Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction.
Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight.
So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction.
You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.
>Text evolved from shapes chiselled into rock or pressed into wet clay, so the roots of typography are as tactile and 3D as it's possible to be.
>Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
>Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
But you don't see the depth of the stroke or the texture of the paper when you're reading. You see abstract lines. You don't see the imperfect squiggles our meat-appendages create unless you really focus; at a glance, your brain autocorrects them into the intended strokes.
>Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
>Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
Even ink on a scroll has a 3D feel. The 'paper' - whatever it's made of - has texture, and the way the ink sinks into it has depth and texture too.
Likewise with traditional printing. The sequence of pages creates a 3D object, and old-fashioned heavy letter press books have texture and depth you won't get on a screen.
Modern minimalism only became fashionable a century or so ago, which was - coincidentally - around the time artists started experimenting with extreme abstraction.
Minimalism has one big problem - it lacks scale-independence. A hand-printed book has visual detail across a range of physical dimensions. You can see the cover across a room, but if you look at the print with a magnifying glass, you'll see detail at that scale too.
Minimalist digital typography has detail at exactly one dimension - the size of the content. Zoom out, and you can't see the content. Zoom in, and you see pixels.
It's a difference of metaphorical and literal depth. Ignoring scale-dependence robs content of weight.
So minimalism is literally shallow. It's aesthetic lossy compression - abstraction into illegibility, for the sake of abstraction.
You can get away with that in art if you have something interesting to say. But it's really not the best of all possible solutions for UI/UX.