It’s an interesting middle ground between technology, psychology and art. As I said in the article when I compared the skill set with that of the architect. Personally, I find that one of the most interesting aspects is the “usability” of typefaces. What is usually called legibility. But if you think about it, it’s really the usability of a typeface. I wrote about that too (and will again): www.nubero.ch/blog/011/
You made a good catch with the spacing of the columns! I actually wrote about it in the article in the 7th footnote. But that is where it had to remain because – as I assume you know from how you write – it’s a rabbit hole. We could go further and mention that behind the inner columns is actually the cella (inner chamber), which would make for a darker backdrop of these columns than the outermost columns, which would be set against the blue sky, would have. That too makes for a difference in perception and is a further reason, why the outermost columns are set more closely to their cella-backed neighbour columns… And so on, and so on… :-)
I think these questions that all of you have brought up here are really interesting and definitely a part of the psychology of perception. Optical corrections, however, are really a different thing though. They have quite a strict demarcation in that they specifically deal with how we perceive the geometry/measurements/space of things.
Thanks for your nice comment! It’s good to hear that people get something out of it! If you want to help, please share the link to the article around your colleagues and friends. Thanks again!
I’m sorry but what you write is simply not correct. Gothic writing is actually a form of calligraphy and the very stilted shape that the characters have make it actually very hard/cumbersome/slow to write. Textura is one of the styles and it is called that because the whole page was supposed to look evenly “gray” when it was filled with writing.
For fast writing, people always developed a sort of cursive because that letter shape seems to almost automatically appear once the human hand uses a pen-like instrument with our (Latin/Greek/Western) writing and is writing fast. The Romans had a cursive for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive) and many others after them did too. This was also used for quick messaging of news/instructions as opposed to monks copying books for months on end.
As for what you said about the sagging and the pillars falling out, that’s also incorrect. In the article, I mentioned the classical orders, which are Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. Only Doric temples used the curvature of the stylobate and the inclination of the pillars throughout. In the other two styles, this was very rare, if it happened at all. The two largest temples of the other two styles didn’t have it for example: The temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens is a Corinthian style temple which has a flat stylobate and no inclination of the columns. The same goes for the Artemision (Temple of Artemis) in Ephesus. There are countless other examples. The entasis is (mostly) the only thing that was transplanted from the doric style to the other two.
That’s not quite true. If you look at what Bill Atkinson did with the innovations on the first Macintosh, comparing it to Xerox Alto won’t hold up. Of course they got a first general idea that an interface to a computer could be more than just a command line interface, but the Macintosh is to the Alto what a modern machine gun ist to throwing stones. The principle is the same in the sense that you somehow get a projectile to travel the distance to your enemy beyond your reach to hit him, but that’s about all there is in similarities. On the Alto, the windows couldn’t even overlap… Not to smaller what the people at Xerox Parc did, but the Macintosh Team and specifically Atkinson went way beyond anything that existed before.
