> How did the typography guys get a voice so strong?
In my opinion the "typography guys" don't have an especially stronger "voice" than anyone else. They just do a job once, get paid some (relatively small) amount for it, and then move on to the next project. At the biggest these projects involve a few people working for a year or two. Their entire job is about communication, sales, and sweating small design details, so it's no wonder they do a relatively good job at those.
The amount of work those "20 year old SQL schemas" take, once you include every bit of other comparable detail across a whole organization, is (at least) thousands of times bigger and more complicated. Overall the "code guys" have much more resources spent, spend a lot more time, and everyone ultimately cares a lot more about their output. They are large teams of either long-term employees or long-term contractors, whose work never really ends.
In short: Code is a sprawling mess rather than a cutely packaged self-contained thing. Unsurprisingly it's harder to make sense of at a glance.
In my opinion the "typography guys" don't have an especially stronger "voice" than anyone else. They just do a job once, get paid some (relatively small) amount for it, and then move on to the next project. At the biggest these projects involve a few people working for a year or two. Their entire job is about communication, sales, and sweating small design details, so it's no wonder they do a relatively good job at those.
The amount of work those "20 year old SQL schemas" take, once you include every bit of other comparable detail across a whole organization, is (at least) thousands of times bigger and more complicated. Overall the "code guys" have much more resources spent, spend a lot more time, and everyone ultimately cares a lot more about their output. They are large teams of either long-term employees or long-term contractors, whose work never really ends.
In short: Code is a sprawling mess rather than a cutely packaged self-contained thing. Unsurprisingly it's harder to make sense of at a glance.