What the absolute what: Teranoptia is a typeface without letters, a peculiar contraption that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures just by typing letters with your keyboard. Its design has been inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and by medieval illustrations, as well as by children's books. You can use it to create...

CJ Hauser: It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive? Wading through the muck...

This thing is remarkable. Designed by Andy Clymer back in 2019, Tilt is a family of the three typefaces based on signage that Andy spotted around New York City. There’s Neon, Prism, and Warp—my favorite here is Prism: Tilt Prism references the lettering that you might find vacuum-formed in plastic on a theater...

Lucy and I were texting about The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde by the Arion Press the other day (it’s perhaps the most beautiful book I’ve seen in years). The shocker here is the price tag though: each book is $680! Wait, nope: that’s just for the paper. The standard edition is $800. And heck, their equally beautiful...

Since I had a terrifying dentist appointment the other day I needed something to listen to whilst I clenched my fists in absolute terror. And that’s when I realized that I hadn’t listened to Web History yet, originally written by Jay Hoffman over on CSS-Tricks and now excellently narrated by Jeremy Keith. It’s real...

This is dumb, but hear me out: what if there was an equivalent of Google’s Web Vitals but for design systems? What if you could look at a report that showed precisely how bad your design system was and what you needed to fix right away? What signals would we need to see a design system clearly? My hunch right now...

When folks talk about design systems they often mention developer productivity (ew), or consistency (better), or accessibility (best). However, one thing folks don’t talk about often is what a good design system feels like. A good design system, to me at least, isn’t about me being able to make a website faster or a...

Right now I feel like there’s no browser built just for me. All the options today are bloated, big, clunky; I reckon they’re all trying to do too much. Booting up Chrome today feels like moving a starship into orbit and being blasted by ads on reentry. Safari feels like both hands are tied behind my back. Edge is a...

C bought a typewriter and hid it in her car. Each week she’d drive out to her parents’ house without telling me and, under this veil of secrecy, she’d type out messages on little cards. On each of them she’d write a joke, a memory, a secret about a secret that we’d told each other over the past year. On my birthday...

Here’s a great piece—wonderfully written and expertly illustrated with maps—about how climate change is going to effect houses and beaches in the Hamptons: “Are we going to take this opportunity to reenvision the way we live with water, or are we just going to fight against it until we lose?” asks Alison Branco,...

I love the look of this: Occupant Oldstyle by Cyrus Highsmith and and June Shin. It’s a perfect addition to the Occupant Fonts library; Oldstyle is playful and silly—look at that Q!—and yet seriously constructed—look at the numbers! The rounded triangular endings are the result of a long fermentation process that...

Rutherford Craze on the design of MD Nichrome: …something I think about a lot in my work is the idea of the technology gap. When a creative work moves from one medium to another, not every part of it survives the transition: the digital version of a typeface originally cut in metal is an imperfect replica, just as a...