Comments on: In Letterspace, No One Can Hear You Kern

By: Ted Bautista

Ted Bautista — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 04:57:00 +0000

oh y ou poo r th in g =(

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 01:49:00 +0000

Yeah, I got to tell people back in the 70s that my boyfriend was a stripper.

By: ewiebe

ewiebe — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 01:20:00 +0000

My wife was a stripper (this kind) for several years. We always enjoyed telling people. I suspect they tired of the joke pretty quickly.

By: ewiebe

ewiebe — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 01:20:00 +0000

Since this is a story about being (overly?) fussy about something almost no actually notices or cares about I will tell you all that “a homage” hurts my head when I see it.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 23:34:00 +0000

Avoid the use of “terminal” in connection with rocket launches.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 23:33:00 +0000

Cleek, there is a thing known as “humor” and “juxtapositional irony” that perhaps might be found in a lexicon.

“that text will never again be read by anyone”: Viz., photo.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 23:32:00 +0000

Night-soil collector seems the most interesting of the bunch.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 23:00:00 +0000

The person who laid out the text that came from the typesetter was called a stripper.

By: Bazinga!

Bazinga! — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 22:05:00 +0000

The penny’s date of 1909 was chosen because that was the original launch date of the MSL mission before it was delayed. By that time, the target with its coin in place had already been made. This I heard in a JPL teleconference when someone asked the significance of the 1909 date.

By: Donald Petersen

Donald Petersen — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:36:00 +0000

What’s next? Cooper, flenser, fletcher, soda jerk, stenographer, carhop, pinsetter, lamplighter?

I used to want to be a dramaturge, but I can’t imagine it’d pay the rent.

By: Shane Simmons

Shane Simmons — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:16:00 +0000

I’ve actually done both. If you’re annoyed that your users require decent typefaces–and clearly you are, since you “had to service” machines used by a graphic arts department–vacate your position to make room for someone who actually gives a damn about doing a good job.

By: BillStewart2012

BillStewart2012 — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 18:17:00 +0000

I go to a lot of ethnic restaurants. Random spellings and obviously-non-native-speaker word choices win out over font and layout problems. (E.g. “loath” and “quick-without-ly” :-)

By: SummerFang

SummerFang — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Oh, but when we point out spelling or grammer mistakes, we’re accused of pedantry.

By: tedder42

tedder42 — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:24:00 +0000

you mentioned the sundial, but did you know Bill Nye was involved on all the mars sundials? See his TED talk, Nerdist podcast, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MarsDial

By: duncancreamer

duncancreamer — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:12:00 +0000

I feel your pain. This is my old licence plate: http://www.flickr.com/photos/creamaster/1003039048/

Also the parenthese are too high in (MAHLI)

By: Youkai

Youkai — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:29:00 +0000

It does look a lot better than what you would get if you simply opened up Word and typed out those letters in Arial.

By: SamLL

SamLL — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:22:00 +0000

I was a member of Blacker House. GDBG is a long-running inside joke / signature for the House – sort of a customized “Kilroy was here” – running slightly behind Dabney House’s DEI. Actually I think the closer analogy to Caltech’s undergrad houses these days is the student houses in Harry Potter.

By: cleek

cleek — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:57:00 +0000

… if they can get past the “T……..a” mystery.

By: cleek

cleek — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:55:00 +0000

Rather, it is to make sure the fine points are so well executed that they carry that sense to normal people who don’t look for such things.

so the assumption here is that people who don’t look for these things are nevertheless deeply aware of them?

keep in mind that the text in question is entirely superfluous; there is absolutely no reason for there to be any text whatsoever there. it is essentially graffiti. that text will never again be read by anyone . and it will only be seen by a digital camera on the articulated arm of a robot, the operators of which are not at all interested in text.

getting that text to Mars is the accomplishment. the 0.03″ spacing between those letters is irrelevant.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:46:00 +0000

No one who worked for a type foundry would claim that this was kerned at all; and the letterspacing is quite broad. The “Ta” pair has plenty of room to tighten without creating a blob, given all the type here is essentially perfectly reproduced. There’s no spreading or blurring.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:43:00 +0000

Arial and Helvetica have a number of features in common, as can be evidenced by several sites that compare features or offer “tests” to see if you can guess which of two chunks of type is Arial and which Helvetica. I checked several features on many lowercase letters, but missed the telltale C.

I was a typesetter for several years two decades ago, and have worked extensively with type for 30 years. Arial and Helvetica still get me.

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Given that, until pretty recently, the only difference between the definition of a ‘meter’ and the definition of a ‘penny-width’ was that one was an object made from platinum/iridium alloy by the French and one was an object made from copper by the Americans, I’m not seeing the major issue with using one for scale…

The world has all sorts of wacky coins out there; but US pennies are of reasonably fixed size, minus circulation wear-and-tear.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Interesting! NASA’s mission site describes only two calibration targets (this one and an X-ray detector one), but I find this Popular Science article with details of the sundial: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-08/how-mars-rover-curiositys-sundial-will-help-rover-see-mars-living-color

Oddly, I can’t find any detailed information on NASA’s various sites about the sundial.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:33:00 +0000

The point of graphic design and typography isn’t to make subtle things obvious. Rather, it is to make sure the fine points are so well executed that they carry that sense to normal people who don’t look for such things. It’s like looking at beautifully made cabinetry in a kitchen, and while one might not be able to explain or appreciate the specific reasons why it looks great, the craftsmanship is apparent and carries the knowledge of quality.

Fundamentally, type that is set well and with care is easier to read, too.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Win.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Marvin says alt? Shift! Delete!

By: James Mason

James Mason — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0000

1909 penny – in 100,000 years there will be a conspiracy theory wide enough to drive a truck through regarding when this curiosity was actually sent to Mars.

By: User 100

User 100 — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:15:00 +0000

I’m sorry, but that’s actually some pretty well kerned text on that display (and I worked 8 years for a type foundry whose main selling point was their impeccable kerning).
Considering that it’s a pretty heavy font, and the display is fairly small, all you would end up with if you kerned the “Ta” much tighter would be a big blob of “ink” (as the blown up image above is significantly bigger than it is in reality, it’s not really representative of how it would appear at a 1:1 scale).

By: Tim Warman

Tim Warman — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:14:00 +0000

Any real geologist will tell you you NEVER use coins for scale, since a scale by definition is something whose size is universally and instantly understood. As a rough guess, there’s probably an order of magnitude range in the diameter of coins in circulation across the world.

By: Hugh Johnson

Hugh Johnson — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:07:00 +0000

When this thing gets found by intergalactic travelers in about a million years, they are going to have a giant alien “WTF?” moment because of that penny.