Typophile Critique Forum

ChrisL

berateafont.com

DB~

Off the top of my head, the rating factors might be, (stylistic) consistency, language support, kerning and tracking, buglessness, freeness, and similar things. Mostly technical, only a little bit of "style", since an image would get that across better.

Just in case anyone thought I was putting out the call only due to a shortage of bad ideas of my own, here's a list, not checked for use, copyright, domain availability, etc.

fontrate.com
fonttalk.something
typefaceoff.whatever
fontfolio.
allstarfontrevue.
fontwards.
departmentofletters.
fontallabotomy.
fontnight.
fontisserie.

fontalcountdown. (with theme music)

or on a slightly more serious note,
thefontshow.
typefacings.
fontdex.

Choz Cunningham
!Exclamachine Type Foundry
The Snark

dysfunctionalfontfamily.
tripeface.
fontforesight. (so many puns! font.for.sight, font fore site. font foresight. )
faceforward.

because i'm a rule-breaker at heart, vulgar names:
craperature.
stemsandtails.

all are available in the .com versions.

farkinfonts.com
shitype.com
typefarce.coma
letterpissed.com
typoholic.org

etc

>fontalcountdown. (with theme music)

This one, please.

These last two are sweet.

fontalcountdown. (with theme music)

This one, please.

That will at least have to be a selectable skin!

What purpose is this proposed site meant to serve exactly? Who would it serve? Why?

To separate the wheat from the chaff in the world of fonts. This would benefit users by letting them find well made ones (and understand why they are well made). It would benefit Type design novices, hobbyists, students and others seeking feedback on the composition. It would benefit Professional designers by exposing the greatness of fonts worthy of it, and (hopefully) decreasing consumer demand for bad fonts. Optimally it would benefit type culture in general, by offering a consensus opinion of what people like/want/respect. Why? Because it is a resource I would love to draw on, and others might as well. Most font sites are shopping centers that say everything is wonderful about every font, or they are just free font archives.

If it was a rounded enough user base, and rankings were fair and the process transparent, the ratings could be very worthwhile. I would love to be able to market a font as a "5 Star" or such, myself.

Naming is fun, and all, but wouldn’t it be worth discussing the mechanics of the thing?

Actually, I just figured that people here would be more into naming ideas than into the mechanics. From some previous work in two other fields, I've got a storm of interesting ideas for implementing a user-friendly reputation economy to "power" the voting/rating process. And I do not have enough to submit a design document on it yet. Seeing if people are even slightly interested lets me consider if this is worthwhile. My programming skills are not enough to code this by hand alone today, and that may limit the core features. Of course, there are lots of interesting FOSS modular web tools out there too...

How are fonts to be selected for evaluation? Who would be eligible to vote? Would everyone’s vote count equally, or would specially qualified experts hold greater sway?

I think that the method for submission should be limited to "controlling" parties, as determined by license. A designer or vendor could submit any of their own work, for sure. A public domain piece could be submitted by any registered user. Those "in-between" would have to be puzzled out. Currently undetermined: the time/scale for adding fonts for review. Probably couldn't be determined until

All methodology would be listed on the site. Full disclosure allows everyone equal chance to understand, and contribute to stopping exploits.

Vote weighting? That's a very tricky issue,and some people get quite riled, "experts count double???!?!OMG WTF" I would rather have a system that weights the votes towards those who contribute short reviews explaining their numeric decisions, and those who don't vote arbitrarily, as determined by their frequency of falling outside a pre-announced truncated mean. All weighting methods would have limits, so that no avenue(s) gives infinite vote-power, will still crediting those most competent.

Another idea is allowing one to specialize their vote. Are you a master of notanic balance, but have no interest or experience with uncial forms? Then you could tailor your own vote power to be greater in one category than the other.... No idea how to code this in to a site, but I've had great results and user satisfaction with this in RL situations.

Very cool. Very taken.

Choz Cunningham
!Exclamachine Type Foundry
The Snark

Letter Sweater

ChrisL

So it would be discusion board in some sense like this one but it would have a Netflix style rating system with all the topics: this fonts or that. Hmmmmm I kinda like the idea. I am not sure though.

This is very ivory tower of me I know, but for me it is almost always a typo-rati's opinions that I find count in the end. So for my part I suggest that you have a two tier rating system with a popular opinion eg 'the great unwashed rabble' if you will. Ok just kidding. You could just call it popular opinion. Good enough.

But then I think it would be good if you also had folks who were authoritative or quasi-authoritative who would go ahead & rate things for you. Then you could have Comic Sans and get two very different ratings. Maybe. But the point is you could read the comments in either track. Frankly I think both kinds of opinions are useful. Very useful in fact. But they are much more useful when they are divided than mixed.

In fact the more separations you could make the more useful the data. The data could be agrigate so nobody is made to answer for loving or not loving Helvetica. But you could know for instance that type designers perhaps love it less than graphic designers or whatever. See where I am going with this? If you can offer the type community good meaningful data that would be really worthwhile.

The great washed rabble would of course be registered Typophile users?

Self evidently not. ;-)

But you could know for instance that type designers perhaps love it less than graphic designers or whatever

The great washed rabble filtering system could work. It would require something like a user selecting from a limited set of choices for occupation or interests, but I would certainly put higher granularity in the software and graphic design sectors. Then, one could filter by that, and get a different set of numbers. I would really love to see which faces are "type designer's choice" versus a "management's choice". Likewise, very useful information could come from knowing the popularity in 18-28 year olds, among students, or from Swedes, or any of a wide number of factors.

The data could be agrigate so nobody is made to answer for loving or not loving Helvetica.

I would like it to expose a user's choices as much as they want. And the more they choose to be open, the more they "weigh" in. To a point. To reduce people filling in garbage profiles, I am considering ways of unlocking voting power, or otherwise maturing an account, so that having a detailed identity is more useful to anybody.

fontthis

________
Hiro

familyvalues.com
.........................................................
Bison Design
Spön

But if every type designer voted for his own submission, in the end things would even out, wouldn't they?

AboutFace?

familyvalues.
That is slick, subtle, hip and clever, in its play of the vote=value idea. I haven't even checked to see if it is available, since it is not that obscure. Definitely a right idea.

But if every type designer voted for his own submission, in the end things would even out, wouldn’t they?

Yes. But i don't want it as simple as a +/- vote. I would like to see consensus reviews. If there are enough designers and users, it wont matter. But I'd also rather have a designer not vote, than stress on judging themselves "fairly".

openfontlibrary.org

I really like that tag cloud, better than most. Its value, as planned, as a PD font archive will become a nice resource someday. Not sure if anyone is doing quite what I am talking about yet, but something as similar to rottentomatoes.com as to abstractfonts.com

“despotype” is indeed awesome. Not quite a open, democratic font review webmagazine sounding name, but god is he right someone has to do something with it. Perhaps it should be the name of the DRM "emhanced" OpenType replacement spec.

(pseudo?) officious identity…
Ministry of Type?
or "Minityp" for short: Serif Is Sans.

or “Minityp” for short: Serif Is Sans.
there's a lot of potential slogans:
- em-dash is en-dash
- screen is print
- truetype is opentype
- 1001freefonts.com is love
- Extended is condensed
- Light is heavy

and so on and so on.
.........................................................
Bison Design
Spön

fullfontalnudity
DB~

aboutface is the best submission so far.

Baseline (Does the overall standard of a font come above or below the 'baseline' of acceptability.)
Typerack
Fontrack (after raph's fontrank suggestion)
Fontarama / Typerama

I still don't think there have been enough bad puns suggested. How about some based on place names...
Fontario
Fonterey / Fontarray
Sanzibar
Fontainebleau
Fontezuma (Also the great ancient god of fonts. Present them before him and either be sacrificed or spared.)

Thanks for all the support for "AboutFace." You're right; it's just about completely taken, but AboutFaces.com is parked, with the owner apparently willing to sell it. Having never created a website myself, I can't say whether this disqualifies the domain or not.

dontlettersdown
Sorry, couldn't resist.

Well, the going price for a virgin name is about $10. The after market name for anything made of common English words is still quite often 50-200+ times that. Although it would be lovely to have big sponsors bankroll this with marketing, a crack coding team and pro journalists, I think that is unlikely in a fragmented industry moving towards cottage culture. !Exclamachine will bankroll the hosting, but I must be modest until this spreads it's own wings.