In last week’s post, I made an off-hand comment about Vercel’s Geist Pixel announcement, and I thought it might be interesting to turn this into more of a full-fledged critique.
I don’t think it’s a good announcement, but its flaws are pretty universal, so I want to put words to these flaws. This will extend to a lot of other writing about design, not even necessary even just about typography.
Here’s my advice that I believe would make announcements like this better:
- Write like a human being would. This is famously hard, and takes practice. Here, we see stuff like “unapologetically digital,” “a functional tool within a broader typographical system,” “the result feels both nostalgic and contemporary,” and “constraints weren’t a limitation, they were the design tool.” No one talks like this. I think people believe font releases have to use these kinds of words and phrases, as a way to bring legitimacy to the project. I do not subscribe to that way of thinking. I think it leads to writing that’s optimized only for admiration, which is not as much fun for anyone.
- Show a specific example of a problem you solved. This page hints at some things – “They don’t scale properly across viewports, their metrics conflict with existing typography, or they’re purely decorative.” – but that feels altogether too vague to be useful or even interesting. These are actually fascinating and hard challenges, yet I know as much at the bottom of the page as I did at the top.
- Show details you are proud of. Zoom in literally or figuratively. “Each glyph was manually refined to avoid visual noise, uneven weight distribution, and awkward diagonals.” I would love to see a few examples.
- Show work in progress! Show stuff you discarded. This will be hard, but why not? It’s good practice and I believe this, more than anything else, will have people appreciate what you did. Plus, everybody loves a blooper reel.
- Related: talk about struggle. But don’t just motion in the direction of challenges, or performatively announce that this was the hardest project of your life. Actually talk about something that was hard, and why. Be vulnerable. Be honest. People didn’t care that Rocky lost in the first movie, because people cared about Rocky.
- Talk about your inspiration or history. What we all do here is part of something much bigger. Why a pixel font to begin with? Why is this interesting to you? Is that because Vercel is filled with nerds, or because you got bored with bold and italic, or because it just seems visually interesting in a new way?
- Let me type! Immediately and on every relevant page. I don’t think any modern font announcement/tester can exist without this. This is the easiest way to getting to know the font and explore specific things that matter to you. (To do this here, you have to go to the font page, switch to Geist Pixel at the top, and then scroll all the way to the bottom. This feels entirely too far away.)
- Show, don’t tell, generally. The Geist Pixel announcement feels rife for an avalanche of “show,” but has so little. I mentioned above wishing to see examples of manual refinements. There is a visual for “seamless mixing,” but it’s really a marketing photo, not a real-use example – it visualizes what, but you want to visualize what and why at the same time. I would love to see the spread of variants, specific examples of how the font is not “breaking in production” and “scaling properly across viewports.” I don’t know what is a “semi-mono approach” and I would like to learn.
- Motion is okay, but it has zero nutritional value. If you have limited resources, don’t spend it on motion. Anything interactive is better. (But again, the best interactive thing is letting you type.)
- The “Already shaping what’s next” is a narratively unsatisfying section, as it promises stuff that you cannot see yet. Either show those, or skip the tease altogether.
I know the elephant in the room here is “how big companies do things.” A lot of redesign announcements and font unveils exist chiefly to make the execs who championed them happy, and perhaps as fodder for future promotion – I bet the whole “Already shaping what’s next” section isn’t really written for external audience – and they get chewed by the big PR machine that often files away whatever personality and quirkiness might have been there. Your job is to fight that machine! But I acknowledge that it might be hard.
However, I’ve also seen all this seeping into personal font announcements, which is unfortunate. (I don’t want to link to specific examples, since that’d be punching down.)
Also, this is not just about the joy of reading or some general notion of “craft” – although they are important, too. This is also purely informational. I feel I haven’t learned enough from the Geist Pixel announcement for the amount of time I spent with it. I don’t understand “multiple variants for different densities and use cases” or “semi-mono approach” or what stylistic sets are included. (My general goal is to write in a way that people can learn something new from any design announcement, even if they don’t have any prior context, and if they never actually use the font.)
It‘s a shame, because the work itself seems thoughtful and excellent, deserves a better intro, and could help others interested in typography as a jumping off point, particularly because this feels like a typeface off the beaten path.
Just to round up this post, some recent counterexamples:
