TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

Oh I love this a surprising amount. Also a good reminder of some of the dividends of vibe coding -- this would have been an extremely useful tool for at least two decades of web designers if published in the early 2000s. Even now for a type nerd who is not a designer, it was fun to play with -- really cool.

I'm such a sucker for skeuomorphism... got chills clicking and turning those knobs

the export button actually being useful is the difference here, most of these type scale tools are fun to play with then you have to manually rebuild everything anyway. gonna steal this workflow for setting up type styles before I even open framer

Some remarks. The entire thing ends up feeling tasteless to me: it has a whole bunch of knobs (metaphorical and for a change pseudo-physical), half of which shouldn’t exist and some others which should being missing, with terrible calibration, poor defaults, and just… it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Various factors make me suppose this is low-effort vibe-coding, but I make this response anyway for the potential benefit of others.

• Modular type scales are harmful nonsense. I wrote about it in more detail a few years ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36000879. They’re often presented as virtuous, but they actually produce arbitrary, bland, inferior results, mediocre at best.

• The range of base sizes is excessive. I think everyone should agree there’s no point in offering below 14px (8px!), and I wish everyone would agree beyond 24px is madness (32px!). Personally I recommend 16px on small screens, up to a maximum of 18–20px (or if you must, 22px) on large screens.

• Styling all heading levels the same is not a great idea. Yes, I know you have per-element overrides. Encouraging people to treat them the same is not wise. h1 especially is too often not treated differently enough from h2–h6. Sometimes I blame HTML for that, because despite its name, it’s not a heading, it’s the page title. Varying weight, and often varying size massively, between titles and headings and different-level headings, tends to be better than just using an anaemic modular scale with single steps. But there I go on that again…

• The auto-balancing button does some sensible things that show the nature of some of the other problems.

• Changing letter-spacing on headings (as is done by default) is a tad dubious.

• Changing letter-spacing on body text, and word-spacing on any text, should never be done; yet this option is offered.

• For “eyebrow” (interesting term, searching suggests it’s well-established yet somehow this is the first time I’ve come across it), 0.2em letter-spacing is definitely excessive. https://practicaltypography.com/letterspacing.html suggests 5–12% (0.05–0.12em). Incidentally, the per-element overrides doesn’t seem to know about that 0.2em, claims it’s at 0.

• I pressed random preset a few times, got some obviously bad results; e.g. Grand Hotel + Lato has a heading font with significantly smaller metrics than the body one, and where the negative letter-spacing is particularly bad, and where bold is not great. Significantly more than half the time, I strongly disliked the pairing. They felt completely random, even though it felt like half of the presets shown in the list were fine.