Somehow it’s March and the idea of posting a review of the last year when we’re already a quarter of the way through the next one probably sounds a bit silly. However, as these posts exist primarily as artefacts for my future self to look back on (and therefore should be read with the usual caveats that this is a horribly self indulgent exercise and intentionally says little of wider global events) I didn’t want to break my streak.
2024’s review takes a slightly different format to previous years: rather than run through everything chronologically, this time I‘ve grouped things thematically.
As anyone who follows me on social media will attest (sorry), 2024 was — after family life — predominantly focused on the publication of my book, Universal Principles of Typography. In April, after nearly two years’ work, I was lucky enough to celebrate the book’s release via an official launch party at Bookhaus, with my wife, some close friends, and a bunch of Bristol’s type nerds in the Letter Luvvers crew. Releasing products out into the world so often falls a bit flat when it comes down to ‘the big day’, so I’m glad we got to make a bit of a thing about it.
Huge thanks to Laurence for hosting the Q&A, Bookhaus for hosting the event, and my publisher for putting on some drinks for everyone.
In the months since the book’s release, it seems to have gone down fairly well, with some very generous reviews appearing on various websites and some very kind words sent privately, for which I’m so, so grateful. Figma’s Marcin Wichary — who was one of the very first people to buy it — sent me a very generous email that pretty much made my year. And as I started drafting this post, I’d recently found out that the book won an award for its design, courtesy of Graphic Design USA, which means I can officially say that the book is ‘award-winning’ — yay!
By the way, it’s always such a thrill seeing photos of the book across the world, so if you have one, please send it my way.
Thanks to some incredibly bad planning on my part, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a coffee table book on type specimens just a couple of weeks after launching Universal Principles of Typography. This is why I’m not in marketing. Long story short: the campaign didn’t meet its funding goal, but I have news incoming about this project. As you can probably guess from that statement, it’s far from dead, so watch this space, as they say. (Subscribers to my newsletter recently got a sneak peek.)
Speaking of the newsletter, of all the projects I was involved with in 2024, Typographic & Sporadic (and by extension this very website), was probably my favourite. I think that’s because I get to write about something I care about, share it with an audience in such a way that’s relatively intimate (as far as digital communication goes), and I’m not really beholden to any external needs or goals. A friend of mine recently asked if I saw the newsletter as a useful marketing tool, and to be honest it probably is, but I don’t really think about it as one.
As part of furthering my own goals for the newsletter, though, I enlisted the help of Keir to integrate the newsletter into this site, and I’m so glad we did that. There are some great platforms out there for publishing newsletters, but personally it’s important to me to have it living on my own website, free of the whims of algorithms and other organisations’ politics. I’m a firm believer in owning your own content and not being another platform’s content. If you’re interested, I wrote a bit about our Buttondown integration.
It wasn’t just about Typographic & Sporadic, though: I also published three editions of my pop-up newsletter, Notes from a different (type)setting, during my travels to Paris, Berlin, and Zagreb. If you joined me for any of those, thank you! “Pop-up newsletter are the greatest newsletters,” Craig Mod says, and I heartily agree. I plan on publishing my own thoughts as a separate post at some point in the near future.
And for those of you wondering what the heck a pop-up newsletter is, here’s how each edition of Notes from a different (type)setting worked:
I have plans for both newsletters in 2025. Please consider lending me your email address if you’re in any way interested what this whole thing is all about.
Also, separately from the newsletter, I published 11 blog posts in 2024 — the most I’ve published in a single year since… checks archives… 2014. Wow. Clearly I’m not going to manage that in 2025. And Manuel Moreale helped me fix this site’s RSS feeds and the OpenGraph / meta images.
I find it very hard to define what actually is and isn’t ‘work’, but forgetting the side projects for a second to focus on things that clients pay me money to do, work at the start of the year was mainly spent collaborating with The Type Founders on a website for the Proxima Nova script expansions. This was a dream project in many ways: as well as handling the design, I was tasked with writing the content, too, which mainly meant interviewing the various type foundries responsible for the new scripts and working those into several ‘stories’ (like this one or this one). Plus, I got to work with Roel again, who is just a wonderful collaborator. I didn’t have to design every possible element, but instead just set the overall tone, and then we’d look over the implementation together in the browser while Roel worked his magic. I absolutely love working this way.
Over the course of the year, several other sites I’d designed for TTF went live, too: for Ivy Foundry, Richard Lipton, and P22 (which also includes the Hamilton Wood Type and Lanston Type Company foundries).
Then, the big change: in June, I returned to the Adobe Fonts team. As I write this, I’m still there now, as my contract has been extended, and I’m so excited to show you what we’ve been working on together. (But not yet. Sorry!)
In terms of speaking gigs and events, 2024 had a healthy amount. The year kicked off with one that was pretty different from what I was used to: I MC’d the premiere of This is What I Want to Do — the feature-length documentary Stefan made about Marc — in Cologne. Here’s the view from the stage:
On the last day of May, I did a slide-less talk at Keir’s Craft+Work intimate event in London...
... and shortly after my session, I hopped on the Eurostar to a very wet Paris and turned up, utterly drenched, to a little gathering of speakers and organisers of TypeParis Now24. The next day, I covered the talks in my pop-up newsletter (see above) and also joined the panel at the end of the event. Nice to see so many old friends — and make a load of new ones, too.
Later in June, I ran the third edition of my Typography Masterclass workshop for SmashingConf. It was very similar in format to the previous ones I’ve done, and the Smashing crew are so lovely, it’s always a pleasure.
In July, I flew out to Berlin with my friends Jamie and Emma to attend Berlin Letters, and I documented that trip via the second edition of the pop-up. As well at Berlin Letters being a fantastic conference (which had a bookshop set up outside the venue selling my book — the first shop I’d seen it for sale in, outside of the book launch party), it was a lovely opportunity to meet up with friends and just generally enjoy the city. We got lots of quality Marc time. We had beers with Norman. Vitaly turned up, too! Erik and Susanna warmly received us at p98a. Claire did a great talk at the conference. And we had a lovely leisurely lunch in the sun with Martina and Francis.
In October, the day after my 43rd birthday (I had to do a quick mental check that I’d got that number right — I guess an accurate sign that I am indeed getting old), I got the train down to Brighton and spoke at Converge. I’ve been on the wonderful stage at the Brighton Dome a couple of times before (for Reasons to be Creative and its predecessor Flash on the Beach), but this was my first Converge. I’m not nearly as much of a ‘design systems person’ as many of the other speakers, but I think I managed to get away with it.
My final speaking event of the year was teaching a two-day workshop in Zagreb for Hura called How to Master Typography. It was a new workshop, quite unlike the recent Smashing ones, and created by using the book as a starting point and guiding structure. Structuring workshops is always hard, so this was such a huge help. I didn’t touch on all of the subjects explored in the book, but I did get to expand on many of them that needed deeper dives in the workshop format. Marko Miščević took some really lovely photos, too:
As I mentioned above, while in Zagreb, I ran the third edition of my pop-up newsletter, Notes from a different (type)setting. That was a very different experience, probably because travelling alone afforded me more time to write. The only downside was being plagued by a dodgy stomach for the entire trip (details of which I decided to leave out of the newsletter — lucky readers) and being plagued by guilt while my wife and daughters suffered from Norovirus back home.
If you’ve read recent years’ reviews (2023, 2022, 2021, etc.), you’ve probably noticed a strong music thread running through them, but 2024 was decidedly quieter on the music front. In March I had a track appear on the Praeterea 03 compilation from the German label Fur:ther Sessions...
... and then in June the same label released my EP Measure, Adapt, Repeat.
I’m immensely proud of that EP — especially as it features a remix from Magna Pia, who’s been a huge influence on me over the years — and I wrote a post upon its release. But aside from finishing the EP’s tracks very early on in the year, I didn’t actually make any music for the rest of it. I still can’t quite put my finger on why. Partly it just felt too hard balancing music with everything else (especially all the promo around the book); partly I just fell out of love with techno. I’ve barely even listened to it in the last few months.
Instead, I rediscovered my love for metal and also started picking up the guitar again. I even bought one of Rick Beato’s courses so I can re-learn how to play, having developed a load of playing habits since I first had lessons as a teenager. I also bought our youngest daughter Gwen a three-quarter-size guitar so that she could learn how to play. Both of us, I must admit, have not been that dedicated with our lessons.
Regrettably, we barely saw any live music in 2024. One exception was The Langan Band — who played at our wedding in 2012 — and they were fantastic.
I launched my podcast, Hello, type friends!, in 2023 and the rest of season one’s episodes — with Emma Luczyn, Francis Chouquet, James Edmondson, Ty Finck, and finally Jamie Clarke as my guests — played out over the first half of 2024.
I was really happy with how the podcast was received (current stats show around 5.5k plays over the eight episodes) and I fully intend on doing more. But I also made the conscious decision to hold off on recording season two until I’d acquired either more time or some sponsorship.
In terms of others’ podcasts, I was on episode #24 of The Typecast (from Good Type) in April...
... and on episode #10 of The Typo Convo podcast (from Silverstag Type Foundry) in December. Both were loads of fun.
I didn’t use Twitter a single bit in 2024, and towards the end of the year, I decided it was time to quit properly. While I didn’t delete my profile (because I’d rather leave an empty one live and retain visibility on that corner of the web), I did delete 23,774(!) of my tweets. One lone tweet remains as a book plug.
Around the same time, I ‘returned’ to Bluesky and that’s now where I post the most. I’m on Mastodon, too, although Bluesky feels a bit more where it’s at.
We watched some great films and television series in 2024, and I continued to enjoy logging movies via Letterboxd. Some film highlights (i.e. one I rated 4 stars or above) included Society of the Snow, Where the Crawdads Sing, The Favourite, Poor Things, American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Reality, Civil War, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Final Cut, The Wolf’s Call, Frybread Face and Me, Free State of Jones, Rebel Ridge, Watcher, Relic, Don’t Worry Darling, His House, Possum, The Substance, Perfect Days, and Revenge. Also, some cracking re-watches: My Octopus Teacher, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Aliens, Ghostbusters, The Terminator, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Jurassic Park, Leave No Trace, Sleepy Hollow, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, In Bruges, The Thing, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (our annual watch), Little Shop of Horrors, and one of the only films I’ve ever given five stars to, despite its title’s questionable use of parentheses: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).
Some TV highlights: Slow Horses, The Head of Joaquín Murrieta, Fallout, Silo, and Scavengers Reign, which I discovered far too late. And such a shame The Bear took a nosedive after the first two incredible seasons, eh?
As ever, I’m grateful that I got to spend so much time with my family, and that work rarely ate into family time. (I spoke about this a bit on The Typo Convo podcast.) To be honest, the school system is the biggest interference, and that’s why I’m especially grateful for the long summer holidays — and an understanding, parenting-friendly work arrangement that allows me to be super flexible.
In summer ’24, we had a great family holiday in Switzerland, and it was lovely because it just felt like some proper quality time together away from, well, everything. We found a small Airbnb that sat halfway up the hillside, overlooking Thunsee, not too far from Interlaken and Grindewald for amenities and activities, but isolated enough to feel like a real little haven. We swam in a very cold lake; we rode cable cars; we drank wine made from the vineyard beneath our balcony; we did a marble run down a mountain; we met multiple cats; we walked a lot; and all four of us were so sad when it was time to leave.
On our last day, we hiked up alongside an actual glacier, which was incredible — if a little hairy at times. The blog post we’d read beforehand, saying it was suitable for a six-year-old was accurate, but also somewhat, er, optimistic. Once our two girls overcame the challenge, though, they loved it. And personally I really felt like I deserved the beer that awaited me at the top in Berghaus Bäregg.
We were also fortunate enough to squeeze in two ‘mini’ holidays: the worst storm of the year ruined the plans we’d had to camp next to Lake Windemere, so we replaced that with a brief Lake District hotel stay instead, and then got our camping fix at the end of summer a little trip to Dorset. Both absolutely magical family time.
Sadly, at the end of November, we lost Ozzy, our 13-year-old dog, and that’s been hard on all of us. This is the last photo I took of him:
But overall, my lasting feeling of 2024 was that I got to spend so much of it with my family, with Sam and I deeply involved in our kids’ various activities and interests, and I feel so lucky to be in this position. The passing of time terrifies me, but I’m confident we make the most of our days together.
Honestly, I’d love to fill this post with loads of our family photos, but because I don’t want AI to be trained on our kids’ faces, instead I’ll remind myself that our experiences don’t need to be posted to the public in order for them to feel validated. Happy ‘new’ year! 😅
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。