Alternative Layout System

Posted by smartmic 6/26/2025

Alternative Layout System(alternativelayoutsystem.com)

396 points | 67 comments

demetrius 6/26/2025|

I think "Same Sizer" looks ugly because characters are stretched mechanically, so each line has different width. Ideally, the lines should all keep their widths, and the position should be stretched.

I think a better application of "all words have the same size" principle can be seen in Vietnamese calligraphy, which sometimes combines Latin characters with Chinese-adjacent writing style, e.g. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C4%90%E1%BB%91i_-... (this is written in Latin script split into equal squares)

pavlov 6/27/2025||

Huh. I would never have noticed that your example image is actually in Latin script.

Because I don't read Chinese, anything that looks enough like Chinese seems to mentally go into the bin of "I can't understand this anyway." (I guess in this case it would help if I knew Vietnamese because then I would recognize familiar words and syllables in this calligraphy.)

Fascinating effect.

jjmarr 6/27/2025|||

I can read Chinese and still cannot process that image as Latin script. They've turned every letter into a Chinese character component. It makes my head hurt.

Scene_Cast2 6/27/2025||||

I still can't read it despite trying.

demetrius 6/27/2025||

The page below, in the “Summary” section, has a version in normal font, starting with “Tân niên”

(Also, interestingly, there is a version in Chinese characters. Looks like the whole phrase is a borrowing from Classical Chinese? Probably the readers know the phrase as set expression, so it's easier for them.)

yorwba 6/27/2025|||

It does not help that "hoa" is stylized as something resembling の口亽.

bradrn 6/27/2025|||

Along similar lines, the calligraphy here is quite impressive: https://www.reddit.com/r/language/comments/1gmzro8/what_scri...

qingcharles 6/29/2025||

Huh. That's a good way to explain how Hangul works I guess :)

gwern 6/27/2025|||

FWIW, I call this approach 'square' writing, and have compiled some links at https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/square/index

Probably the most interesting one is the 'Hangulatin' font (https://www.t26.com/fonts/22320-Hangulatin-EN), which is exactly what it sounds like, and unfortunately has been abandoned/linkrotten but you can see a lot of it in the old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0syCsC0_4s

floppyd 6/27/2025||

I really wanted to see the example you linked, but the link is broken

demetrius 6/27/2025|||

I don't know why. It works for me.

As an alternative, you can go to Wikipedia and paste File:Đối - Tết 2009.jpg into the search bar.

rapnie 6/27/2025|||

I had the problem that navigating the page in firefox almost set fire to my CPU on my 2yr old linux dev laptop. Really liked the visualisations, though.

bryanrasmussen 6/27/2025||

navigating the page in firefox on my 2 year old Mac M1, with about 50 tabs open and a few other applications running including Krita, Chrome, VS Studio, The Terminal, Preview and a couple finder windows gave no problems whatsoever, so maybe they should look at it but not high priority.

cjcenizal 6/27/2025||

Every once in a while I come across something so beautifully stupid that all I can see is the genius behind it, and it fills me with joy. Well done!

n3storm 6/27/2025|

Did you try to read it aloud? Your voice instantly becomes robotic :D

cjcenizal 6/27/2025||

Hahaha, actually I think I heard it in Jony Ives’s voice.

eddythompson80 6/26/2025||

Ok, I want the "Hyphenator" layout, but with more than just one word. I want the extra text to wrap around while the font keeps getting smaller to mimic how I used to take hand notes in college and need to shove in some stuff with no space left in the line.

nick238 6/27/2025||

In non-phoenitic languages, i.e. English, many of these methods are painful, especially "Last is First". See "I", but then it's "In", so you need to mentally backtrack some understanding. See "t", but then it's "that", so if you're subvocalizing to read, you need to reform the phoneme because 't' is a different phoneme from 'th'.

pfortuny 6/27/2025||

Just trying to help: "i.e." stands for "id est", which means "that is".

In your text, you should rather say "e.g." (exempli gratia), which means "for instance", "for example".

mkaic 6/27/2025||

I think in casual speech at this point (at least in my experience) the two are used interchangeably. In professional or legal settings I'm sure the distinction matters more, but I feel like OP's usage here felt pretty natural to me even though it's not technically correct.

kevin_thibedeau 6/27/2025|||

They aren't interchangeable. "i.e." is equivalent to "in other words". "e.g." is "for example".

jjmarr 6/27/2025||||

The distinction matters because i.e. implies English is the only non-phonetic language in existence.

lelanthran 6/27/2025||||

> I think in casual speech at this point (at least in my experience) the two are used interchangeably.

How?

They don't mean the same thing.

bee_rider 6/28/2025||||

Better to get corrected in an informal setting, than to use it wrong on a formal one.

pfortuny 6/27/2025|||

Well, the thing is… when you use a borrowed term from a dead language, in writing, it really sounds wrong to cultivated ears. I really had to double-check that sentence to see if I had parsed it wrongly. Not bragging, just saying.

They cannot be completely interchangeable:

“There are white people among us: i.e. me and my father” is totally different from “…: e.g. me and my father”.

cAtte_ 6/28/2025||

it's "my father and I"

dxdm 6/27/2025|||

Isn't reading more like pattern recognition than parsing letter-for-letter? It seems to work like that for me. There's also the somewhat famous text where each word's letters are jumbled and people can still read it fluently. Maybe that's not the case for everyone, though, and people have different ways of making sense of written text.

Edit: Quick search turned up this article about the jumbled-word phenomenon, containing the example text at the top: https://observer.com/2017/03/chunking-typoglycemia-brain-con...

speerer 6/27/2025||

I once attended a short workshop where the person presenting encouraged us to switch between two modes of reading away from sub-vocalizing and into pattern recognition. The result was much faster reading without loss of understanding.

He didn't use those terms but adopting them from this thread - I learned that day that these really are two distinct modes.

taeric 6/27/2025|||

English is phonetic? The writing systems aren't regular in that the same letter can represent different sounds. But they still represent sounds. Indeed, your confusion wouldn't even be possible if they didn't represent sounds.

pmontra 6/27/2025||

A short word like "that" is read at once, especially because it's common. So no need to backtrack.

A less common word like "phoenitic" or "subvocalizing" is read as you say. However by the end of the sentence we know how to read "phoneme" because we encountered it 3 times in one form or the other.

rswail 6/27/2025||

I think "Last Is First" is almost like a checksum for the people writing the text, so they don't lose their place as they are copying it.

I remember having to read the Torah and it was hard to move from learning to read with standard printed Hebrew, into not only the voweless text, but with the letters stretched. You had to learn how to sing the words correctly as well.

But it was a beautiful thing to see, handwritten, fully justified, columns written with ink on parchment.

kevincox 6/28/2025|

I suspect that if it was common the reader would also use it to help find the right line to continue on. Especially for longer lines where it is fairly easy to try to read the same line again or skip one.

smm32 6/27/2025||

God, please don't make websites like this. I have a 1 Gbps connection, with a 1 Gbps network interface. Your server _cannot_ serve a site this large. Every single jpeg image which by design takes up no more than a few hundred pixels on a side when rendered on a screen is transferred over in 4K resolution, at sizes up to 9 MiB. Certain pages take upwards of 15 seconds to load with a total size of >40 MiB!!! I'm aware that it's partially due to the hug of death, but 3 Mbps is actually a respectable serving speed for most small servers, the site itself is just too large!

jrajav 6/27/2025||

This is one of the cases where it seems more justified than usual. This is not a website intended for end users, maximizing for performance and conversion rate. It's a design showcase by a typographer, for typographers. Every pixel is crucial, and the intended audience would rather wait a few seconds to be able to scrutinize the output with the required detail.

rossant 6/28/2025||

Progressive loading?

eddd-ddde 6/27/2025||

I was so confused by there was no link to see the layouts. Turns out they were loading! It took like 3mins> on my network to even show the first one!

philsnow 6/27/2025||

"Last is first" very much reminds me of the custos/custodes seen often in Gregorian chant notation, which come at the end of a line and are a hint of the first note in the next line (so while your eye is finding the start of the next line, you already know the pitch, even though it typically does not include the syllable).

See e.g. https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/ancien...

RattlesnakeJake 6/26/2025||

This is horrendous. I love it.

donatj 6/27/2025||

I have some eye issues, namely a lazy eye and double vision. I find same-sizer remarkably easy to read. Easier than standard text, which is very curious.

I almost wonder if the idea could be used as a sort of accessibility mode.

JoBrad 6/27/2025|

Other than a very slight astigmatism, I have no visuals issues, but also found the same-sizer text much easier to read than I thought it would be.

Gualdrapo 6/26/2025|

Their "imager" tool is really cool, though:

https://alternativelayoutsystem.com/imager/

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