In the year of our lord 2024 it feels so very antiquated that there’s separate licenses for web and desktop fonts. Every project I work on requires both font formats and I know there’s business reasons why a type foundry might make those separate purchases but as a designer it’s a deeply frustrating experience to...

Sarah Jeong: We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of...

Nolen Royalty writes about his wondrous One Million Checkboxes project, and how something very peculiar happened: A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens. [...] I hadn’t been hacked....

Here’s a lovely monospaced font by Helena Zhang that’s worth checking out. It has just the right amount of charm and charisma, but it’s still readable at small sizes. I’m downloading this thing immediately. Also: Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and...

Last night I finished Moonbound, Robin Sloan’s latest novel, and now I am deeply, thoroughly annoyed that there aren’t seven of them lined up already for me to blitz through. I demand EarthBound, SeaBound, SpaceBound! This is the kind of novel series where you want to step inside and never let go, spending whole...

There’s this scene in Halt and Catch Fire that I think about all the time. Lee Pace (played by me) walks into an empty office with his business pal and smiles at all the emptiness. “Look,” Lee says, pointing across the room towards a chalkboard that has nothing written on it. “It’s perfect.” It’s perfect because,...

Here’s a fantastic post by Chevy Ray about how they made a dozens of pixel fonts using Rust: Kerning was a big time hog when making my previous font packs. Because the tools I was using required every kerning pair to be manually entered, it was incredibly time consuming and also extremely error prone. Look at it...

Man, it feels good to see Geoff back at the helm over at CSS-Tricks: Remember these? Chris would write a post now and then to chronicle things happening around the ol’ CSS-Tricks site. [...] That’s why I thought I’d dust off the chronicles. It’s been a hot minute and a lot is happening around CSS-Tricks today. This...

I really enjoyed this post by Miriam where she pokes back against the whole “design ain’t a democracy thing” and argues that teams don’t need a boss, they need a process instead: What we like about a dictator is that they have a vision, and set the process, and take the responsibility to be decisive when necessary....

Great episode of the Shop Talk Show here with Chris and Dave where they chatted about that whole vibe driven development thing and I worried listening back to the episode that my original post was...misleading. And arrogant. Okay, and pretty dismissive, too. So let me clarify. When I think of vibe-driven development...

The other day I was wondering what it would feel like to live my life with the comfort and safety of universal basic income: it would open up so many doors! Opportunities! Space to breathe and think! I likely wouldn’t quit my job, but I would take way more time off for my health, and I might go back to school or...

Jenny Wen: The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the...