My favorite typeface right now is Magnet by Inga Plönnigs. I’ve been working on a side project for the last couple of weeks that I’ll be sharing with y’all this weekend and Magnet has been by my side the whole time, making me look much smarter than I really am. The most distinctive feature of Magnet is how it has...

Sprints and backlogs and pointing tickets—the nigh-on universal method for making software today—is stupid. All this junk around the work makes software slower and more difficult to build. It’s form-filling monkey work and the only way we can improve the quality of software is to throw all those best practices away....

Ages ago, Marcin wrote this great piece about printing a small batch of books: I’ve recently found myself wanting to print a small run (15 copies) of a book. I approached this knowing pretty well what I wanted: a simple, old-school book with…letters in it: This is mostly a note for me soon, but it’s amazing that...

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to Alphabettes before but this blog is thoroughly worth adding to yer RSS feed. I stumbled over the website again today doing some research for a little thing and forgot how joyous it is. The Alphabettes gang describes their website like this: Alphabettes.org is a showcase for work,...

I missed this 2022 update for MD System and this particularly lovely specimen website: MD System’s standard width is designed for running text and punchy titles alike. Its proportions are geared towards readability and an overall natural balance, rather than the rigid uniformity of many similar grotesque typefaces....

My relationship with the internet is changing. I don’t really have a home on the web now, a place I can go to log-in, kick back, and doom scroll. That makes me happy for many reasons—yay for no abuse and casual violence!—but also sad for others—the loss of distant friendships! Oh, all the jokes I’ll miss! Every...

Jeremy wrote a great piece about how we treat our work: Here’s the thing: there’s good work and there’s working hard. What matters is doing good work. Often, to do good work you need to work hard. And so people naturally conflate the two, thinking that what matters is working hard. But whether you work hard or not...

Saunders, of course: The closer we look at a time and place, the less strange it seems, the more knowable, the more like our own. (And also, of course, the more specifically different from our own.) We learn, or remind ourselves, that we are capable of this sort of deep looking and that with deep looking comes...

My editing process is disorganized. Perhaps the only time when it gets better is when I print things out onto actual paper, sit at my desk, and cross things out. But there’s no process there, no real objective besides finding the really bad stuff and getting it gone. But—one thing I’ve always done with newsletters...

Saccharine, careless, melancholic, naive, questioning, questionable, dashing, daring, and vengeful. Inquisitive. Soaring! Doubtful, distrustful, apprehensive, hesitant, unready, unabridged, undecided, unwavering. Woeful. Well-researched, well-footnoted, easy-going, mild-tempered, soft-spoken, youthful, vigorous....

I’m happy with this here website for the first time in years. There’s still a lot to fix but since I nuked my website and started from almost-scratch a few months ago, I think this is a good place to stop and look back at what I’ve built so far. Let’s take a look! First up, the new homepage: Of everything here I’m...

Neil Gaiman in Smoke and Mirrors: (Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesteron once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)