Good ideas are not enough

Film and music

When Céline Sciamma was making Portrait of a Lady on Fire, she decided she wanted the story (a love story) to have almost no music. There would be music at a pivotal moment, and a lot hinged on getting it right.

“I listened to a lot of old melodies from the [18th century]; some of them we are still singing to our kids to bed,” said Sciamma. “But I wanted it to be kind of a trance, I wanted the [beats per minute] to be very high, and didn’t find something. It was all very instrumental, and I wanted no instruments. I wanted just the voice and the clapping of women.¹”

She worked with Para One, the electronic music producer who had scored her previous movies, and he brought Arthur Simonini to help with the choirs.

According to Para One, the duo extensively researched the music of the period but ultimately convinced Sciamma a modern sound would better suit her film. Their biggest inspiration was not anything period appropriate, but György Ligeti’s Requiem, famously used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.²,³

The music is brilliant⁴, and it has an enormous impact in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is one of my favorite films from recent years.

Typography

In the 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, Microsoft Corporation hired renowned type designer Matthew Carter to create typefaces⁵ that would work well on screen. The typefaces would be made available to the public for free. The classics Verdana and Georgia came from that, and for many years they were the only reasonable choices for web pages to use.

Verdana, a sans serif named for the verdant Seattle area, and Georgia, a brilliant serif named after a tabloid headline about alien heads found in Georgia, which was then used to set test headlines.⁶

Up to that point, typefaces were designed primarily for print, and were converted to the screen as an afterthought. The screen is, still today in 2024, a low-resolution medium compared to print. In the 1990s, the resolution of screens was even lower.

Some designers explain screen typography this way:

Screen = Bad Paper⁷

For Verdana and Georgia, Carter took the novel approach of starting by how the fonts would render in existing screens, at typical text sizes, which meant the characters would be drawn using a relatively small number of pixels.

So instead of starting with outlines and then working to hint them for the screen, I started by simply making bitmap⁸ fonts. No outlines, just bitmaps.

Once the key bitmaps were done, I very carefully wrapped an outline around them. I always have in mind that this outline will then be given to the person responsible for hinting⁹–and they’ll need to be able to hint [the] outline to get back, pixel for pixel, to the bitmap faces where we started.⁶

Today we have better screens than were available in the 90s, and we have technology to bundle fonts with web pages, rather than rely only on what users have on their machines, but Georgia and Verdana remain immensely popular. Verdana is still my first recommendation as a default choice for readable text on screen.

Says Carter:

If Verdana has any unique qualities at all it’s in the spacing. Pre-existing printer fonts are spaced for paper, not the screen, so they suffer on screen. In Verdana, it’s the regularity of the spacing that’s just as important as the positive parts of the letterform.⁶

Where the art is

Science fiction author Ted Chiang has been writing thought provoking articles for The New Yorker about Artificial Intelligence and the hype surrounding it.

A recent one argues that A.I. can’t make art.¹⁰ The crux of the article, in my view, is this:

What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

It’s a great point, and it applies very widely, not just to art: it’s not enough to have a good idea. The idea needs to be executed by people who know how to, or who have a good enough eye to keep working until they arrive at something good.

Anything that’s good, is good at several levels. When that doesn’t happen, you get those pieces of modern art that are eschewed even by the educated public, but that insiders might appreciate because of some interesting idea in their conception, or some novel technique in their development.

Countless type designers have followed Matthew Carter’s example and started out with bitmaps, but very few typefaces get to be as good as Georgia and Verdana. Fonts don’t just need to fit well on pixel grids. They need to be comfortable to read, they need to have enough visual interest, but not so much that they become distracting. There are many tradeoffs involved. It’s not easy.

Countless movies have been made around a strong structural idea, but few are any good. You need many things to come together for a movie. No matter how clever a plot twist, no matter how good the soundtrack, or how charismatic the actors, those individual aspects cannot carry a whole movie on their own.

A good idea is just a good beginning.