The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

More like "The hardest website your browser will work on" ... will come back once it loads

> Carve something into plastic, on the other hand, and it can survive decades. Substitute plastic for metal, and you just turned decades into centuries.

"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."

The site is killing my brave browser. Maybe long thin transoceanic paths, or phase of the moon.

So many partially loaded images.

But definitely worth the wait. A great read. I liked the almost mimetic quality of "which slightly broken font plate is being reused to make the broken "3" I keep seeing" which is a classic detective novel trope, e.g. Lord Peter Whimsey in "strong poison" and a typewriter glitch he recognises.

I love this article, it's been posted here several times before. The first time I read it I had been in New York and was waiting in JFK to fly home, so naturally it resonated.

In some ways it's THE perfect hacker news article. It's about design sensibilities and typography, and as we know all HN readers have great taste, so it tickles that part of the brain.

It's mechanical and analogue, so it harkens back to a time when engineers built things with their hands and their work had a physical manifestation in the real world. So for the former 'physical' engineers who turned to tech for better career prospect (like me) it tickles that part of the brain too!

It has an air of Americana in that New York is its most iconic city and this article is drenched in 'look how good we used to make things', and then it delightfully leads us back to old blighty for the Anglophiles.

For an article romantic about a font, it's perfection. Catnip for nerds.

I started reading the article with a feeling of "I don't recognize this at all" from the first few images that slowly loaded.

Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it."

A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.

It's a pretty font and gives that instant retro look on keyboards for example.

I've tried it on the computer with "Gorton Digital" and that's just terrible, I can't recommend it. The spacing/kerning is all wrong.

Hoping someone takes on the project of making a nice digital font, potentially a mono-spaced one too.

Some past comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053419

The Gorton machines being initially developed by a lens manufacturer made a lot of sense given the 1920s brochure material the author included earlier. That material (unlike the later versions presented) focused on the machine's ability to do circular engravings (exactly the speciality the lens text presumably needed)

Funny, I'd actually noticed that this font was knocking around in various places, particularly in American media, without giving it too much conscious thought. Although I had decided that I liked it. It's very 60s, mechanical, tactile, and almost cute in its ignorance of typography rules that would come to be unquestionable. It's nice to put a name to the font.

https://archive.ph/mYRQX

(the site seems to eagerly load lots of large images, and a 500MB video)

And on the pedestal these words appear (in Gorton):

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains.

Cool to flip through their master copy typeface reference: https://archive.org/details/gorton-master-copy-type-for-all-...

Very few of the images are loading for me.

It's funny reading an article about kerning mistakes in font usage while the author doesn't even bother to implement lazy loading of images.

Jesus, who thought loading hundred of MB of images in a single page was a good idea?

Normally I hate the pointless use of javascript in basic text and image websites, but lazy image loading would probably stop this server having been hugged to death

> Of course you will see it, the same way you saw a lot of Arial in the 1990s, or Calibri today.

Well, that didn't last long; Aptos enters the chat.

[flagged]

> There was a goofy wavy hook sticking out of Q. P and R were often too wide. & and @ symbols would be laughed away in a type crit, and the endings of C felt like grabbing something next to it – a beginning of a ligature that never came.

No one gives a shit about this.