Rendered at 15:38:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
Firehawke 1 days ago [-]
I started reading the article with a feeling of "I don't recognize this at all" from the first few images that slowly loaded.
Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it."
A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.
ReactiveJelly 1 days ago [-]
> Carve something into plastic, on the other hand, and it can survive decades. Substitute plastic for metal, and you just turned decades into centuries.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
cwmma 1 days ago [-]
Ironically, most of the metal stuff doesn't survive from antiquary. For instance most statues were in bronze not marble, but since metal can be easily recycled the only metal statues that survived are from ship wrecks.
Rendello 25 minutes ago [-]
Stone is a safer bet to survive the centuries, but even those are reused as bricks, like the Rosetta Stone:
I thought it was 40K reference at first about certainty of steel
inhumantsar 1 days ago [-]
it's from the mistborn series by brandon sanderson. fun books. would make a great big budget TV series someday
eightysixfour 1 days ago [-]
Mistborn was supposedly picked up for film.
GarnetFloride 13 hours ago [-]
Picked up by Apple, of all places, and Brandon finished the first draft of the screenplay last week.
ErroneousBosh 1 days ago [-]
I've been saying for years that future archaeologists will wonder at these mysterious emblems they dig up, generally associated with a large deposit of what was once highly refined iron, aluminium and copper. About half a metre wide and 11cm high, made of incredibly durable plastic obviously intended to last for centuries, if not millenia.
And they'll puzzle over the inscriptions, "G809 BGG", "R420 BRL", "RFS 131Y", "SJ12 EXW", "RE51 CUE" - this on some huge chunk of steel, easily three times as big as the rest, and so many others.
What could they mean?
setopt 1 days ago [-]
As a non-American, I don’t even understand today what that means. (And the website linked to isn’t loading, so I don’t have the context from that.)
Arch-TK 1 days ago [-]
License plates vary between countries but this description should be recognisable to most of the world.
FinnKuhn 1 days ago [-]
We use "AA AA 1234" or variations of that, so the examples did not register as license plates at all. Interesting.
addandsubtract 1 days ago [-]
Regardless of the content, what other 50x11cm mass produced metal signs are there? I was thinking street name signs, before reading the examples.
FinnKuhn 1 days ago [-]
The comment described them as made out of plastic, while license plates here are usually made from aluminum, so I was thinking more along the lines of some kind of packaging.
ErroneousBosh 17 hours ago [-]
In the UK they're incredibly high quality perspex, to the extent that if you need to make up some small HV insulators that won't be subjected to a lot of mechanical stress you could do worse than chop up some old numberplates.
msdz 1 days ago [-]
I believe those are car license plate numbers.
xnorswap 1 days ago [-]
British ones of various vintage, with RFS 131Y the oldest of those, from 1983.
ceejayoz 23 hours ago [-]
"We believe they served some kind of religious purpose."
ErroneousBosh 17 hours ago [-]
I mean, <gestures at car culture>...
1 days ago [-]
vee-kay 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
ggm 1 days ago [-]
The site is killing my brave browser. Maybe long thin transoceanic paths, or phase of the moon.
So many partially loaded images.
But definitely worth the wait. A great read. I liked the almost mimetic quality of "which slightly broken font plate is being reused to make the broken "3" I keep seeing" which is a classic detective novel trope, e.g. Lord Peter Whimsey in "strong poison" and a typewriter glitch he recognises.
kylestanfield 1 days ago [-]
There's 600 photos and one 500 MB video. It seems like they are being served directly from the owner's Apache server from response headers. Server could be overloaded?
ggm 1 days ago [-]
Could be. And they're high quality images and movie clips.
ReactiveJelly 1 days ago [-]
It is definitely a "Macbook Pro on a wooden table at a coffee shop, owner with tattoos and stylish facial hair" kind of website
ggm 1 days ago [-]
Yea, but if I bought coffee table books and this was printed by Taschen, I'd buy it.
That typeface is so familiar. One imagines a great big red "reset" up in the clouds, benevolent creator pondering pressing, this is definitely the font on the button. I can smell machine oil, hear 50hz hum just looking at these labels.
rubberpoliceman 23 hours ago [-]
> hear 50hz
100Hz, actually…
gpvos 1 days ago [-]
On Fennec on Android, no images appear to load at all. Edit: they do, it just takes ages. Could be the slow connection.
jrrv 1 days ago [-]
I think my ad blocker was the problem. Disabling it didn't turn it into the fastest website in the world—the images loaded in about 15 seconds—but that was a lot better than the never loading I was getting before disabling it.
ucyo 1 days ago [-]
More like "The hardest website your browser will work on" ... will come back once it loads
Shorel 1 days ago [-]
Nah, it is only using 90MB of RAM in my PC.
At the same time, Gmail is using 244MB.
My average tab opened is about 30MB, so the difference is only 3 times the memory.
Probably only the network connection struggles for a few seconds in my phone, and that's it.
sixtyj 1 days ago [-]
600 images in the page takes time to load.
NichoPaolucci 4 hours ago [-]
Unrelated to the article, but I'm a big trackpad user and, man... I sure hate it when websites hijack my scrolling / pinch + zoom functionality. Totally throws me for a loop.
keyle 1 days ago [-]
It's a pretty font and gives that instant retro look on keyboards for example.
I've tried it on the computer with "Gorton Digital" and that's just terrible, I can't recommend it. The spacing/kerning is all wrong.
Hoping someone takes on the project of making a nice digital font, potentially a mono-spaced one too.
As nerdy as it is, it is also an interesting historical look on how certain things in society/culture have a life that is hidden in plain view and quietly goes on. It is an interesting reflection on many things in life.
FrameworkFred 1 days ago [-]
That was a fun read. I was a draftsman as a teenager in the late 80s and I did my best to make my handwriting look like those letters. Then, as a CAD operator, I put that font on everything I produced. It never once occurred to me that it looked like that because it was designed to be legibly engraved.
mech998877 1 days ago [-]
Gorton does strike me as very similar to Century Gothic which is the default font for a lot of CAD software I've used (Creo, maybe others).
claiir 1 days ago [-]
The Gorton machines being initially developed by a lens manufacturer made a lot of sense given the 1920s brochure material the author included earlier. That material (unlike the later versions presented) focused on the machine's ability to do circular engravings (exactly the speciality the lens text presumably needed)
Funny, I'd actually noticed that this font was knocking around in various places, particularly in American media, without giving it too much conscious thought. Although I had decided that I liked it. It's very 60s, mechanical, tactile, and almost cute in its ignorance of typography rules that would come to be unquestionable. It's nice to put a name to the font.
fsargent 1 days ago [-]
And on the pedestal these words appear (in Gorton):
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
kingkongjaffa 1 days ago [-]
I love this article, it's been posted here several times before. The first time I read it I had been in New York and was waiting in JFK to fly home, so naturally it resonated.
In some ways it's THE perfect hacker news article. It's about design sensibilities and typography, and as we know all HN readers have great taste, so it tickles that part of the brain.
It's mechanical and analogue, so it harkens back to a time when engineers built things with their hands and their work had a physical manifestation in the real world. So for the former 'physical' engineers who turned to tech for better career prospect (like me) it tickles that part of the brain too!
It has an air of Americana in that New York is its most iconic city and this article is drenched in 'look how good we used to make things', and then it delightfully leads us back to old blighty for the Anglophiles.
For an article romantic about a font, it's perfection. Catnip for nerds.
... and I find it distracting by how wrong it is. It should say "Single stroke Gothic", or even better: mention Gorton directly.
Instead, it says: "a Gothic sans-serif script", even if it mentions Leroy a few paragraphs later :)
jason_s 1 days ago [-]
> Of course you will see it, the same way you saw a lot of Arial in the 1990s, or Calibri today.
Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.
dreamcompiler 1 days ago [-]
I started reading this article and thought to myself "Author is just talking about Leroy and calling it Gorton for some reason."
Sure enough. I learned a lot of history from this wonderful piece. And I still have the Leroy device I used in the 70s.
ImHereToVote 1 days ago [-]
It's funny reading an article about kerning mistakes in font usage while the author doesn't even bother to implement lazy loading of images.
ChrisRR 1 days ago [-]
Jesus, who thought loading hundred of MB of images in a single page was a good idea?
Normally I hate the pointless use of javascript in basic text and image websites, but lazy image loading would probably stop this server having been hugged to death
mewens 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mvdtnz 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
gpvos 1 days ago [-]
Fonts are a side interest for a very large number of hackers. In fact this page has been submitted before and got 857 points and 122 comments.
mfru 1 days ago [-]
Counterpoint: I give a shit about this because I love typefaces / fonts, how they are made and what the history behind them is.
jimmaswell 1 days ago [-]
I can appreciate the aesthetics of a font but I found the author's disadulation of the letters excessive and totally unrelatable. They look nice while clear and functional for their use case to me.
Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it."
A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
And they'll puzzle over the inscriptions, "G809 BGG", "R420 BRL", "RFS 131Y", "SJ12 EXW", "RE51 CUE" - this on some huge chunk of steel, easily three times as big as the rest, and so many others.
What could they mean?
So many partially loaded images.
But definitely worth the wait. A great read. I liked the almost mimetic quality of "which slightly broken font plate is being reused to make the broken "3" I keep seeing" which is a classic detective novel trope, e.g. Lord Peter Whimsey in "strong poison" and a typewriter glitch he recognises.
That typeface is so familiar. One imagines a great big red "reset" up in the clouds, benevolent creator pondering pressing, this is definitely the font on the button. I can smell machine oil, hear 50hz hum just looking at these labels.
100Hz, actually…
At the same time, Gmail is using 244MB.
My average tab opened is about 30MB, so the difference is only 3 times the memory.
Probably only the network connection struggles for a few seconds in my phone, and that's it.
I've tried it on the computer with "Gorton Digital" and that's just terrible, I can't recommend it. The spacing/kerning is all wrong.
Hoping someone takes on the project of making a nice digital font, potentially a mono-spaced one too.
As nerdy as it is, it is also an interesting historical look on how certain things in society/culture have a life that is hidden in plain view and quietly goes on. It is an interesting reflection on many things in life.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
In some ways it's THE perfect hacker news article. It's about design sensibilities and typography, and as we know all HN readers have great taste, so it tickles that part of the brain.
It's mechanical and analogue, so it harkens back to a time when engineers built things with their hands and their work had a physical manifestation in the real world. So for the former 'physical' engineers who turned to tech for better career prospect (like me) it tickles that part of the brain too!
It has an air of Americana in that New York is its most iconic city and this article is drenched in 'look how good we used to make things', and then it delightfully leads us back to old blighty for the Anglophiles.
For an article romantic about a font, it's perfection. Catnip for nerds.
(the site seems to eagerly load lots of large images, and a 500MB video)
... and I find it distracting by how wrong it is. It should say "Single stroke Gothic", or even better: mention Gorton directly.
Instead, it says: "a Gothic sans-serif script", even if it mentions Leroy a few paragraphs later :)
Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.
Sure enough. I learned a lot of history from this wonderful piece. And I still have the Leroy device I used in the 70s.
Normally I hate the pointless use of javascript in basic text and image websites, but lazy image loading would probably stop this server having been hugged to death