One last BTW collection for the year! In this edition: There’s something so satisfying about watching people being good at things. I’ve been enjoying putting these together, especially moving a little slower and seeing what themes might coalesce. See you in 2026!

🔵 A2Z

Designer Pedro Neves organized a graduate course at the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Design to explore creating letterforms within a modular system, and that system is LEGO! And they created letterpress prints of their work. Stunning compositions abound in this project. I’m particularly struck by some of the surprising forms achieved and the addition of overprinting too. Obviously, part of that is inherent from using LEGO bricks, but many feel so expressive and new. This combines so many things I’m into, and I’d love to try this out myself sometime.

🧶 Knit Hello

A “typeknitting” typeface by Rüdiger Schlömer based on a simple letterform grid and made for hand knitting. I know next to nothing about knitting, but this looks like fun! Schlömer also offers patterns for Knit Hello and other knitting typeface projects.

📓 The Ohno Book

From James Edmondson of Ohno Type Co, the brains behind so many great contemporary typefaces. Billed as “A Serious Guide to Irreverent Type Design”, it’s chock full of helpful tips for designing type. I love how naturally James writes about a highly technical craft, it makes it feel approachable while not overly simplified.

🤖 Beyond the Machine

Good buddy Frank Chimero gave a great talk in October at the Kinference conference in Brooklyn, and he’s made it available online as an essay. Beyond the Machine is one of the most clear-eyed takes on creative existence, coexistence, and resistance in a world with AI. I love the framing of over/beside/under when it comes to machines, and the artist examples really sing (especially Spirited Away as allegory). He also posted outtakes and extras that didn’t make it into the talk. And here I thought I was alone in not clicking with Rick Rubin’s book!

🔠 Designing Gotham

Another great retrospective by Tobias Frere-Jones (written by Doug Wilson from interviews conducted with Tobias) on the design of Gotham, now 25 years old. I’ve heard bits of the inspiration behind Tobias’ approach to Gotham’s in various places, but to have it all in one place feels like a gift. Don’t miss the other great histories on Archer, Landmark, Surveyor, and Whitney.

Loose Ends

• The Mel Brooks Questionnaire: I only just discovered this! Mel Brooks devised a one-page personality test for The New York Times and it gets some really insightful and (of course) hilarious answers from celebs. I love the career ambitions at different ages. Some other past interviewees include Maya Rudolph and Rob Reiner (R.I.P.).
• Color Palette Pro: A synthesizer for color. I love the interface and the approach to assembling color combinations. Read more about why and how Ryan Feigenbaum made it.
• Shop Sans: A new in-progress typeface from Nick Sherman of HEX Projects. This one is a variable font with axes that let you tailor letterforms for settings on a circle or curved paths. Wizardry!
• Matthew Hinders-Anderson: Some great fonts for “people fighting for a better future”. Fonts are free for all non-commercial use and some were recently used in the Zohran Mamdani NYC mayoral campaign design. New to me!
• Fran Sans: Awesome monospace typeface project by Emily Sneddon inspired by the digital segmented displays for San Francisco’s transit system. Perfect name too.
• Size of Life: Beautifully constructed comparisons in size from strands of DNA to the largest living thing on Earth. The arthropleura is some new nightmare fuel for me.

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I’ve been in a funny loop on Citywide’s lowercase for a couple of months, drawing and redrawing ns. When plotting out the forms for a typeface family, it’s common to start with the letters H, O, n, and o. These letters give you some of the basic rules for what your family is going to look like. You define fully round and fully perpendicular characters, set character widths, an x-height, and establish counters and stroke styles.

These letters don’t give you all the pieces you need to fully realize your typeface (diagonals are still a thing to figure out), but they give you a lot. In the case of the lowercase n, you likely have enough information to rough out a, b, d, g, h, i, l, m, p, q, r, and u. Over halfway there — not bad!

Lowercase is related to uppercase, but typically has some unique strokes that the uppercase lacks, like the curved joining stroke on the lowercase n. Seasoned type designers know all of this already, but I’m not seasoned. I’ve been moonlighting as a type designer because it’s fun and I love the heck out of it. It’s humbling and nourishing to be a beginner at something again. I know a lot about typography, but making fonts has been a whole other beast. Sure, there is crossover knowledge, but it doesn’t all equate. Like how an expert chef’s knife skills wouldn’t necessarily translate to excellence in topiary.

In the case of Citywide, I had great reference for the capital letterforms, but no true reference for lowercase. So I'm pulling inspiration from a few neighborly typefaces (Eurostile and Microgramma being useful models) and trying to find forms that complement the caps. Hence drawing dozens of ns to try and find the best form. When something clicks and feels right, it’s like finding the right note to play. It rings out, in time, in tune, in melody.

All of these ns have some relation to existing forms in the uppercase. Some early ones were rigidly geometric or tried to replicate the uppercase’s curves. I don’t know exactly how the original letterforms that inspired Citywide were made, but I like to imagine a person with a brush and a guide curve creating them. My first attempts felt machined rather than human or painterly. Where I ended up is closer to the version on the right in the image above, emulating the uppercase’s curves while adding an upward connecting stroke.

The resulting process was about pushing shapes toward an extreme (angular or curved) and feeling out what “too much” was. In the image above, the n on the left introduced a deeper cut in the top where the curve joins the vertical, but I think it got too narrow. And the way the middle of the curve flattens out was a nice reference to the uppercase, but also made it feel stodgy. The version on the right pulled together more of what was working — a generous cut at the top that wasn’t too narrow, and a “faster” curve that added life to the letterform, while still keeping a similar right-side radius to the uppercase. It all seems so straightforward, but it really takes ages of squinting at proofs trying to see the letterforms with fresh eyes.

I’ve been at this a few years now, and I’m getting better. The first versions of Citywide were baaad. I’m sure there are mistakes that’ll be obvious to more experienced type designers, but I’m embracing the learning process. Like growing any skill, it takes time, feedback, and reps. And like many design-related skills, that repetition is how you develop your eye.

The journey is the fun part—and so is looking back to see the progress you’ve made. Special thanks to CJ Dunn (of CJ Type, go check out his awesome typefaces) for his advice and guidance in shaping Citywide’s lowercase. I have a few more bits to button up and always more proofing, but the lowercase should be out in a couple of months.

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I recently had the pleasure of working with David Jonathan Ross (of DJR) to create a microsite for his type family Megazoid. Megazoid is a big, blocky exploration of raw geometry. It’s such a fun typeface! The font itself draws inspiration from stark geometric forms and shares some DNA with works like Milton Glaser’s Baby Teeth or RadioShack’s previous logo, but also leans into some of that quirkiness with depth layers and offsets like the best of Photo-lettering.

The brief for these kinds of projects is almost always the same: Showcase what the font can do and examples for what it feels like in use. Beyond that, have fun with it. Since it’s a playful typeface, the site should be playful too.

I had a blast making the site and iterating through ideas with David. When we met, we gathered inspiration we both liked, leaning into retro packaging design like VHS and cassette tapes, Polaroid, and Trapper Keepers as well as analog devices like calculators, keyboards, and game controllers. This material is also rife with great color motifs that go right up to the line of “clashing” while still feeling energetic.

The text samples are largely sci-fi and space themed, and the longer passages are game descriptions from an old Atari catalogue. I layered in a subtle paper texture to evoke the feeling of discovering these materials in an attic box, preserved but aged, like a time capsule from my youth.

I capped it all off with lots of little moments of motion and play. Almost everything on the site reacts to hover or touch — letters bounce, shift, and extrude. Because this is the very place to have fun with web design, all while trying to show how cool it is to use Megazoid.

Check out the site, and grab a copy of Megazoid for your next project.

More on DJR and Font of the Month Club

Megazoid started out as an entry in DJR’s Font of the Month Club where members receive a new surprise font every month. It’s a fantastic membership that I highly recommend, it pays for itself many times over. Some fonts feel experimental at first, while others are revivals, expansions, or future workhorses. All are fully baked and usable, and serve as the seeds for future expansions. I love how David makes room for experimentation and play in his work, it’s both a labor of love and a dare he puts forth every month. Also, members get discounts on past months’ releases!

DJR is a friend and collaborator. He’s one of the most generous people in the type community, often giving his time and expertise to teaching and lifting up others. When I’ve taken type workshops in the past, he invariably shows up as a guest critic. Other type designers often tell me they turn to him for advice when they hit tricky scripting challenges. Just last week, he used ad space he bought on Fonts In Use to promote other designers. A+ human right there.

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💡 Pencil Lampshades

Nanako Kume is an artist that makes giant lampshades that look like pencil shavings. How do they do it? By making a giant pencil and giant pencil sharpener, of course! Don’t miss the video, the process is mesmerizing. They’re beautiful, and I totally want one.

✏️ Pencils Are the Best

Speaking of pencils, they’re still my all-time favorite tool. I love getting ideas out quickly in their roughest form. In the last few years I’ve also made a habit of taking notes from meetings and conversations on paper — I swear it has helped me remember things better. What I love about pencils is the balance they strike: you can geek out on materials, production, or mark-making, and yet some of the best pencils being made will only run you a dollar or two. So you don’t have to sweat lending one out or losing one.

I wrote a little Mastodon thread about some favorites a couple of years ago, and it still holds true. Most days I’m using a Camel HB or some kind of Tombow. I’m also enjoying the pack of Musgrave’s 1101 Yellow Special pencils earlier this summer.

👾 Arcade Marquees

Dan Sinker visited the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois, and came back with loads of beautiful pictures of vintage arcade game marquees. I agree with Dan: the combination of color and light makes this such a pleasing canvas for expression. It scratches a specific corner of my brain, the same way looking at the VHS covers of movies in the horror section of the video store did when I was young. For a deeper trip down retro lane, Bitmap Books has a great book called ARTCADE all about classic game art.

📚 Video Game Research Library

More games! The Video Game History Foundation is a non-profit that has started a video game history research library. You can already dig through old video game magazines and other ephemera. Bonus: you can buy a monthly subscription to receive a random vintage video game magazine issue every month in the mail!

🗒️ Good Notepads

Write Notepads has stopped doing general retail and moved to a custom bulk/branded business. I’m so sad, they’ve been my favorite notebooks for years. Once I run out of the few blank ones I have left, I’ll need to find a new go-to. I’ve been eyeing Maruman Mnemosyne and Rollbahn notebooks. Have any you like?

📐 Iconfactory, Better Than Ever

Iconfactory are craftspeople of the highest order. They’re the brains behind countless apps that made spending a day at the computer enjoyable (CandyBar, xScope) and have made services usable (Twitterrific, Tapestry). Icons. Wallpapers. Custom work that will knock your socks off. Every detail shows their care and artistry. If you have a need for their kind of work, you can’t do better.

🪡 Handmade CMYK

Artist and designer Evelin Kasikov has been making CMYK embroidery since formulating the technique in grad school. The results are beautiful and effective. Her body of design work is vast, but she often returns to these CMYK expressions. Found via Ethan’s great new links stream.

Loose Ends

• Feeling stuck in a loop? Read Eject Disk, by Greg Storey.
• Robin Sloan pens a consistently great newsletter about books, media, and life. I also highly recommend his last book Moonbound.
• The old Pizza Hut restaurants had such an iconic look. Filmmakers Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker made a documentary about the second life many of these buildings have had after Pizza Hut moved out.
• Ever wonder how Muppets manage to ride bikes or move in ways that seem impossible? Check out How Muppets Break Free from their Puppeteers.
• To celebrate David Attenborough’s 99th birthday, 99 smart folks (Michael Palin, Jane Fonda, Hans Zimmer, and more) share how he’s inspired them.
• “Good Internet is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit print and digital biannual magazine for personal website owners and those interested in using the internet as a means of self-expression, art, and recreation.” Yes please!

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I wanted to collect the thoughts that have been swirling in my brain about AI. Not to add another think piece to the pile, but to record them so I can understand where my head was at on the topic. Kind of a future letter to myself.

I’ve been pretty allergic to the wave of AI and all of the services popping up around them. Admittedly, part of it is fear. I’ve tried out many AI offerings. I can see how they are handy, they work quickly and seemingly make a lot of tedious things easier. They’ll likely help cure diseases or unlock breakthroughs in many fields. And that’s awesome. But I can’t shake the anger I feel about these models being trained on work taken without consent — including from artists, writers, and sites that explicitly opted out.

As someone who has spent their entire career and most of their life participating and creating online, this sucks. It feels like someone just harvested lumber from a forest I helped grow, and now wants to sell me the furniture they made with it.

The part that stings most is they didn’t even ask. They just assumed they could take everything like it was theirs. The power imbalance is so great, they’ll probably get away with it. There are countless lawsuits out against the AI companies. They say they can’t make these models without sucking up everyone’s copyrighted work. That should set off alarms. And still, do they acknowledge the imposition made on the sources of their training models? Nah, they are asking the government for absolution.

They’ve broken so many of the spoken and unspoken contracts of the web. And they want us to welcome them as a friend, like they didn’t just kick down the front door and invite themselves to dinner.

It’s worth saying it out loud as an affirmation: making things is not about the destination, but about the journey. The journey is what you put into creation: the thought, the mistakes, the sweat, the time, the lived experiences, the refinement in technique. What you get back is knowledge. The output is an artifact of that knowledge. When you get that artifact without the journey, you make nothing, you learn nothing.

Do most people make that distinction? Does it matter? Of course I care, but talking about it seems to backfire, making you look like a curmudgeon resistant to technological progress. As people accept AIs and become more reliant on them, their origin will probably just be a footnote in history, something only pedants care about.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how certain skills erode, how we lose touch with things we once worked hard to learn. Early on, driving a car for me meant memorizing directions. I got good at it because I had to, but it also felt nice to develop a sense for direction. The weekend before the iPhone came out, a friend and I pulled over to the side of the road and unfolded a big paper map on the hood of my car to figure out our route. They laughed and said, “I wonder if we’ll ever need to do this again after next week.”

They were right. Since then, I’ve become reliant on map applications when driving somewhere unfamiliar. My ability (and maybe patience) to follow ambling directions has completely atrophied. And I think about that sometimes when I sit down to write, or design, or solve a problem. When you aren’t made to use a muscle, that muscle stops working. How long can you still be a good writer if you aren’t writing? Painting? Coding? Reasoning?

These tools have already injected themselves into so many of the ways we learn and work. Regardless of your like or dislike of AI, I don’t think there is an unwinding that can happen here. Will there come a point when it’s no longer possible to work in our industry without opting in?

And still that anger. It’s not just that they didn’t ask. If these tools have so much promise, could this have been a communal effort rather than a heist? I don’t even know what that would’ve looked like, but I can say I would feel much differently about AI if I could use a model built on communal contributions and opt-ins, made for the advancement of everyone, not just those who can pay the monthly subscription.

Behind that anger is sadness. How do we nurture curiosity and the desire for self growth? Not just because your brain and body are great things that need tending to, or because it’s fun, or because it’s part of being alive. But because you simply must? Or maybe you must because of all those things.

I honestly don’t know.

I imagine there will be a time when using these tools or not creates a rift, and maybe it will be difficult to sustain a career in our field without using them. Maybe something will change, and I’ll come around to using these services regularly. I don’t think I’ll ever not be angry about it.

For now, I’m planning on continuing to roll up my sleeves. I want to make things because I’m human and alive. I want to go on journeys and grow. I’m not always looking for an easy path, I want the friction. Because if I give up the journey, what am I really making? What do I actually learn?

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✍️ Kermit, a typeface for kids

A new type family from Underware in partnership with Microsoft geared towards helping kids learn to read. It strikes a smart balance of legibility, playfulness, and variability. They even created a variable “writable” version of Kermit that can interpolate its shapes to mimic the motion of the letterforms being written!

I have a love/hate relationship with handwritten style fonts. They usually feel limited or contrived, like too much of the typography is pre-baked. I sour on them as soon as I see an identical repeating letterform, the veil drops and the illusion is ruined. But Underware are probably the best in the biz on these kinds of fonts: Scribo, Bello, Liza, and more. Kermit contains tons of alternates and variability, the illusion is clean and whole. And bringing it to Office? Let’s put Comic Sans to bed forever. Don’t skip the in-depth notes around Kermit’s design and how it might be able to help those with dyslexia learning to read too.

✉️ Behind the Scenes with Licko & VanderLans

Following up on the last BTW’s mention of Emigre, Stephen Coles got to interview Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans. Loads of great tidbits like Zuzana’s original proofing markups and details on how much they spent on those mailings in the ’90s. Wild that they recouped the costs and more! Different times:

Licko: By the mid-nineties, our mailing list was reaching upward of 40,000 to 50,000 potential customers. So we would mail out these promotional materials, be it a specimen booklet, a poster, or an issue of Emigre, to the entire list, free of charge. This would run upward of $30,000 to $40,000 per mailing. Each time we did this, it seemed like a lot of money, but we would usually recoup those costs and then some.

🤖 Are Em Dashes Really a Sign of AI Writing?

Apparently AI generated text is rife with em dashes. Sorry, I use em dashes a lot and will not cede this to the bots. I probably overuse them, but will now think of it as a badge of my own human imperfection. A cheatsheet: option + hyphen for an en dash, option + shift + hyphen for an em dash.

🕰️ Poltik

A new typeface from TypeTogether by Patrycja Walczak, the 2023 Gerard Unger Scholarship winner. Poltik was inspired by the numerals on a 1970s clock design Patrycja found in her grandfather’s drawer. Its text styles are warm and a little quirky in Light and Regular, but get really expressive as it gets bolder. Then the Display styles just hit you with retro goodness.

🕹️ Cartridge 3

A big update to Dan Cederholm’s Cartridge type family, now with 5 weights across both Regular and Soft styles. Plus new alternate letterforms, revised kerning, and lots of under-the-hood improvements.

🦋 Soft Text

A new in-progress family by Kyle Letendre (Soft Type) at Future Fonts. I love the gentle contrast here, it’s a beautifully laid-back design. And $35 as an introductory price is a steal. More styles and weights on the way!

Loose Ends

• The Ohno Book, A Serious Guide to Irreverent Type Design: This promises to be a great read with insight from James Edmondson on his type design process.
• Yes to Kagi: I’ve been using Kagi search for two months now and am hooked on having useful, AI-free search results.
• Line height units: I totally missed when these got added to browsers, but they look super useful for typesetting.
• Webrings are back! I love this and totally want to get on board.
• Ryan Coogler on film aspect ratios: It’s always a treat to hear an expert geek out on something technical. Also, Sinners is great. You should see it.
• Alphabet in Motion teaser: Kelli Anderson made an activation video (to tease bookstores) of her upcoming pop-up book on how letters got their shapes. Unsurprisingly, it looks bananas, Kelli consistently brings so much artistry to everything she does.

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Earlier this year I started taking on contract work again, something I haven’t done steadily for about 10 years. The spark was getting laid off, which turned out to be a great moment to step back and reflect on things.

After some soul searching, I started to see a pattern I’ve been repeating: I’d start a new job with a company and team I felt good about, and a few years later I’d have some reason to move on. Sometimes it was a mismatch with leadership or my manager, other times it was burnout on that specific work. All valid reasons to leave! But when I think back on those companies, I remember most of them fondly—good teams, supportive managers, and companies making things I believed in. So why did I leave?

Reader, it was me.

I don’t think I actually mesh well with the structure of in-house design. I loved working among designers, mentoring, and shaping the direction of things; but at the same time, I was drowning in the reporting, OKRs, and earnings metrics of it all. I was often too far from the actual design happening, stuck hovering at some low altitude over the work. And that often left me feeling depleted.

Basically, I’ve always felt best when I was making things, and I miss being more hands-on. But I really miss the flexibility to try different things, work with different people, and learn while I’m doing it.

So I decided not to look for a new full-time position and instead go solo and hang out my own shingle again. I started a new LLC to work under and wrestled a domain name away from a domain squatter (boo! hiss!) last week.

Is this a good time to start a business? I dunno. But for my own health, I want to break the pattern of chasing fulfillment in the next shiny new role. It feels like an extra bad time to count on big companies to look out for their employees. That’s always been true, but it’s even clearer in economic downturns.

I’m excited about the chance to steer what I’m doing and who I work for again. I want to carve out something small and sustainable for me and collaborators. Something that doesn’t need to scale just to stick around. Something that takes on useful work, things I believe in, that works locally—in geography or community—and builds relationships. I want to will some optimism and fun back into my workday.

I want to work alongside people again, maybe in a shared studio space a couple times a week. Even better if we’re collaborating on projects together. I want to mentor designers. I want to keep learning. I want space to experiment and take on side quests just for the joy of it.

I’ve been having a blast designing typefaces and love making artifacts around design—books, shirts, games, who knows. I’ve always admired the polymathic studios like Coudal Partners, Young Jerks, Panic, and others. Places that found a niche doing things that nourished them creatively.

I’m taking it slow and trying to be intentional right now about what fills me up. I’ve booked a couple of gigs already, which is reassuring, and I hope I can grow that into something fun-sized and steady.

If you or anyone you know is looking for contract design help, please drop me a line.

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I’m kicking off a new feature here: a roundup of things I’m reading, viewing, or generally into right now — loosely grouped around a theme. Since I’m getting back into writing here, I want to be a good web citizen and add to the link party I’ve been enjoying from folks like Naz Hamid, Dan Cederholm, and Scott Boms.

📚 Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue, now in PDF

I remember being in design school in the late ’90s when an instructor showed me an issue of Emigre Magazine. It was full of idiosyncratic, postmodern typography. Flavors of photocopier grit, collage, deconstruction, asymmetrical layouts — like punk rock beamed through QuarkXPress. As a new convert to graphic design, it felt like a secret transmission from another world. Messy, radical, opinionated, and totally electrifying.

Back then you could snail mail Emigre a letter asking to be added to their mailing list, and they would send you issues for free. I can’t remember if it was a student-only thing, but I certainly mentioned that I was a student in the hopes they wouldn’t get wise to who was getting the better end of that deal. Granted, over the years I’ve licensed a lot of Emigre fonts, and that was surely one of the magazine's goal: to showcase fonts and get people to purchase them.

Incredible inspiration, blasted straight to my mailbox, for free?! I pored over every page. Emigre was so formative in my early designer days. They were making fonts, designing wild magazines, and publishing essays that questioned what design was even for.

About 15 years ago for issue 70, they compiled every issue from 1984–2009 into a doorstop of a book. The physical edition is out of print, but you can pick up a PDF edition for only $5. It feels like I’m paying back a little of that free inspiration and postage they spent on me all those years ago.

Also worth a look: Letterform Archive’s recent release, Emigre Fonts: Type Specimens, 1986–2024. Smaller in stature, but thicker in pages and years.

🐦 They Might Be Giants interview

TMBG was one of the first bands I got into as I started discovering music, and they’ve stuck with me ever since. Their songs are stitched into the fabric of my life, and can instantly take me back to specific times and places.

I’ve even been lucky enough to cross paths with the Johns a couple of times: first, interviewing them for an entertainment magazine where I interned during college, and years later, designing a website for them when I lived in Brooklyn.

The AV Club did a two-part retrospective interview with them for their Set List series, using specific songs as entry points to talk through their whole career.

🫥 Design burnout and disillusionment

Elizabeth Goodspeed is back with another great article — this time digging into the dread hanging over the design industry, and the ways we try to cope. It’s full of healthy straight talk and introspection. On career growth:

And the longer you stick around, the more disorienting the gap becomes – especially as you rise in seniority. You start doing less actual design and more yapping: pitching to stakeholders, writing brand strategy decks, performing taste. Less craft, more optics; less idealism, more cynicism.

And on trying to exist as a designer without losing yourself:

The line between optimism and pessimism is increasingly blurred; designers are ironic about being sincere, sincere about being ironic, suspicious of optimism, but also wary of coming off as too cynical (or, sad). What’s being performed, more than anything, is ambivalence: the most protective emotional position in a profession that demands passion but punishes vulnerability. When the stakes are this personal, forced indifference can feel like the only safe response.

I see myself in a lot of this and I don’t like it! But later, some good advice:

If the industry no longer offers security, prestige, or even clout, then who is all this self-styling for? Why not do the thing that feels worthwhile, and be honest about how much it matters to us? As Mira Joyce puts it, “Caring deeply and openly about your craft shouldn’t feel embarrassing. It feels necessary to me.”

Trying to care more, not less.

✏️ Type designers’ sketchbooks

Sketchbooks continue to be one of the best inventions ever. Libbie Bischoff asked a bunch of her type design friends to share pages from their sketchbooks, and the results are incredible. Take a peek inside the brains of folks like Joanna Malinis, Lynne Yun (Space Type Co), James Edmondson (OH no Type Co), and more.

Libbie is the designer behind Type du Nord, a fantastic independent type foundry making awesome faces like the recently released Yolker. She also teaches at Type Electives where I’ve had the pleasure of taking a couple of her workshops, including one last fall that helped me push Citywide across the finish line. Her work and newsletter are well worth your time!

Loose Ends

• You Deserve a Tech Union, reprise: Ethan just released an updated design for his latest book, and it’s a beaut.
• RIP, Ottmar: Doug Wilson tracks down Ottmar Mergenthaler’s death certificate while pulling on all the threads for his upcoming Linotype book.
• Ultramega: A new typeface by Rachel Kriebel from JTD Type, a charming revival of a bootleg Futura-esque design from Russia. Don’t miss the interview with Rachel too.
• Ditch your smartphone? The idea of a phone that’s mostly just a phone is starting to sound real good.

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Hello! It’s been a while — nearly eight years since I posted on my blog. A lot has changed for me in that time. I’m back in Philly, have two kids, and have bounced around in my career a bit. Now I find myself wanting to try something new again, or maybe return to things I used to do. Namely, blogging and contract gigs paired with side quests.

Somewhere along the way, I found myself receding from the web a bit. I still loved making websites and staying current on how the web as a medium was evolving. But I grew disinterested in socializing and hanging out in any of the social spaces. The reasons are probably obvious: pandemic, kakistocracy, and the overwhelming daily drumbeat of current events. Parenting also takes up a lot of time, and that’s been a welcome reprieve, giving me more reason to focus on family and friends.

But I love the web and miss feeling like a part of it! I never stopped reading friends’ sites or stumbling upon little hidden creative gems—there’s so much goodness here. More than the social side of things, I miss having my own little home on the web, a space to write and reflect. It keeps me learning and helps me better understand what I think.

Sometimes, I don’t know what to make of the world or how to make it make sense. Ethan, ever the smarty, tells us websites can be worry stones. That’s exactly how I want to think of it right now, something to comfort me and guide me. Making things helps ground me, gives me a job to do, and fills me up.

So, here we are again. Somehow, my site turns 25(!) years old this year. I want to rekindle things and get back to writing again. And I want to do it in my own space, apart from the tides of platforms and networks. Just some internet webpages and RSS. I’m excited to write more and share silly, interesting, and inspiring things. I don’t know how regularly I’ll post, but I’m thinking a couple times a month should be possible.

The best time to (re)start a blog was yesterday, and the next best is today. Blogs are awesome — they’ve always been awesome. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll stick around. The RSS is flowing!

P.S. Thanks to Luke and Colly for their generous advice and guidance as I got myself up and running on Kirby. They are fine folks and Kirby is charming as hell to use.

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