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.
🔠 Fonts as Software
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...
🔠Typographic Perambulations
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.
🔠 Blogs, Revivals, and Workshops
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:
🔠 Ampersand 2018
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.
🔠 A Short Note on Conductor
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:
🔠 Small Improvements in the Right Direction
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.
