... and I find it distracting by how wrong it is. It should say "Leroy technical lettering set", or even better mention Gorton directly.
Instead, it says: "a Gothic sans-serif script", even if it mentions Leroy a few paragraphs later :)
ucyo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
More like "The hardest website your browser will work on" ... will come back once it loads
sixtyj [3 hidden]5 mins ago
600 images in the page takes time to load.
ReactiveJelly [3 hidden]5 mins 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."
yohannesk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I thought it was 40K reference at first about certainty of steel
ErroneousBosh [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
License plates vary between countries but this description should be recognisable to most of the world.
FinnKuhn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We use "AA AA 1234" or variations of that, so the examples did not register as license plates at all. Interesting.
addandsubtract [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
msdz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I believe those are car license plate numbers.
xnorswap [3 hidden]5 mins ago
British ones of various vintage, with RFS 131Y the oldest of those, from 1983.
ggm [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Could be. And they're high quality images and movie clips.
ReactiveJelly [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
jrrv [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
gpvos [3 hidden]5 mins ago
On Fennec on Android, no images appear to load at all. Edit: they do, it just takes ages. Could be the slow connection.
Firehawke [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
keyle [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
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)
kingkongjaffa [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
jrrv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
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 [3 hidden]5 mins 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
jason_s [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
mvdtnz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
[flagged]
gpvos [3 hidden]5 mins 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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Counterpoint: I give a shit about this because I love typefaces / fonts, how they are made and what the history behind them is.
HN.zip
... and I find it distracting by how wrong it is. It should say "Leroy technical lettering set", or even better mention Gorton directly.
Instead, it says: "a Gothic sans-serif script", even if it mentions Leroy a few paragraphs later :)
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
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.
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'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.
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)
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
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
Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.