Daan Balm

/sandbox/arrows

A typed arrow is a straight, even, machine-made mark sitting next to handwriting. The first three below ask what belongs inside a sentence; the rest ask what belongs pointing across a gap.

• 1. The typed glyph

  my notes are public →

  What was there until now. Perfectly straight, perfectly even, and the only mark on the page that no hand made. Reads fine beside Roboto and wrong beside Caveat.

• 2. Drawn, inline

  my notes are public

  The same gesture in the same pen, sized in em so it rides the text rather than sitting beside it. Still an arrow at the end of every note, though — which is the thing that felt excessive.

• 3. Head only

  my notes are public

  Quieter than a full arrow and cheap at small sizes — closer to a bullet than a direction. Might be too faint to mean anything on its own.

• 4. Nothing at all

  my notes are public

  Where the site landed. The drawn underline already says it goes somewhere, so the arrow was saying it twice. Worth keeping in the comparison precisely because it's the cheapest option.

• 5. The long sweep, pointing down

  there’s a checklist further down

  The player's arrow, aimed at something below. Earns its place when it crosses real distance to a thing that isn't a link — and looks like overkill when the target is the next line.

• 6. The long sweep, pointing aside

  some tunes?

  The same arrow doing the job it was drawn for: connecting a note to an object beside it, across a gap the eye wouldn't otherwise cross. This is the case where an arrow is genuinely load-bearing.

• 7. A stroke with no head

  there’s a checklist further down

  Direction without the point. Reads as a connector — this belongs to that — rather than as an instruction to go. Softer, and ambiguous in a way that might be a feature.

Open. The working rule so far: an arrow crosses a gap to something that isn’t a link. Anything that is a link gets the underline instead.