HN Explorer

23 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 65.8 ms ] thread
pallandt
This is very, very pleasing visually.
agumonkey
Especially the compared results. I found the cyan over made some almost beautiful logotype designs over my errors.
cs648
87/100. Very interesting game, it definitely helped me start to understand why some people get so upset about incorrect kerning. Would have been nice to see a running total score throughout.
rmk2
85/100

I really like the idea behind this side. It neatly shows the difference between proper and improper kerning. It also showed me that I am much more likely to kern certain types correctly naturally.

jawns
I liked this, although I felt a little bit of resentment over the fact that the "correct" answer is a typographer's solution -- as if no other typographer could possibly disagree.
lowboy
90/100, and I agree with jawns that it should be agreed upon by multiple typographers, not just one.
Wistar
Hmm. Crashes Firefox 25.0.1 instantly on OSX 10.6.8
fiatpandas
Same for me (10.7.5). I just cracked open Chrome to try it out and no issues.
Wistar
84/100 after switching to safari. I am irked that the last character in the word is not moveable as I thought many of these were too widely spaced for my tastes. I got several 100/100 scores but one 45/100 with which I utterly disagree and about which I am conferring with my lawyer.
techwizrd
Works perfectly for me on Firefox 25 on Linux. Worked fine in Nightly on Linux as well. Is something wrong with your profile?
sjwright
I hope everyone filled out and submitted detailed crash reports?
tptacek
I did much better this time than I did the last time this was posted. The trick is to pay attention to the negative space more than the letterforms themselves; if you visualize the black pixels as the meaningful content, it's usually straightforward to see where things are out of balance.
techwizrd
98/100. "Toronto" and "Xylophone" were really hard for me. I arranged them and tried to squint from afar to make sure they looked balanced.
tptacek
Xylophone was the one for me where negative space was most helpful; notice how most of the letterforms are bordered by a straight edge on one side and a curved one, always at x-height, on the other.
TwoBit
This game doesn't work like kerning works. The game lets you re-space letters between letters at fixed positions on the left and right. Kerning is about the spacing of all letters.
itafroma
> Kerning is about the spacing of all letters.

That's tracking (also called letter-spacing). Kerning is indeed about the adjustment of space between individual letters.

elseless
95/100. I thought the second-to-last was hardest. Serif/sans-serif didn't make as much of a difference as I expected.
Stratoscope
Aw man. I only got 87/100. And I thought I was a decent kemer!
Kronopath
93/100. The one with small caps was tricky -- small caps fonts generally have wider letterspacing, which threw me off for a bit.
the_imp
Only 79/100, but I think the scoring is a bit off---it seems to judge the total divergence, when it really ought to look at each pair of letters separately.