I Love Typography

You need to separate writing systems and language there, though. Unlike the Chinese writing system that it bears superficial resemblance to, Hangul is an alphabet, and it's more purely and consistently phonographic than most writing systems in widespread use. Many of the letter shapes are actually based on things like tongue position and mouth shape when making a particular sound - and there's only roughly as many of them as there are Latin letters. It was specifically designed to be fast and easy to learn, to promote mass literacy. (Both the scientific rigor and the noble motivation that went into it, and the resulting elegance, give it a lot of geeky appeal really.)

So it's actually quite easy to pick up and be able to read it fluently (you can have your first successes within 15 minutes, and have it pretty much down within days). Here, have a comic: http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/index.html

Actually learning Korean OTOH is another matter entirely, though :) (don't I know it ...).

Anyway, I think even without the ability to understand the words, type designers have experience and knowledge they could usefully apply to the Hangul script. I recently read this nice series by William Berkson on a new revival of Caslon's designs he's been making:

http://ilovetypography.com/2010/11/02/reviving-caslon-part-2-readability-affability-authority/

All that stuff he touches on there - rhythm, visualizations of regularity, avoiding the picket fence effect,…

Part A - I am on the side of completing as much UX up front as possible. Bad visual design is something that no one can ignore. I think that ideally before you even have done the "black-text-on-white-background" prototype you start with UX.

Part B - Steve Krug has a couple of simple concrete usability books. Other than links I have seen mentioned. http://ilovetypography.com/ learning good type will help a ton with design http://www.useit.com/ Jakob Nielsen is kind of the godfather of usability, some people love him, some hate him, either way you will learn something from this guy. Also, going through tons of websites and critiquing them by yourself or with peers, writing down everything that works well and doesn't work well, that you would change. Do little usability tests on your sites, even on sites that aren't yours with family or peers.

Part C - I don't know as much about startups. I do know that having a designer on hand is much nicer to work with than outsourced. Ultimately I think it would be like dealing with anyone else outsourced in terms of reliability.

Part D - I actually started as a designer, and IE 6 crushed my soul. I am still very interested in UX though. I think starting as a programmer, I would just try to recreate designs you think are appealing. I would also try to learn the grid system. Use CSS frameworks as training wheels that have a solid grid, and decent typography (eg. Blueprint). I started constraining myself to HTML and CSS, and I think you…

> For drawing a given glyph, there is normally a lookup into a font table that involves solely the string of Unicode code points coming in.

Why are you implementing OpenType? It's got working libraries already.

But if you are getting into that, glyphs in a font are stored by "glyph name", not necessarily by code point. There's a bunch more steps than that.

- Font substitution: Find fonts that cover every character in the text. The order of your search list depends on the language.

- Text layout and line breaking: for best results, you don't want to line break in the middle of a word, and you need to place punctuation on the correct side of right-to-left sentences. I think both of these need dictionaries.

- Choosing individual glyphs: it's complicated!
http://ilovetypography.com/OpenType/opentype-features.html

You have to read the GSUB tables and do a bunch of expected features, like ligatures, automatic fractions, beginning of word special forms (see Zapfino), &c. This includes language specific glyphs, but fonts can also just choose glyphs with a random number generator.

- Drawing the glyph. Remember not to draw each one individually, or a translucent line of overlapping characters (like in Indian languages) will look bad.

Each glyph actually comes with a custom program to do the hinting! It's even more complicated:
https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM05/Chap5.html

Luckily I don't think it depends on much external state.

In terms of general Web strategies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351709

But here are some tips specific to niche blogs. I run a niche blog that has 17,000 subscribers and am in the process of building up others, so I have a few tips (but I am by no means an authority on this!):

- TWITTER! Use search.twitter.com to find people talking about your topic and talk to them. Follow them, get them to your site. Twitter about your topic. Use TwitterFeed to stream the titles / links to your blog posts into your Twitter feed.

- Sometimes niches are interesting to broader audiences. On HN you see stories relating to the Ruby programming language (or Rails) all the time - these are pretty niche topics but with some general appeal to hackers / programmers.

- Find the other blogs. Comment on them wisely and try to build up relationships. Find areas where you can complement what others are doing rather than just copying them. For example, let's say your blog is specifically about flash photography. You could get interest to your articles from general digital photography sites! If you're going to be niche, find the blogs that are one thicker branch further down the tree.

- Blog carnivals ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_Carnival )

- Get "outsiders" interested in your niche! I wasn't really all that interested in typography or logo design, but ILoveTypography ( http://ilovetypography.com/ ) and Logo Design Love (…

Serif fonts have looked more or less the same since 1465. [1] Blackletter fonts didn’t last very long, because they were not very legible, and were quickly replaced.

Sans Serif (Grotesque) for formal printed material is newer, probably around 200 years old, but is also widely established. Regardless, on my personal website, I use serif lettering for most text, because while it’s slightly less readable at 75dpi, retina displays are common enough (e.g. pretty much any phone in use today has retina level resolution) that serif text makes more sense. [2] Also, the only open source font the great Matthew Carter (Verdana, Georgia) has made is a serif: Bitstream Charter and its derivative Charis SIL.

The English language is much more likely to change to the point today’s English can only be read by linguists and researchers before typefaces undergo any significant change.

[1] https://ilovetypography.com/2016/04/18/the-first-roman-fonts/

[2] Regardless, I have gone to a lot of effort to make my Charis SIL/Bitstream Charter derivative as readable as possible on a 75dpi display.

Overshoots are an unfortunate holdover. In many fonts, "C"s and "O"s are too big and "A"s are too tall. I mean, just look at this:

https://typography.guru/uploads/monthly_2020_01/overshoot.thumb.png.daaf421910bb62e86e56e457cf8b0e24.png

Or this:

https://ilovetypography.com/img/2015/03/Caslon-overshoot-500x2501.jpg

Or this:

https://ktla.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/06/GettyImages-1166667354.jpg?w=2560&h=1440&crop=1

Or this:

https://live.staticflickr.com/5300/5482446696_1fa1ff2b45_b.jpg

Hideous.

Try to follow that baseline with your eye. It's a roller coaster of chaos.

Type designers like to add overshoots merely out of habit, not aesthetics. They might have made sense in the lead type era, but simply look like mistakes today.