Fonts for rendering lines and bars from data

Google Fonts now provides two open source fonts by Dmitry Ivanov that let you make simplified, small to medium line and bar charts based on data: Linefont and Wavefont. These might come in handy when you want to embed small charts in body text.

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Fonts primer

The Washington Post provides an introduction to fonts with mini-quizzes and straightforward examples. You can also change the font of the article:

You make font choices every day. You pick type designs each time you use a word processor, read an e-book, send an email, prepare a presentation, craft a wedding invite and make an Instagram story.

It might seem like just a question of style, but research reveals fonts can dramatically shape what you communicate and how you read.

Everyone knows Comic Sans is always the best choice.

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Map shows US typefaces named after cities in their geographic location

For The Statesider, Andy Murdock wondered how many typefaces are named after American locations. Then he put those typefaces on a map. So how many?

The answer is 222. That’s not actually the answer, it’s just where I had to stop, because the more I looked the more I found. What started as a quirky challenge to make a US font map during COVID-19 quarantine days started to edge into obsessive-compulsive territory. I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking, “Did I check to see if there’s a Boise font?” (I did. There isn’t.) I finally found the limit to how many fonts I could use in one place.

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Gerry, a font based on gerrymandered congressional districts

Gerry uses congressional district boundaries as letters. Hahahahaha. Oh wait.

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People font

You know those graphics that use icons of people to represent units or counts of people? The Wee People font by Alberto Cairo and Scott Klein makes it easier to use such icons on the web. Just add the CSS file and you’re ready to go.

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How artificial intelligence can augment our own

There’s another essay on Distill by Shan Carter and Michael Nielsen. They describe and demonstrate how one might use artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence.

Our essay begins with a survey of recent technical work hinting at artificial intelligence augmentation, including work on generative interfaces – that is, interfaces which can be used to explore and visualize generative machine learning models. Such interfaces develop a kind of cartography of generative models, ways for humans to explore and make meaning from those models, and to incorporate what those models “know” into their creative work.

Because, you know, it’s not all about machines taking over the world.

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Playing with fonts using neural networks

Font neural network

Erik Bernhardsson downloaded 50,000 fonts and then threw them to the neural networks to see what sort of letters a model might come up with.

These are all characters drawn from the test set, so the network hasn’t seen any of them during training. All we’re telling the network is (a) what font it is (b) what character it is. The model has seen other characters of the same font during training, so what it does is to infer from those training examples to the unseen test examples.

I especially like the part where you can see a spectrum of generated fonts through varying parameters.

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