tblancpain

Hi! I’m Thierry Blancpain, co-founder of Grilli Type. If you have any questions, happy to answer! I designed and coded the site, although it’s quite a mess ;)

I found that the benefits – a more well-moderated use of complaining in everyday life – stay with me all year, so I do it steadfast for one month and then am a bit less aware, and probably a bit more lax overall, about my complaining.

As a designer, that’s one my life’s goals.

I don’t want to write out rules or codify behavior with this, so I never wrote this out, but: of course you can still critique things.

I’m a designer, my work consists of giving people critique and telling them what’s wrong with their work, and how to make it better. I couldn’t survive half a day without this.

What this month is about, for me, is getting rid of useless negativity in my life. And that comes from complaining, to a large degree. If you want to tell your congrassman he’s wrong, go for it. If you want to call a company and ask them to repair your product, do it. But stop complaining to your colleagues about the rainy Saturday, and instead tell them about the sunny Sunday that you shared with your friends.

I started this together with my friend Pieter. Happy to answer any questions you may have. Join us!

Hey! Yes, every element of this typeface was labored over and discussed in detail again and again throughout its three year design process.

On page 6 of the specimen PDF (http://grillitype.com/sites/default/files/specimen/GT-Sectra...) you can read about some of the design elements and why we chose them. The ink trap in the lowercase y is one of the stylistic ink traps, designed to create a higher contrast and add visual sharpness to the typeface.

Font hinting is relative, and there’s many levels of font hinting. To simplify (a lot), the main levels are: 1) Absolutely no hinting information present 2) Auto-hinting process used to create hinting information 3) Manual hinting process used to create hinting information

Our typefaces for the web are auto-hinted, the only realistic possibility for smaller foundries. We hint them with all possible auto-hinting tools and then decide which one looks best (per style) across all rendering environments. The results will never be perfect, but absolutely acceptable across a large number of rendering environments and type sizes used.

No auto-hinted font is going to look perfect at 8px sizes, for that you absolutely need hand-hinted fonts (and even then they look like crap). But hand-hinting a font costs thousands of dollars per style – or about $50 per character, more or less. Only big foundries and operating system providers like Microsoft can do that. GT Sectra for example contains around 900 glyphs per style, across 30 styles.

Additionally, the whole industry is moving away from manual hinting, as more and more high-dpi devices are on the market, and operating systems’ rendering of typefaces becomes less and less dependent on hinting information (OS X ignores it completely, for example). It’s just not an investment that’s really worth it going forward.

You can see GT Sectra in small use for example in use on http://reportagen.com – and it holds up pretty decently in my opinion. Or don’t you think?

Thierry here from Grilli Type – we released GT Sectra. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

I just realized my mistake – of not posting the original article, and not searching for it – before coming back here now. It wasn’t intended to be spammy. Sorry for that.

Thank you!

Not having the huge address header on the iPhone with Safari is already a huge improvement of the reading experience.

It helps the consumer because if it's a good app, it allows you to better focus on that one task you're after. Reading the news, for example. I haven't had any of the problems he discusses with the NYTimes app, for example.

For the organization, the benefits of longer engagement are pretty obvious as well.

He's right about a lot of bad developers (and clueless execs) producing really crappy apps. He's wrong if he thinks that a lot of the bigger brands are still at that stage.