This week I was reminded with a big, thundering oomph that the sixth episode of HBO’s The Watchmen, This Extraordinary Being, is some of the finest television I’ve ever seen. The focus of this episode is inherited pain, the idea that it can be passed on from generation to generation. And at the heart of all this...

This cover of Springsteen’s 41 Shots by Living Colour is heartbreaking and worthy of every second of your attention today. Goddamn.

A couple of years ago I was at a cafe and someone dropped a plate on the floor. Half a second after it exploded they shouted “I AM GROWING AND LEARNING” and I still think about it everyday. Anyway, during this quarantine there’s so very much that I’m learning about myself, such as: Man, I really need people. Like...

Cassie sent me this pdf the other day, an excerpt of Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (which I need to pick up immediately) and I really can’t stop thinking about it: “I can't possibly teach Black women's writing—their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and...

Still enslaved to a white man, Frederick Douglass is climbing to the top of a hill. After some time he reaches the very top where he now has a vantage of the whole bay—beneath him the ships are rolling into the dock with piercing white sails, men are unloading the boats and setting up wagons in the town, and high...

Over on the NYT, An Incalculable Loss is equal parts beautiful and horrific. It says a giant “fuck you” to the charts and statistics and shows everyone that’s died so far during the pandemic in a way that’s entirely heartbreaking. One hundred thousand. A number is an imperfect measure when applied to the human...

I think the weird thing about newsletters is that they’re so...formal. It would make for a cruel and unusual punishment if I sent an email out to a bunch of people that was nonsensical, doesn’t conclude properly, doesn’t have some sense of progress or I-don’t-know-what. But with a blog post? I don’t care! In fact,...

Type designers often use pangrams (a sentence with every letter of the alphabet in it) to design their letters and “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is undoubtedly the most famous. It’s supposed to be an easy way to see if every letter of the alphabet fits with all the others. But in Text for Proofing...

Herb Lubalin and his studios created a vast number of logos over the years. In a career that spanned over 40 years, Lubalin easily created over a hundred marks. Some were corporate logos, some were for non-profits, some were merely tight lock-ups that could act as titles on books, or seen on ads. The range is pretty...

There’s a lot of nifty things you can do with variable fonts. You can make small design adjustments, or you can get a bunch of performance benefits...kinda. If you load a giant variable font with a ton of different axes then your users are going to have a bad time. But! Loading one font like Newzald.woff2 is likely...

I wish blogging was easier. I reckon that 95% of the reason why people don’t write more on the Internet, on their own little spot with their own URL, is that it’s just a pain. The other day Tejas Kumar showed just how easy it is to publish a website today (really, I think this whole drag and drop thing is...

This gig is about throwing all the toys on the floor and making a giant mess before slowly putting everything into labelled buckets, separating some things, subcategorizing others, binning the trash that needs to go. It’s all about inventing classifications for things — a Dewey Decimal system of desires. A lot of...