Roons interface choices remind me of those big coffee table books about architecture that get praised by everyone but nobody actually reads.
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BINGO. I once read that being a âconnoisseurâ is knowing the difference between what you like and what is good. I do not care for U2, Diane Arbus, Times Roman, or sea urchins as sushi, but I recognize their objective greatness and their influence in their fields. An art director should be able to say WHY a particular type face was chosen, and âI like itâ is not an answer to that question. (I mean, people like Zapf Chancery, and thatâs just depressing.)
If thereâs a reason Grifo is the answer in this situation, Iâll be damned if I can divine it. In this context, itâs worse than ugly. It just doesnât WORK.
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I think thatâs a very good analogy. You look at hose books and they look nice, but they are not very nice to read on a daily basis⌠
I think those books are only designed to be used as photo props in lifestyle magazines or furniture shops⌠
By that logic, shouldnât you precise why it doesnât work? To say it doesnât work is the same weight in argument as I like it
There is ok consistency in how the font is being used, at least over iPhone, iPad and Macbook. The only place I can immediately spot where there is a inconsistency is on the Live Radio section, where categories possibly should have the serif applied. But I wouldnât make it a strong argument against that.
The serif is only used in very large type as far as I can tell and never in small. This makes it perfect for the magazine headline feeling, Roon said they wanted to communicate. Usually it is only the very main object of each screen which get te serif and nothing else. I say usually, as the genre screen present them a bit differently, but also there it works as they show a lead further into the genre browsing.
Sorry, but even if it is not a perfectly executed visual style, it is not sloppy. If you find it sloppy, then please show me. Maybe it is, but either I havenât found these horrid screens yet, or my typography eye is simply not at the level of yours.
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I really appreciate this civil and focused conversation. I just wanted to say thanks for being such good âconversationalistsâ
Take care,
Vince
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I like the mix
I, too, like the mix.
What I simply abhor is the continuance, from 1.7, of the white justified text on black in the Now Playing screens when I have consciously chosen the Light theme. 
Edit: just noticed that the text is no longer justified, but ragged right. A small step in the right directionâŚ
It was invented 20 years or so ago, and itâs called skinâŚ
Mixing is fine, but thereâs an old rule of serif for text and sans for titles for a good reason.
And rules are made to be broken â if done well. They are not written in stone.
This is subjective yes, but to me it works. Keeping all in sans serif would not convey the luxury music magazine feeling in an easier way than this choice â I think.
A topic to divide us all.
Yes, of course the best artists break the ârules.â But thereâs such a thing as readability that trumps that rule breaking in typography. Try reading a long bio of Bach in Roon (sans serif), and then go read a similar length article in the NYT (serif). Tell me which one you actually got through because your eyes werenât swimming or ready to pop out of your head.
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I agree that for sustained reading a serif is easier on the eye, but I donât think people would have been more appreciative of what you are suggesting, to put the serif font on the small text on screen.
Also to me the sans-serif doesnât cause problems, because the lines of text are not very wide (and only left-adjusted, which make it easier for the eye to find the next line and not get lost).
But should say that until this post from you, I thought most had issues with the serif and not the other way around. Maybe I was wrong with that assumption.
Thatâs true for Western countries, Charles, but itâs not universal. Scandinavians routinely use sans-serif faces for text, and thereâs good research on âreadabilityâ that links the fluency of serif text among US residents, for example, to typographic customs of the country, rather than anything inherent in the design of the faces â i.e., Swedes read sans serif text just as quickly as Americans read serifs. Iâm just reporting some of what I know, not at all looking for a fight.
Fair point, Martin. I think the face calls too much attention to itself â witness this discussion â which, to my mind, is contrary to the purpose of type in a type-intensive exercise. Type conveys information, and anything that distracts from that â âWhoa, what a cool type face!â â is problematic to me. (Itâs why the same dozen-or-so type faces have been in wide use since the 18th century: because most of us donât really notice them. They just do their job.) I recognize that competent designers may disagree to some extent on this, but we would certainly agree on principle: Nobody sane would set a book in a script or a blackletter.
Grifo is too chiseled for my eye, and some of the very specific choices by its designer are awkward. One type site notes, âIndeed, sharp spikes and hooks are one of Grifoâs traits.â Enough said? For my part, the strange join of the two strokes of the lower-case ây,â the bizarre finish on the bottom of the leg of the lower-case âb,â and the ânon-serifâ on the bottom right leg of the upper-case âKâ are a few examples. These are all unorthodox choices by a designer. Nothing wrong with that per se, of course, but they work against the familiarity that most of us expect, even if unconsciously, from serif type.
Grifo is a 2016 design, meaning it needs about 20 years to see if anybody is still using it. (The type world is littered with the-next-great-things that fade in a few years. Optima is almost never used today, despite being hailed widely in the 1980s as the greatest design of the era. Ditto Meta for the first decade of the 2000s.) Picking such a recent design is a near-guarantee that it wonât hold up well, and that the design will soon look dated.
So thatâs a longer thought. We can disagree about whether we âlikeâ it, and obviously I donât â but I also think there are objective problems with it that are apparent to those of us who are fascinated, either by vocation or simple obsession (Iâm the latter), by type.
As they say, the politics are so fierce because the stakes are so low!
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Independent of what we all individually like, there are plenty of examples of very successful designs that use one display font and one text font, and they are very frequently one serif and the other sans, though plenty of the time they are simply distinct fonts that are either both serif or both sans. Itâs a design choice. I would describe this move as one that took Roon from being more utilitarian (what I as a leader of software engineers used to call âdesigned by engineersâ, with a smile) to one that is more design forward.
The fonts arenât the only evidence of this design choice. So goeth purple, round images, multiple colors. Some have described this as âmagazineyâ. In a sense itâs a set of decisions which tie to increasing visual interest and visual engagement. Theyâre the same kinds of design decisions a social network might make if they were trying to get you to use their interface as many seconds & minutes of the day as possible.
Now, we have an overwhelmingly male, and older, and engineering-y user base. These decisions might grate on that core to some degree. Worse for Roon, there are a lot of folks, especially the old-timer Roon since the beginning $500 lifetime crew, who likely view it as a utility. And anything that deviates from the visual representation of utilitarianism is going to seem like it makes it less useful. Some people find that theyâre faster when information is super-dense, some when thereâs more white-space. Iâve seen in multiple occasions where users believe theyâre faster at achieving a task in a denser lay-out, especially when theyâre more âexpertyâ. But most of the time the opposite turns out to be true, in some sort of wierd design dunning-Kruger effect. Anyhow, I would just say that you canât please anyone, but you have business goals, user profiling goals, you make your decision and you stick with it. People inevitably get used to it and some of the naysayers drop out, and some love it over time. And the real question is whether people use it more or less, whether they have good experiences measured by engagement and renewal and referral. People very often are not good judges of their own preferences - I know Iâm not. Judge not by what I say, but by what I do.
Out.
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Yes, of course, Iâm being a generalist and thereâs plenty of contemporary examples of sans serif type being used for body text, and it has actually become quite commonplace. Itâs a matter then of finding the correct one for readability on a computer screen (esp white against black) and then line spacing, kerning etc. But it doesnât feel like Roon made it past just picking some trendy typestyles and going with them, with little thought as to how they actually look and work beyond a printed out storyboard.
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I just looked at the last 2 issues of The Absolute Sound. There are mixed typefaces in the ads but I donât see any examples of mixed typefaces in the editorial content. Looking at Downbeat, there are mixed typefaces in the editorial content. Mixed typefaces are clearly a mixed bag
Not sure what youâre looking at, but almost every editorial page of TAS 312 reveals more than one face, primarily Bembo and Aller. Most copy is (like Stereophile, oddly enough) Bembo, one of the sturdiest text faces in history, with originals dating to the 1600s. Most headlines are Aller Bold. In many of TASâs âbest ofâ issues, they use both of those fonts for copy on a single page â see p. 32, e.g. (I donât understand this, because I have this crazy idea that the same kind of information should be presented in the same kind of format. Again, is the design serving the reader or the designer?) Also on p.32, and in that entire section, the page headline is Bembo â though review headlines are Aller, with review subheads in some dated serif, New Century Schoolbook or something similar. The section headers (âAbsolute Analog,â p. 84) are in what appears to be the bold of that same long-in-the-tooth serif.
Thereâs no hard-and-fast rule about this stuff, just like good photographs and paintings can come in many different colors. The real lesson is that professional layout requires a skilled art director. Anybody can pick two type faces, but like all crafts, design requires mistakes and experience. Thatâs what I find puzzling about Roonâs adoption of Grifo⌠Just⌠why?
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Will answer a bit longer on your reply tomorrow, but about Grifo, maybe the price was right?
Some enlightening discussions here, refreshing to say the least. Ta!
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I agree with this. Justified test should be avoided wherever possible. It should only be used in relatively narrow columns of copy where space is at a premium, in newspapers or magazines for example.
It is often used because people think it looks âneatâ or âtidyâ as both edges of the column are straight vertically, but itâs less legible and more uncomfortable to read than ragged text as the space between words is uneven.
Sorry, type nerd in me coming out there!
I like the display font that Roon are now using. It has a kind of rhythm and elegance to it that works well, especially on the white background.
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