Hello dear Reader 🐉

It is so ironical that the second I decide to start a newsletter, I realise I am burning out haha.

I have been taking it SLOW these past two weeks. I finally admitted that I was losing my joy to type design, and I'm doing my absolute dream job, so that couldn't happen. I had to force rest. I therefore have been playing unholy amounts of Diablo 2, and 3 especially, on my good old Switch. Which is funny, because I play respectively a Paladin and a Crusader, exclusively. Love me some overpowered Fists of the Heavens optimised build! Diablo 3, with all its violence, is SUCH a comfort game for me; and Diablo 2 is one of the earliest video games I've ever played. I died to Radament in D2 again the other day, and had a Ratatouille style flashback of playing on my cousin's terrible PC in 2007. If you know you know. So much fun.

I have also, while playing, watched 50+ hours of Critical Role. Critical Role is by far one of my absolute favourite things that ever existed in general, no cap. It's extremely popular, but for a good reason. If you like Dungeons & Dragons, or just podcasts, role playing games, or cry laughing until you have no humidity left in your body, I can only recommend it.

I am in particular extremely fond of Campaign 2. Jester (played by Laura Bailey, which my sister does not fail to remind me, plays Serana in Skyrim and Abby in The Last of Us 2) has spectacularly entered the roster of the fictional women that ever had the most impact on me. And this list includes the sisters from Arcane, Aloy from Horizon, Lae'zel from BG3, FemV from the 2018 E3 demo of Cyberpunk 2077, and especially Cirilla from Wild Hunt specifically, so I don't say that lightly lol. These women built and shaped me.

In terms of actual type, because the word type is still in this newsletter's name, and if I'm not stopped I will tunnel you about the fictional women I love for a novel's length, I still tried; but incredibly carefully. I now have 19 glyphs left, as of writing this, to clean up for Baleze's graduation on Future Fonts. It is PAINFUL. 30mins per glyph painful. I'm SO EAGER to finish, because then I can move on to the release pipeline I prepared (which could be, by the way, an interesting topic for a future issue; let me know on socials if you're interested). I am really excited about developing the world building and magic system I created for this typeface. But man, the clean up is so boring...

Thankfully, I have my beloved playlist of chill phonk and wave, ADD meds, and energy drinks (addicted to Monster Ultra, but everyone knew that). When I'm not listening to this amazing playlist on a loop, which is rare these days, I've been enjoying rewatching the entire YouTube channels of both Jesse Nyberg, which has to be my favourite graphic designer and content creator for a while now, as well as his GlueFM podcast. In particular, I LOVED his recent episode about rest. My sister also hooked me up on Monotonic ASMR a while back, and though one of my biggest prides is to have my name at the end of each of Atmosphere's videos as a Patreon patron, I admit I am HOOKED. Fun fact: I had an ASMR channel on YouTube, which was starting to get pretty popular, from 2012 to 2013. Lol. The more you know.

As for productivity, too, I've recently been on a quest to cancel as many subscriptions as I could. It's a delicate process, but I'm very happy to say I've managed to reproduce my Todoist workflow entirely on Obsidian. I'm a supermassive to do list nerd, and I was a Todoist poweruser for years on end, so this is a huge relief. I actually received a news camera lens as an early birthday present from my mom, and I was considering explaining this workflow in a YouTube video - especially as a type designer. Let me know if you're interested!

Last but not least, I've finally took the plunge, and registered the domain name for my future foundry. I have started building TypeLair's site. Ultra in progress. I am using Cargo, which is honestly so much fun. I love projects where I can learn in several fields at once! I am thinking of simplifying it, however, as I want the process to be crystal clear for video games studios. I am rewriting my EULA and I am having the time of my life, said no one ever.

I have lots planned for this newsletter tbh. For instance, I would LOVE to write a more in depth article on how I kern with a video game controller - with over 40k pairs of kerning Dargon this way, I am starting to get the hang of it. Let me know as well!

Thank you so much for reading. I'm elated to say that I finally managed to go back to work after my forced rest; extremely excited for a more engaging update next issue :))

Take care ⚔️🔠
Ando