Hello dear Reader 🐉

You might have noticed; this issue comes to you later than usual. I apologise. Life has been just a little bit surreal. For the best.

On the day after my 32nd birthday, which was September 6th, I moved into the Arkive (as you might remember, this is how I call my new place). Best area of Paris period.

The move took 2 intense days, huge thanks to my mom and sister, and left me super exhausted. Which was only accentuated by my smart decision of getting tattooed for 7h on the Wednesday.

The result is incredible, and I am very aware I chose this, but man, this was a long 3 days lol. I've just been deliriously happy and tired for two weeks straight. I've been wanting to get tattooed lyrics from my favourite song, In My Head by Lauren Sanderson, for a long while; I have over 600 listens of this song, it's my favourite song ever period, I'm sure I mentioned it before I can’t stop talking about it.

And coupled to my desire to mark the release of my biggest font ever, Dargon, on TypeTogether this year, as I consider my tattoos more as personal milestone reminders than art pieces, I naturally chose to get In My Head lyrics tattooed - in Dargon. I have "WHEN I LOOK INTO MYSELF" on the right arm, "I KNOW THAT'S MY POWER" on the left; and when I say Dargon, I actually mean that I arranged letters from the various uncial styles to get exactly the configuration I wanted.

My tattoo artist, JB aka totallyscribes, is insanely talented (even my grandma agreed!), and an insane calligrapher; I encourage you to check him out. Fun fact: if you look up the lyrics of the part I got tattooed online, you will get the wrong ones, as confirmed by Lauren Sanderson herself. Which amuses the shit out of me, as I often still say "I notice my power", and I had to quadruple check her DM when confirming the tattoo.

Not content with these 3 intense days, I had the second installment of the Boring Workshops on last Saturday, deep Fontra demo session, and started on last Monday a week of INTENSE workshop at the university I am a regular teacher at, ECV Paris. The topic was Type & Motion, and my partner in crime, Benjamin, absolutely nailed it; his pedagogy and technical skills helped alleviate how unbelievably tired I was, and how little I know about motion design. Especially since on Monday evening, I had the pleasure of going to the Type Tuning session organised by Tunera, which was really amazing, and where I had the pleasure of receiving the latest issue of Xyloplast, Ariel's gazette, printed in purple (of course) riso and featuring Ampoule. Thank you Ariel omg, if you read this, you're truly a chef on all aspects!

And on top of all of this, I also had my grandma's 91yo birthday with my family on Tuesday evening, after teaching alone to 43 students for the 8h of the day. Friday was hand in day, less brutal than usual as we prepared groups, and finally, after the 3rd session of Boring Workshops yesterday, I can sit down today and write what happened.

As you can probably understand from how I avoid talking about it, I did not have much time to work on Transept. Which I profoundly regret, and feel free to shame me on socials, as I did say I would.

But I really wanted to type design last Sunday, as a way to sort of baptise the new place, so I started a typeface inspired by a random D20 dice that was on my desk.

In terms of media corner, lately I have been, to my great dismay, listening to the following song on a loop. My friend Charlotte showed it to me and it will, unfortunately, be in my Spotify Wrapped. I am freaking ADDICTED.

If you're reading this listening to it, and now you have it head, first I'm sorry, second welcome to my world this past week.

Other stuff I've been listening to is this particular sped up tiktok remix of Money Trees by Kendrick Lamar (talking 34 listens in a row, omfg), and this infuriatingly good nerdcore song about Jinx from Arcane. LMAO. The state of my music taste needs an intervention STAT. I did reach 100k scrobbles on Last.FM, if you'd like to watch in real time the fall of my musical civilisation, which makes me both happy, and super sad that it took 5y - I'm listening to less and less music, when I need it as much as air.

YouTube and video wise, I did not have much time to watch anything this week either, but I do want to mention that since a few years now already I really like, in terms of aesthetics, the content of Trey Gustafson, and I was pleased to see his new vlog. I have also fell asleep, oddly enough because I was laughing so much, to this video of the incredible Monotonic Asmr, on how the new GTA 6 game would perform in terms of ASMR. Fantastic stuff, highly recommend.

Ah wait! Actually I lied; I did reach half of season 2 of Jujutsu Kaisen this week, and shoutout to Charlotte again for inspiring me to watch it, cause Lord knows I don't know anything about anime, but this is ULTRA enjoyable. Yuji is def my favourite character tbh :) He's so pure. My culture of the manga genre is almost non existent, but my favourite series of all time is, was, and forever will be Rave Master (you might know Hiro Mashima from Fairy Tail, but Rave is the absolute shit, ever).

And indeed I just did not had time to play any game or even read this week, urgh, but I plan to combine both for the next two weeks, as I've finally set up my reading corner in the Arkive, which I'm ultra excited about, and look forward to sit down and browse my game related art books a lot.

Ok I'll stop yapping now. Thank you so much for sticking around with my newsletter. I am extremely excited to start the Ando Ark this fall and winter. My plans and goals and dreams have no limits. My whole life I wanted three things: independence, purpose, and health. This translates now at 32yo into: living alone, type design, and fitness. I am living alone. I'm a type designer. I have time. Time to become the fit type monk I am inside. LFG. Let’s type design.

Take care ⚔️🔠
Ando