The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing
Ranked #3 on Hacker News with 83 points and 20 comments.
Appreciating typography is a study in paradox. The primary goal of well-designed typography is to help you read the words, not appreciate how the words are composed of letters and how each of those individual letters has been designed to convey a small bit of meaning. If you see the typography rather than read the words, the typography has failed in its job, right? You should be reading, not staring at the shape of that uppercase A.
The goal with typography is functional, right? To convey the meaning, not the feeling?
Feeling is always conveyed. The question is, depending on the project, “How much feeling is required?”
I’ve created a full-time job for myself talking to Claude Code. This is Claude running from the command line of macOS, which gives me unhindered access to my data. I’m using Ghostty. I’m staring at a fixed-width typeface all day. Apple provides a functional and gorgeous fixed-width variant of their San Francisco typeface called SF Mono, which I’ve been using for months, but, well, I have a short attention span — typographically speaking.
In the past month, I’ve evaluated many additional fixed-width typefaces favored by the nerdcore. Here are the six that have made my cut: 1
The question is: how do they make you feel? For a typeface designed for coding, you first want fixed-width. Every letter and symbol is the same width, giving you a predictable and readable grid. But how wide? And how tall? Also, how much information do you want to be able to see on a screen?