easy to read then you wouldn't be sure they'd put any effort into the choice.