Friends!
Last year I was talking to an engineer on our team who was leaving for Google and I asked him over coffee: why? Not out of disrespect, or a Big Judgemental Why, I just wanted to know what he expected from the new gig.
After a beat, and a few nervous sips of coffee, he replied that it was because of impact. He wanted to work on something that touches millions of lives every day. And when he finished I let out a sigh so long it was as if I was a six thousand year old man. The sigh was so prolonged in fact that the buildings shook and the leaves from the hedges burst into the air around us. Dogs barked in the distance, sirens wailed, and the cement beneath my feet cracked from the sheer force of apathy.
I know that’s why so many flock to the Bay Area; they want to change the world, they want fast cars and even faster fortunes. They want to work on something that helps everyone in the world. Which is, if you tilt your head to the side when you look at it, pretty admirable. But everyone I’ve spoken to that says this, that truly believes they can turn the world on a dime with a few lines of code, is doing it for the fame and prestige and not the work. They’re doing it for entirely the wrong reasons and the actual thing they’re building doesn’t matter so long as it has .
🔠 Gold Rush
Friends!
Being on the lookout for interesting new typefaces is often like panning for gold in a stream. You head out into the world and sift through a ton of dirt yet after weeks of panning all you find are clumps of soil and the odd fish. One day weeks later though, as you’re on your last leg and want to quit the prospect altogether the stream turns in your favor; rocks of diamond gold rush through the water and suddenly you have so much gold that you have no idea what do all with all of it. The river is pure gold at this point and there’s too much to sift and organize, too much to haul back to town. You realize that you can never possibly inspect all of it and so you sit at the edge of the riverbank cursing your gold.
Stupid gold.
This is how I felt when I saw that Ayer, a new collection of type families by Commercial Type, was released into the wild a couple of weeks ago. First up, there is Ayer Deck:
🔠 Video games and WiggleTech™
Friends!
This weekend will be the first lazy one I’ve had in quite a while. There’ll be no rushing about sorting out my visa or flying across large bodies of water or working into the middle of the night on a side project. All I have to do for the next couple of days is drink an inhumane amount of coffee, type up a few notes that have been drifting about in my noggin’, and catch up on my backlog of video games.
One of those games I’ve returned to this weekend is Celeste – it’s a wonderful platformer from early 2018 and I could write endlessly about the difficulty of the game or its dialogue (which is perhaps the best of any game in recent memory). The entire game oozes with brilliant design, animations, and something else that I didn’t expect going in: typography.
🔠 Let’s Talk about Fonts
Friends!
This week I’m writing from England where I’m attempting to navigate the American visa application process without collapsing into a giant puddle of anxiety. But after thirty minutes in the embassy and a small, respectful fist bump with one of the security guards last Thursday I now have my visa in hand.
Over the past week I’ve bopped all over the country though; from every square inch of London and up to Peterborough, across and up to Wales (through breathtaking valleys and mountain ranges), and then across to Liverpool (and its wonderful collection of mummies) before heading back to my hometown in the southwest of the country (where I have acquired both Jet Lag and a Big Flu).
🔠 The Berlin Handshake
Friends!
In Salman Rushdie’s luminous and musical novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, our protagonist Ormus Cama is standing in a Bombay record store. He is seventeen years old and he has just met someone who will change his life forever, his future collaborator Vina Apsara. In a few short years he will ascend with her into unparalleled stardom when they move to England together and become the most famous musical act the world has ever seen.
But today they are looking at records and a new song starts playing over the store radio: by The Beatles. Ormus is upbeat and charming until he hears the song and then immediately throws his hands up in the air and starts pacing around the store in anger whilst Vina asks what’s wrong.
🔠 Nostalgia
Pals! Comrades! Big Serif Friends!
Whenever I look at serifs of a certain kind I see them all as children of an era. Take, for example, the big chunky serifs that were popular for a flash in the 70s – a ton of popular letterforms back then chose big, chunky terminals and descenders to punctuate their style. And these letters were used so heavily in that period that now whenever I see anything even remotely like it I see a hint of nostalgia in them.
The rebranding of Mailchimp is one example that uses a typeface of this kind, the Cooper type family:
🔠 Hyperobjects and the Black Triangle
Friends!
In his first week at SingleTrac, a video game company that made cult classics like Twisted Metal, Jay Barnson discovered what he called the “black triangle.” This is a way of describing problems that happen to be giant engineering infrastructure projects but they don’t tend to be all that impressive visually:
🔠 Wild and Kinder Things
Friends!
Every so often I stumble upon a typeface that draws a loud and cartoonish gasp of excitement from me. It’s the sort of typeface that happens to be so weird that I spend hours scanning each and every letter and it’s the sort where I’ll keep finding something new that jolts me awake as if I’ve drunk one too many pints of coffee.
Whilst I’m staring at this typeface all of its unexpected curves are teaching me something new. It’s teaching me all about graphical space and how to arrange it properly – how websites and books can be divided and then subdivided, how large blocks of text can best be shaped to attract and hold someone’s attention.
George Saunders once wrote that “it is possible for one’s gaze to become more loving” and I cannot think of a better way to describe how I feel when I see an unfamiliar typeface. It’s not just that I’m learning about typographic shapes and graphic design, I also feel that this level of curiosity is making me a better person in the long run somehow. I’m not entirely sure if that’s too cheesy but it’s certainly how I feel.
🔠 Typographic Scales
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:
🔠 A Quick Note about Ronnia
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:
🔠 Scattered Notes from the Field
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.
🔠 Take Care of the Margins
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?
🔠 The Smallest Possible Bit
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)
🔠 Discipline
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.
🔠 The Four Kinds of Space
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.
🔠 The Victorian Internet
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.
🔠 Cool Gray City of Type
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:
🔠 IBM Plex
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).
