markboulton’s avatarmarkboulton’s Twitter Archive—№ 32,785

  1. Typesetting in traditional Mongolian is challenging every part of my designer brain. Vertical writing. Top down. Right to left. Not a native speaker. Just shapes. Send help.
    1. …in reply to @markboulton
      An interesting side effect of designing like this (not a native speaker, different reading directions), is I start to really question line height. What looks right to my eye, may not be right to native speakers. Had that problem before in Arabic.
      1. …in reply to @markboulton
        For me, it looked just fine. For quite a few Arabic speakers I tested the design with it was hilariously large with huge line height. ‘Ha ha, Mark, is this for children or old people!?’. So, when doing work like this, I try to spend a couple of hours with the language.
        1. …in reply to @markboulton
          So, there are different typographic cultural expectations and norms. It’s not just about fonts. Good international typesetting extends to understanding optical weight, hierarchy conventions, glyph usage.
    2. …in reply to @markboulton
      One interesting thing to note… no vertical writing mode in Figma.