The special edition of the newsletter I sent out last Friday was only meant to be a “heads up — the podcast is coming” sort of thing, but many of you sought it out immediately and managed to find the first episode on your podcasting platform of choice, as — much to my surprise — it appeared on Spotify within minutes of sending out that issue, and on Apple Podcasts about an hour later. Weirdly, it’s still marked as “processing” on Google Podcasts, but hey, they’ve literally just announced the imminent closure of Google Podcasts, so there’s that.
Anyway, the important thing is: the very first episode of Hello, type friends! is officially live, and you can listen to me chat away with Jessica Hische right now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and hellotypefriends.com. 🎉
But it’s not all podcast podcast podcast in this issue, you’ll be glad to know...
Floodfonts have just released Ferryman — “a Blackletter typeface for the contemporary reader. Unfamiliar Blackletter characters have been replaced with […] letters from other historical scripts that are more legible to a modern audience.” Although they call it a display typeface, it’s surprisingly readable at body-ish sizes. Cool site, too.
Lisa Huang, who I collaborated with on some of Google Fonts Knowledge’s CJK articles, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign for Words of Type — an online and multilingual encyclopedia of typographic terms. The multilingual bit is important here: “The first version will contain 200 terms of specific vocabulary of typography and typeface design. Their descriptions will be available in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Several experts have translated from English and proofread the content in their own language.” Be sure to also check out the project’s supporting website (and its bespoke typeface), wordsoftype.com
I Love Typography are currently having a massive 50%-off sale, and quite a few typefaces caught my eye, especially the really quite cheeky Asgard by Zetafonts. ILT are also currently offering a 25% discount on their online courses and workshops — including mine — with the code “Draw23”.
Here’s one to file under my ever-expanding not-news category, but a recent email newsletter from Emigre reminded me of the Emigre Fonts app for iOS and iPadOS, which seems pretty different from when I last looked.
Are you up for a quick bit of, er, user research? I’d love to know if you’d like to listen to the podcast on a service other than Apple, Spotify, and Google. I can add a whole bunch of other networks, but haven’t yet done so because I’m not sure exactly where people listen. If you could let me know where you’d like to hear it, I’ll update the networks.