For the CSS-Tricks newsletter, I wrote a bit about all the weird browsers I’ve been seeing lately: ...it feels like there’s something in the air when it comes to browsers. Folks are starting to think about them differently and that’s exciting. And although in the front-end world we’re constantly bemoaning the...

White Tears kicked my ass and it’s impossible to describe why. I read it in three or four big gulps this week but it’s so good that I’m still in a deep fit of despair about just how good it all was. It’s a novel by Hari Kunzru about music and ghosts and the cost of addiction but about halfway through it becomes this...

Here’s a beautiful book called the Manual of Diacritics by Radek Sidun. Diacritics are those peculiar shapes above and below characters that are mostly absent in English—façade and naïve are those rare leftovers—but these marks are extremely important for many languages where the words will fail to make sense...

Adam J Calhoun: Inspired by a series of posters, I wondered what did my favorite books look like without words. Can you tell them apart or are they all a-mush? In fact, they can be quite distinct. Take my all-time favorite book, Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It is dense prose stuffed with parentheticals....

Jim Nielsen on removing the hurdles to blogging: If the goal of your blog is to blog, i.e. to write and publish, then start by removing everything that gets in the way of that goal. Eschew anything beyond writing the content of a post. No art direction. No social media imagery. No comments. No webmentions. No...

Willy Staley wrote a piece about The Sopranos and captured why it’s so gosh darn good: Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline. “Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,” he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a...

In his excellent newsletter, Font of the Month Club (which I cannot recommend more highly), DJR wrote about variable fonts and how they’ve been out for a while yet they still feel like an experimental technology: In my perception, they’re in a bit of an awkward phase right now. Support in browsers is great, and...

I can be whoever I want and no-one can tell me otherwise. I can be funny or dark, a romantic or a raging goth. I can be a typographer, a web designer, a poet. Tomorrow? My accent can change, the colors revert, typefaces flipped inside out; I can change everything about this website and reimagine who I am. Edit the...

Paul Ford describes his climate mid-life crisis: I began to feel a strong sense of déjà vu. I couldn't place it until, one night, in the glow of the e-reader, I realized: It's Web 1.0 all over again. We are in the Pets.com-puppet-mascot era of climate. The comedy of the technology industry is playing again as a kind...

I was reading Alberto Manguel’s Packing My Library on the train back to SF the other day and the moment I read this passage I hurriedly underlined it over and over again: There exists, perhaps, in all human imagination, an unspoken expectation of losing what has been achieved. You build, of course, because you want...

Lucy made a huge spreadsheet to help her see the status of her project and hot dang it looks scary to me: This was actually hugely helpful, because I've been watching my overachiever tendencies flare up during meetings with Susan, whispering "Surely you can get this done in a year and a half. That's so much time!...

Bookmarking this post from Kris Sowersby all about his new type family, Epicene: Epicene Text & Display are Baroque typefaces inspired by the work of two 18th century maestros: J-F. Rosart and J.M. Fleischmann. Typographically, Epicene’s exaggerated details add rigour at small sizes and vigour at large sizes....