Friends!

When young designers are introduced to typography the first thing they learn about are the typefaces: identifying serifs from sans, learning about the history behind which of them came first, etc. Shortly afterwards they probably start learning about grids, layout, and then – typographic scales.

If you’re unfamiliar with that term “a scale” is often a group of font-sizes that are used to help designers make an interface consistent and help them limit their options from a billion different sizes.

So for example, at Gusto our scale looks like this:

Friends!

There’s something about Ronnia that I completely adore. It’s a sans type family by TypeTogether released in 2007 and it’s one of those times where I’ve stumbled upon something and then it’s sat patiently in an open tab for a couple of weeks. I find myself opening the specimen website every couple of hours and just staring at it, longingly, and I’m not entirely certain why.

There’s often no rhyme or reason as to why or when I fall in love, but that’s often the case when it comes to beautiful letters. And especially with Ronnia.

I think the numerals show why I’m so infatuated: there’s a degree of subtlety in their design. There’s just enough quirkiness to make them stand out without being whacky or clownish and one example of that is the 7 and 8:

Friends!

Whilst many companies herd towards a similar aesthetic—the ever-so-slightly geometric letters and the rather plain looking grotesques—there’s something else going on in the typographic community.

Something wild and monstrous.

I don’t think it’s particularly new, as type designers have always been working on projects which happen to be entirely bonkers. Without rhyme or reason they’ll make letters that are inverted, letters that are upside down and inside out, letters that are almost entirely illegible simply because they can.

Friends!

I know this is cruel but I always judge a book by its margins; I’ll take the bad paper and boring typefaces, I’ll even forgive a book that has one of those plastic covers (the sort that makes me feel as if the book will slip out of my hand at a moment’s notice).

I will accept all of these things as long as the margins of a book have been cared for.

Why are the margins important though? Surely all that good typography and printing requires is a pretty type family, a fancy illustration on the cover and—voilá—we’ve made a book, right? Well, no, but here’s an example why: head to your bookshelf for a moment and pick up any random old book. Flip to the very middle of it and really look at the paragraphs sat side by side. Do they look comfortable? Do you have to wrench the book open to read them properly? Does the text feel like it’s about to slip off the page and onto your floor?

Friends!

I received this email the other day that brings up a thoroughly interesting question about typesetting and I reckon it would be neat to reply in public so that we can all talk about this stuff together:

Dear Adventurer:

What do I do when I'm stuck on a good typeface? I was recently freshening up my website for the new year, and as part of the process, I decided I ought to finally change the somewhat showy typeface that I use for all my <h1>'s and <h2>'s -- my page and article titles. I thought: "I'll swap it out for something else, just as showy, but a little different!" I had plenty of contenders: typefaces I've had bookmarked for ages, all beautiful and interesting and usable. But… they just didn't look as good. I would toggle from Showy Original to New Contender, look at the page, think "hmm… maybe!" -- then toggle back, and be so delighted with Showy Original again that I couldn't even contemplate changing it.

So here I am, with a website that's been using the same typeface for years. Will I ever change? Can I? How?

Yours,

Stuck on a Good Typeface (There Are Worse Fates, I Suppose)

Friends!

This past week I’ve been spelunking into the cavernous maw of our CSS as I refactor our codebase to be more resilient, predictable, legible. And in between these lines of code, the tens of thousands that make up our application, I can still see my mentor Dora Chan down here even a year after she left my team.

And I’m glad I still see her down here, because at these depths you need every friend you can get.

I see her in the classnames and abbreviations, the terseness of the documentation, the way things click-clack together effortlessly, automatically, as if we’re still hacking away together and she’s sat right next to me explaining each and every line.

Friends!

This week I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite books about typesetting; Inside Paragraphs by the teacher and type designer Cyrus Highsmith. Unlike many other books on the subject that try to hone in on a specific field, such as book or web design, Cyrus takes a very different approach here: he jumps head first into a paragraph, gets up close to the letters, and tells us how it all works from the inside out.

The book is also beautifully designed with Cyrus’s wacky and crooked illustrating style that makes it feel more like a children’s book than a serious one devoted to the art of typesetting (and it’s designed in such a way that the visuals never feel patronizing either). Each spread has only one or two paragraphs with a big illustration that stretches across the page and yet somehow Cyrus squeezes in more information to this slim volume than most giant graphic design textbooks do.

Friends!

This week I’ve been entirely obsessed with The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage where he traces the history of the telegraph; from the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, to the tales of fraudsters that used the telegraph to find their marks, to those that used this budding technology to find the person they’d soon marry.

There’s so many exciting moments in this book that it’s difficult to contain my excitement. For example, Standage notes how the technology was ignored for many painful years and yet there was this moment in time when the idea suddenly clicked and the telegraph became essential:

Expansion was the fastest in the United States, where the only working line at the beginning of 1846 was Morse’s experimental line, which ran 40 miles between Washington and Baltimore. Two years later there were approximately 2,000 miles of wire, and by 1850 there were over 12,000 miles operated by twenty different companies.

Type pals! Friends!

I’m reading Gary Kamiya’s Cool Gray City of Love this week which is all about San Francisco and it’s history, architecture, culture, and people. I’ve been wanting to read it for quite some time and so the long weekend gave me a chance to finally sit down and drink it all in. I’d certainly recommend it too, as Gary writes thoroughly lovely stuff like this throughout the whole book:

San Francisco is famous for its natural beauty. But to call its beauty “natural” is slightly misleading. For aside from the cliffs at Lands End (which are actually covered with introduced trees), Glen Canyon, and a few other places, its beauty does not derive from nature in its pure state. The paradoxical truth is that before the city existed, its terrain was not particularly beautiful. Covered in sand dunes and with scant trees, it was a monotonous, even dreary landscape, largely devoid of color and contrast. Heretical as it is to say, much of San Francisco’s terrain became more attractive when the city was built. San Francisco is the urban equivalent of an English garden, an artful blend of wildness and cultivation.

This book has led me on a few too many midnight photo gathering sprees where I’ve dug through the archives of the Library of Congress searching for old maps of San Francisco. This one in particular caught my eye: “Graphic chart of the city and county of San Francisco respectfully dedicated to the leading interests of California and the Pacific coast.” And it looks something like this:

Friends!

Let’s take a look at Plex, a new-ish type family by IBM that’s interesting for a host of reasons. The type specimen and website is the first thing to notice as it explores the abundance of styles which include mono, sans, and serif variants – but it does so in a rather bombastic and flashy way:

Perhaps it was because of the flashiness of the website but I’ve mostly ignored the type family until now. I rolled my eyes too quickly at the announcement as so many big brands are designing custom typefaces and, generally speaking, they’re rather boring variations on a well-trodden theme. There’s nothing daring in them, there’s no care or acknowledgement to the history of a company. Instead I feel like they just slap on a typeface that’s Apercu-adjacent and call it a day. (This is probably an unkind assessment but that’s what it feels like anyway).

Friends!

Typekit is no more. As the acquisition of the company back in 2011 implied, Typekit became more integrated with Adobe’s enormous galaxy of apps until it officially became Adobe Fonts a short while ago.

Along with the rebrand there’s a few things I really like about the recent changes. For instance the team has greatly improved the UX for adding fonts to a website – as far as I can tell you no longer have to manage a whole bunch of domains in a project, too. You can just copy and paste the link to the font’s CSS and there you have it!

Another neat addition is the collection of Font Packs. At the beginning of a project exploring and picking typefaces can be a tedious and ultimately painful process, so I think that these bundles are going to come in super handy:

Pals!

I’ve been thinking a lot about Future Fonts lately for some reason. If you’re unfamiliar, that’s the typeface shop that opened up about eight months ago. I think my fascination stems from the constant stream of updates I’m seeing from folks publishing their fonts on that platform and the wild contrast in visual styles between them.

There’s something about looking at a type family and seeing that it’s at VERSION 0.1 that feels very punk rock to me.

Anyway, I’ve bought two families from Future Fonts, Goiters and Covik Sans Mono over the eight months or so since they announced their service. Both fonts have received significant improvements since then and it’s neat to see how tiny communities are building up around them.

Fellow cartographers!

I’m standing in a large ballroom at the Regency Center and there’s static and friction in the air as hundreds of people are scurrying around from one booth to another as if they’re at Comic Con. They’re smiling and giggling and laughing as if they’ve just snatched an autograph from their favorite celebrity.

But they’re not and they haven’t. Instead, we’re all standing in a room filled to the brim with hundreds if not thousands of maps – maps tacked up on displays and racks and stalls, left out in the open air for us to sort and filter through with our grubby little hands.

Yet these are not just ordinary maps.

Nerds!

Portland is a ghost town. Although the city isn’t deserted, you can find ghosts hidden amongst the buildings, layered on surfaces of every kind, littering the city streets.

Last week I was in Portland for XOXO and no matter where I turned I found myself haunted by old street signs and giant banners that were fading into the background of a modern city landscape. A landscape where big and beautiful letters are almost entirely forbidden.

Friends!

Genuine enthusiasm is hard to come by but especially when it comes to the web. As I sit here in this fabulously raucous café though, reading a real-life book about the web, I find myself cheering quietly to myself. And I can’t stop smiling.

I’m reading Tim Brown’s and I realize it should be the textbook definition for the word itself. And it’s one of those rare examples of a book that’s overwhelmingly charming from start to finish. In fact it’s the sort of book that reminds you that the web is a precious thing worth building, and that the web is, and can still be, ours for the making.

Friends!

If you’re unfamiliar with Framer X then at first glance it might look like a design tool you’ve already seen before; there’s a side bar and a space for drawing rectangles, there’s a pen for drawing shapes and, besides it looking a little more futuristic than Sketch or Figma, there’s nothing immediately life changing about it.

The difference between those apps and Framer is that you can write real-life, honest-to-goodness React components in the latter. And at first I thought “well, okay this is technically neat but it’s also basically Dreamweaver all over again and I don’t want an app to generate code because it’ll always be bad.”

Friends!

I have a draft of a thing that’s been sitting in a folder for several years. It’s unpublishable, unresearched, unfinished. But there’s something to it that makes me want to quit my job and run away up into the forests of northern California, renting a cabin somewhere along the way, in order to spend a whole year typing away at this thing and building a little shrine of a website around the idea.

I imagine this thing is part type specimen, part historical account and it would focus entirely on the life of a Milwaukee born 20th century type designer called Morris Fuller Benton.

The name is famous in typographic circles, but it’s one that I don’t think many designers have heard. And yet it’s a name that all of us should know and, I would argue, be in awe of. This is because of all the type designers that have ever lived, Morris Fuller Benton is quite probably the best of them.

The other day I stumbled upon Type Journal, a website “de­voted to type design, visu­al cul­ture and ty­po­graphy in the Rus­si­an-speak­ing world,” and this year they collected ten of their favorite Cyrillic typefaces, bundling them all up into a lovely little microsite:

After scanning the site for approximately 0.006 seconds I immediately fell head over heels for Casus Pro by Eugene Yukechev, a gorgeous serif that seems just as useful and beautiful at larger sizes as it is smaller ones. It sort of reminds me of a more reserved Eames as each letter appears refined and stately, punctual even. These lively characters look like they aren’t really down to party (they most certainly do not listen to EDM) but only because they’re all too busy being effortlessly reliable at work and at home:

Friends!

For a change of pace let’s talk about some real honest-to-goodness fonts, eh? One release that’s worth your attention and one I noticed that made me squeal with excitement was Acme Gothic, a new family my Mark Simonson that’s based on the lettering style that was pretty much everywhere in the U.S. in the early 20th century:

I can tell this is a lovely type family because of my big, dumb excitement about it. And generally speaking a lot of gothics look a little too mean and are trying too hard to be cool to be useful. Acme though doesn’t share the same quirks and since the family contains compressed, condensed, normal, wide and extrawide styles, it’s possible to cover a huge swath of design possibilities with ease.

Friends!

It’s 2007: I’m sat in the kitchen watching a family friend and her four year old son talk to my mom. Over the course of a few minutes I notice how this kid, Jack, is starting to get bored; his eyes roll into the back of his head and all of his limbs begin to fidget independently of the host as if he’s possessed by the spirit of boredom itself.

In a flash my mom notices this before her friend does. Her eyes dart around the room, looking for something, anything, to entertain Jack with. Coming up short, my mom grabs the closest thing that was on the table: a key. I think it unlocked one of the older cabinets we had lying around back then so it was very nondescript and boring; it didn’t have any patterns on it, or engravings, and it certainly wasn’t imbued with ancient magic of any kind.

But my mom gets down to Jack’s level and hijacks his attention with the key. She twirls it between her fingers and Jack’s eyes expand to the size of saucers.

Friends!

For the Atlantic, Julie Beck has written a lovely piece about the exclamation mark and how our use of it has changed in recent years:

Much like awesome once served a greater purpose, the exclamation point has been downgraded from a shout of alarm or intensity to a symbol that indicates politeness and friendliness. As Shipley and Schwalbe put it in their guide: “Exclamation points can instantly infuse electronic communication with human warmth.” And that’s what we use them for now.

“The single exclamation mark is being used not as an intensity marker, but as a sincerity marker,” says Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who studies online communication. “If I end an email with ‘Thanks!,’ I’m not shouting or being particularly enthusiastic; I’m just trying to convey that I’m sincerely thankful, and I’m saying it with a bit of a social smile.”

This kind of communication isn’t only limited to messages with friends though, as I’ve started to notice how at work there’s something going on, too. Lowercase sentences, uncorrected spelling mistakes, the proliferation of emoji – all of it announces a new kind of enthusiasm and sincerity.

Type pals!

If ever there was an award for the type foundry with the best italics then Pampatype would be amongst the front runners. It might come as no surprise then that when I stumbled over a piece they’d written about a new type family designed for Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de Córdoba called Reforma (which is simply beautiful in every which way) I was especially excited to see the italics:

Friends!

I’m not sure if you have a favorite passage in the English language but I most certainly do, and it’s really the only parlor trick that I know. At a moment’s notice I can recite this bit of text and immediately become an unbearable 17th century Duke:

Thoughts, whither have ye led me, with what sweet
Compulsion thus transported to forget,
What hither brought us hate, not love, nor hope
Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste
Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying, other joy
To me is lost.

It’s a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost where Lucifer describes how he gains pleasure only in breaking things and being a big, dumb jerk all the time. But he’s angry and doesn’t really want to be the devil and there’s something wildly interesting to me about that idea. Plus, the words just sound real good. Oh and try reading them aloud because that’s how Milton, once appointed as the Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the British Government (which is by far the coolest government position of all time if you ask me), dictated them due to his blindness. In other words his writing at this point was meant to be heard aloud, preferably as close as you can get to the seventeenth century; with a cozy fire and a sleeping dog.

Type pals!

Earlier this week I read an excellent post called How to Make a Book and it’s a collection of advice from writers and novelists about how to get started with a book of your own:

Chums! Pals! Life-long enemies with whom I shall only meet briefly before the painful end!

This week I picked up a copy of Many Subtle Channels, a book in which Daniel Levin Becker investigates the not-so-secret and almost-famous gathering known as the Oulipo. They’re a group of writers, poets, and mathematicians that are interested in two things: potential literature and constraints in writing. For example, one of the members of this illustrious group, Georges Perec, once wrote a novel without the letter “e”. That might sound daft but try and write a sentence without the letter “e” for a moment and you’ll find it’s much more difficult than it looks.

Friends!

This week I’ve been obsessed with Foreday by the DSType Foundry and the reason why is quite extraordinary: I think it might be the first variable font where the options aren’t just font weight or the width of the characters. Instead, you can choose whether you have a sans or a serif typeface and change it on the fly.

Here, take a peek:

Dictionary friends!

On Tuesday I headed over to a book store in the Haight for the launch of Dictionary Stories, a peculiar little book by my pal Jez Burrows, and it just happens to be one of the most charming and joyous things I’ve ever read. In fact the book is overflowing with charm and I find myself thinking about it constantly.

Here’s the cover:

Friends!

I’m a little worse for wear this weekend however I just wanted to write a brief note about a type specimen website published by Google that showcases a collection of Hangul fonts that they offer. It’s difficult to describe what’s going on because 1. it’s completely bananas and 2. it’s unlike any other specimen website I’ve seen before:

Hangul is the alphabet of Korea and this specimen site describes why developing webfonts for the language can get particularly complicated:

Type pals!

Last week Jason Pamental shared a link to Bona Nova which is a revival typeface of the serif persuasion and it’s designed by Mateusz Machalski. This specimen of Bona Nova is particularly lovely for so many reasons:

I love that Mateusz met the designer of the original Bona typeface, released in 1971 by Andrzej Heidrich, and the idea that the two of them sat down together with the student expanding and improving on Andrzej’s work from 40 years ago is simply lovely. I think it’s more often the case with revival typeface projects, such as a Baskerville or Caslon, that the type designer has only left over material from previous designers. Contacting the original designer is impossible because everyone has long since passed.

Friends!

The Master Type and Media course at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague is a masterclass in type design and the students there just released this lovely website in celebration of their work. It showcases all of the typefaces that they’ve been working on over the past twelve months and many of them are strikingly beautiful.

Take Henk by Martin Pyšný for example where things start off normal. We have a regular, italic and bold weight that share rounded serif characteristics like this:

First you notice the city. San Francisco from 30,000 feet appears to be a tiny holdout at the very tip of a cloudy peninsula, but as you begin to descend you’ll find bridges and ocean, mountains to the north and east, and a patchwork quilt of skyscrapers at the northernmost tip.

But from this height it’s still a city, just like all the others.

Whilst the plane continues to slowly dip through the atmosphere though you’ll catch glimpses of landmarks, like a lens slowly bending the light into its focus. Do you see the Coit tower yet? Can you spot the buffalo in the park, the decorated trams? Perhaps you’re flying into the city at night, where you’ll find the dim and orange glowing hum of the Golden Gate bridge or maybe instead its neighbor, the bridge that heads north-east towards Oakland, where at dusk you can find its lights shimmering as if strung together with a set of loosely bound and luminescent pearls in the dark.

Friends!

This week Future Fonts launched and it’s interesting for several reasons. First: it’s a website that lets you purchase fonts in an unfinished state. Each family might only consist of a single weight, a single style or variant, or even supporting characters from a single language (whereas a great many other type releases will try to support as many weights, styles and languages as possible to increase their value).

But second: Future Fonts has already assembled an impressive collection of typefaces for sale, from the peculiar and broad nibbed Jaws...

Friends!

There’s far too much to do. There are three websites to be built, a countless number of books on my shelf to be read, several drafts about CSS to publish and a secret project that didn’t exist until a flurry of text messages spurred the idea the other afternoon. It’s exciting and yet wildly daunting to find myself with so little time and energy and focus left over all of a sudden.

However, speaking of exciting though, late last year I ordered an interesting bit of typographic ephemera from Glenn Fleishman that I’ve wanted to write about for some time now. It’s a folio (which is a roundabout and rather fancy way to say a folded sheet) and it’s all about the poet and printer Walt Whitman.

Friends!

This weekend I’ve updated the fonts on my blog like it’s 2009 and for this version I’ve chosen Commercial Type’s excellent Caponi Display and Caponi Text to replace David Jonathan Ross’ Output (which I still thoroughly adore and will most certainly forever live on as one of my favorite typefaces of all time).

Here’s what my site looks like now after this little refresh:

Friends!

If you’ve never heard of the Ampersand conference then let me introduce you: it’s the best typography conference you could possibly ever visit. It’s held in the UK, in the sea-side town of Brighton to be more specific, and it’s organised by Richard Rutter and the rest of the team at Clearleft. Peculiarly enough though, this is not an annual conference with the same faces on the same stage like many web design conferences.

This is an entirely different affair.

I’ve been to every Ampersand event in the UK and each time I’m astounded by the quality of the talks and the diversity of topics on stage. In 2015 the event introduced me to the work of Lu Yu, Jen Simmons’ experimental layouts and Marcin’s completely mind-boggling and hand-made presentation software. Every talk is buoyant and I’d recommend you go even if you don’t care about font rendering or the intricacies of CSS Grid.

Friends!

There are fonts and then there are fonts.

I believe that the Conductor family that was recently designed by Nina Stössinger and Tobias Frere-Jones is most certainly in the latter category: it’s striking, unpredictable and, best of all, it’s really, really weird:

Friends!

There’s a tendency in web design circles to ditch the old in favor of the new: We’ll blow up the archives! We’ll cut loose all the legacy code! With a little bit of effort our work can feel fresh and exciting again! A new year, a clean slate, a whole new thing. Yet the more I work on the web, the more I recognize the benefits of tiny, iterative improvements.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past month or so at Gusto as I’ve been tidying up The Guide — an internal design tool for the company — and in the introduction I describe it like this:

This is where the documentation for Gusto’s design system is archived for safe-keeping; it contains all the assets we need, such as images and illustrations as well as notes on our copywriting style and documentation for our React components. In fact, we like to think of The Guide as a sort of Pokédex.