Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently:
> It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the global population — you’d need to plant and permanently maintain trees on more than 16bn acres, roughly half the landmass of the world.
You don't need to absorb ALL co2 currently being output by Americans. A large percentage of that is already being converted/stored by algae / trees
So the baseline isn't "we need to store all CO2". The baseline is, we need to convert the part that is currently "overcapacity" for our environment. And for that, planting trees IS a good solution. But don't take my word (or Bills) for it.
... Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity.Such a change has the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool.
- Trees are being cut down at record rate for meat production. Meat production is one of the bigger culprits in deforestation (and particularly of the Amazon and other tropical rainforests). If the world were willing to eat less meat (we don't have to be all-out vegan, we just need to eat much less of it) we'd be a lot better off in terms of how much arable land we need to feed everyone instead of feeding a bunch of cows and then feeding everyone
- The world population is much bigger now. All environmental problems are essentially only an issue because we have too many people in the world right now. If we had the population of the 1800's, none of our modern lifestyle habits would be a serious problem.
For the sake of bringing it into more immediate (for this context) perspective, I'm curious if anyone is able to do the analysis on ecological impact from technology decisions?
For example, choosing fancier, JavaScript-heavy ways of building webpages probably results in clients consuming extra electricity. One could hypothetically estimate the impact, and then come up with an analysis to the effect of, "For a site generating X amount of traffic, you'd need to plant Y trees to offset the decision to use Google Tag Manager."
Ads, basically. But I doubt web makes any impact here. Let's say every web user spends 2 hours every day waiting for ads to finish loading. 2 hr x 100 watt x 360 days x 5 billion users = 1 TWh. The US alone produces 4000 TWh per year.
Gates is supporting many good solutions but this quote about trees is false. As outlined in the book The Treesolution, it's just "2 billion hectares of trees to disconnect all present and past CO2 what is produced through fossil fuels." [1]
and furthermore
"Pieter Hoff says that we can replant a hectare for approximately 2,500 USD. We need 2 billion hectares of trees to disconnect all present and past CO2 what is produced through fossil fuels. The total investment to clean the air from the CO2 pollution is therefore 5 trillion USD. This investment is smaller than the costs of saving the bank system since 2008. Both USA and Europe spent over 6 trillion USD to save their banks."
Note: it's an investment, not an expense. ie profitable.
yes but this is the guy who didn't think he needs to give up his private jet, so although I'm sure he's will intentioned I'll not accept his pronouncements about the environment at face value, I'll check elsewhere first.
Lots of people have suggested adding Inter UI to this project. I've held off for two reasons: the creator, Rasmus, has built a very good site for the typeface himself and the typeface is under active development, which means my overview would constantly be in danger of being out of date.
> Lots of people have suggested adding Inter UI to this project.
For the sake of people who will be very happy to discover it, please do add it (unless you think it doesn't deserve a place on your list).
IMHO, regarding your concerns: (1) You can have a prominent link to the Inter UI site, as I'd expect you would to any typeface's web home. (2) Every typeface you include has gone through a bunch of revisions. Even if you don't yet have an automated way of handling updates, there's still value in the aggregation.
I'm the maintainer of this project. Happy to take any feedback or suggestions.
At the end of last year/beginning of this year, I was working on this site heavily and attempted to use Patreon to fund the project. Ultimately, I didn't see enough interest and scaled back my time on it.
I still think it's a worthy goal to give an in-depth overview of the best typefaces, but I'm still looking for the right way of promoting and funding the project.
This is an excellent resource, and I think what impresses me most, beyond the design and comprehensiveness, is the curation. I considered myself fairly familiar with the current SIL type landscape, yet I had never heard of half of the type families on the home page, all of which look to be of a caliber with the best open-source (or otherwise) types out there.
Thanks for a very interesting and well presented collection. The suggested uses section is thoughtful. I was wondering if it might be possible to add some info on the original motivation/intent/application of the typeface. This is to see if it can help suggest a typeface's "natural" use.
The website is called Beautiful Web Type. Nonetheless, it would be nice if you could also add recommendations for print, not only screen reading. I'm not sure how much this influences your decisions, but it might be worth screening fonts for print (and low-resolution print) specifically.
Thanks for this site! I was going to request a way to type one's own text and see how it looks in the different typefaces, but the feature is already present: the text in the "compared with similar typefaces" section is editable! Maybe this could be slightly more discoverable that this text is editable.
If you want the best, step 1 is to eliminate anything with the Vera "l". The foot at the bottom is dreadful.
Step 2 is to eliminate anything with an "@" that doesn't have all 4 vertical lines when cut horizontally. That is, it should contain a full "a" of some sort, without the loss of a gap between the "a" and the surrounding circle.
After that there won't be many fonts left. Prefer a "$" that has both vertical bars. Prefer (){}{} that are tall, reaching both above and below a "X".
Make note of the tilde, asterisk, "a", and "g". These are notable for the style they give the font, but it is less clear what might be best.
I'd just like to add more weight to the "Let the quotes breathe more". As soon as a page of quotes loaded up, my TL;DR alarm was firing, but after ignoring that and reading a few in isolation it was pretty cool.
Another issue that I've personally run across is negotiating how much control a (non-founding) designer has over the product.
In an early stage startup, it makes sense that one of the founders will run the product side of the company. But really good designers often want to have a good amount of control over the product, knowing that putting a glossy coating on a product with bad UX is a losing proposition.
This often means getting more involved in product research/strategy/prioritization process. This can be problematic, since non-founding designers are often hired mostly for their UI design/front-end implementation skills.
My feeling is that very good designers are ideally suited to taking a larger role in running the product side of the company. If startups are willing to offer this, I think they can lure more good designers to their company.
Personally, this is the position I'm in. I'm an experienced designer, looking for an early stage startup to work with. Many founders I speak with are hesitant when I say that I'm interested in working on the big picture vision for the product. I'm still looking for the right fit in this regard.
I agree with you entirely about the extent to which design is integral. I don't think design and making are effectively separable activities in software, especially at a startup.
But I think that doesn't mesh well with what a lot of people who identify as designers see as their role. From your portfolio you clearly don't fit the stereotype I'm describing, but a lot of self-identified designers (especially those with an agency background) want a lot of power to control others, rather than direct ability to create themselves. That is, they define "design" as something separate from coding, shipping, supporting, and studying the usage of a product.
That kind of hands-off approach to design won't work in a startup smaller that a dozen people or so; there just isn't enough of it to do. And even if there were, that sort of designer becomes a bottleneck, slowing iteration and reducing effectiveness. That's especially bad at small startups, because, as you say, at least one founder already believes they can do a lot of that work.
In your shoes, I'd look for a company where everybody is involved in product research, strategy, and prioritization. Sure, you'll do a lot of front end implementation to begin with, because that's what a startup needs. But if you also pick up some product tasks (e.g., organizing user tests, distilling site data into useful feature guidance, solving business problems via feature changes) I think you'll end up with the kind of involvement you want.
> In your shoes, I'd look for a company where everybody is involved in product research, strategy, and prioritization.
Speaking as one member of a three-person startup which is struggling to operate like this, I'm skeptical that such a company can work well. Three opinionated co-founders is a crowd; I can't imagine that having more would help. It might work in a case where there is a clear vision is which is shared by all members, but then the product development would already be more-or-less done.
There needs to be one founder or maybe two, who can lead the team by earning their trust. Loyal team-members will work like dogs; without that trust/loyalty (which again, needs to be bought or earned) you're herding cats.
The GP should find a compatible co-founder. With three co-founders (in our case at least), shipping a product is like stuffing three cats into one wrapped gift box.
I'm a big fan of the model of teamwork where everyone is welcome to offer their opinion on and spend a bit of time thinking about and working on any aspect of the product, but there are fairly clearly defined responsibilities regarding who has the final say on what goes to the final product. Or to put it other way, everyone is involved in everything, but each thing has only one person responsible for it.
Works for us, anyhow. We have a clear mission, but the vision of the product is constantly evolving. The CEO/head of product does have final authority, but we are all definitely involved, and I think it's a very collaborative process.
It helps that we work very incrementally and are very data driven. Every commit goes live after the unit tests pass, and we commit every few hours. We don't have to agree on everything, just the thing we're testing next.
I think there's a similar thing happening with designers that happened with engineers over the past several years, moving from a "idea guy" plus implementation engineers towards everyone looking for a technical co-founder.
It sounds like you should start your own company. I can't think of a situation where an early stage startup will want to hire someone to have a significant influence over the product strategy to the degree that it sounds like you're looking for.
I agree, anything that is designed with the intention of being used by people must unify functionality with visual appeal. The best way to do this is to have those creating it involved with both sides of development.
These typefaces should not necessarily be compared to each other. Every typeface has contexts where it works better than other contexts. I've tried to use each typeface in a way that highlights its positive attributes and minimizes its negative ones.
This is helpful feedback. This is a very new project, so I am still iterating on my approach. Over time it will evolve. Maybe in the future you will find it more useful for your needs.
> It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the global population — you’d need to plant and permanently maintain trees on more than 16bn acres, roughly half the landmass of the world.
From: https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc...