Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to call a project ‘complete’. A few of you might know that I come from the world of web design, where it’s always possible to continue tinkering, updating, and iterating. There’s no ‘final’ version of a website — only a current state, primed and ready for the next inevitable revision. Being used to this mindset is what probably led, in part, to me making 8 Faces: Collected back in 2018 — it was a chance to take a print-based project (the magazine) and iterate on it in the form of another print-based project (the book). And yet the appeal of print, to me, has always been that it forces some sort of conclusive version. A hard stop. A sort of antidote to the ever-updatable nature of the web.

In a recent issue of Flavia Zimbardi’s newsletter, she reflected on the nature of calling a type design complete and says that “you don’t finish a font so much as you decide to stop.” I love that. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that fonts are almost somewhere in between web design in print design: yes, they’re software and theoretically easy to update, but getting users to update font files to new versions can be difficult, and force-updating them via a delivery network of sorts can lead to problems, too, like documents suddenly reflowing without explanation. So, in many ways, the hard stop is preferable: here’s the final version and that’s that.

The reason this has all been on my mind of late is that as of two weeks ago, my next book, Fine Specimens, is officially DONE. It’s been almost done for some time now (as you’ll know from previous issues), but after a final round of tweaks and then a last-minute round of further tweaks — requested by me but handled by the publisher, since by that point the files were quite literally out of my hands — the book is now at the printers. The hard stop has, at last, arrived.

The funny thing about this process is that there’s no grand, conclusive moment. No fireworks. No champagne. That point where the book gets called ‘done’ simply comes down to one email, with one tiny change request and an accompanying screen grab, and then… that’s it. It’s finished.

I’ll be sure to celebrate properly in March when the book’s published, but for now, knowing that it can no longer be changed at all, I’ve effectively been given permission to switch from production mode to marketing mode, and I owe a different department at Quarto an email with a few plans on that front. They’ve given me the green light to do the official cover reveal in the next issue of the newsletter, so watch out for that.

Let’s start with a new foundry discovery: London-based Dogray, founded by Sahar Afshar and José Solé. And although some of my ‘new’ foundry discoveries are only new due to me simply not paying attention, this one is actually fairly new in that they launched this year. Dogray have released four typefaces so far: the Arabic Setar and Mazhik, and the Latin Kohl and Sets Grotesk — the latter of which was released in the last couple of weeks, I think, because when I started drafting this, they only had three. Beautiful work — and also a beautiful website. I love the accompanying illustrations.

Manic Type’s WIP typeface Palmetto just hit v0.5 on Future Fonts and I’m really interested in all the lovely stylistic sets contained within this one, which allow you to switch between high or low crossbars, high or low rounds, and much more. (And let’s also take a moment to enjoy the Manic Type website, too. More lovely type-plus-illustration combos.) Jamie Chang, you’ve got a new number one fan!

I thoroughly enjoyed the recent interview with Alice Savoie by François Chevret. I’ve admired Alice’s work for a while — Faune, with its daring italics, is a personal favourite — and it was great to read (assuming my browser’s translation tools are accurate, because sadly my Duolingo-powered French skills are not quite at fluent reading level just yet) about her earlier years as a designer at Monotype, the challenges of balancing a type design career with parenthood, and her role in the extensive Women in Type research project with Fiona Ross and Helena Lekka. (And oh, look, Mathieu Triay was responsible for that website — nice!)

Staying on the French theme for a sec, Almandin, designed by Laurent Bourcellier and Jonathan Fabreguettes for typographies.fr, is a new “slightly calligraphic sans”, influenced by the designers’ time as students at the École Estienne, where calligraphy was a core practice.

Font licensing is so very often a mess, I think we can all agree. So it was nice to see the launch of the aptly named website Font Licensing Mess, a genuinely useful research project by María Ramos, Ana Moliz, and Óscar Otero, that aims to “provide an initial overview of the current state of commercial font licences, based on structured and comparative information.”

The same folks behind Font Licensing Mess have put together a Notion database on women leading foundries. What a great idea! Reassuringly, it’s nice to see so many of the female designers in Fine Specimens on this database, too.

The Captn Offscript podcast is now in its second season and Alen has had some great guests already, If that name is new to you, that’s because it is new: previously, the podcast was known as The Type Convo (and some of you might remember who was one of the first guests). Alen is also the one-man band behind the wonderful SilverStag Type Foundry, in case you need further motivation.

Daniel Swartz of Hoosier Type Company has a newsletter and recently wrote a very interesting post about rescuing wood type. After identifying the typeface, part of Daniel’s process involved redrawing and laser-engraving a missing numeral into wood to match the rest of the drawer of original type.

I was very excited to see that Simon Walker — whose lettering and type design work I’ve loved for years, and who was in 8 Faces, and who I once commissioned to create one of the 8 Faces artwork prints, and who is most definitely in Fine Specimens — was responsible for creating some custom fonts for M&S. If, like me, you’re in the UK and you like your sarnies on the slightly bougie side, it’s a thrill to realise we’ve been looking at Simon’s work on the aisles recently.

(Last-minute addition: looks like Simon just released Cleric yesterday(!) via his wonderful type foundry Beasts of England.)

This next one you’ve probably already seen, but how could I not mention TypeTogether’s Futura®100? The scripts covered — Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Khmer, Lao, Latin, PanAfrican Latin, Thai, Arabic, and Myanmar — are, impressively, just the first half of the full multiscript family: next year, the foundry are planning on releasing 11 additional scripts, including support for major Indic scripts, Simplified Chinese, and Hangeul. There’s a detailed accompanying blog post and a big ol’ font pack on Adobe Fonts to get you started with the Regular weights from each script.

Speaking of Adobe Fonts, here’s the fifth edition of my current favourite Adobe Fonts (“Elliot’s 8 faves” — get it?) and oh boy, there are some real corkers in there, including some from the aforementioned Manic Type.

And speaking of Adobe Fonts again, some big personal news (apart from finishing Fine Specimens) is that I’ve officially joined the Adobe Fonts team as a full-time employee. It’s the first time I’ve been an actual employee in 18.5 years, so it represents a pretty big change, but I jumped at the chance to continue working on a product I love and use daily. Plus, having the opportunity to help (in some small way) shape the way AI affects the world of typography — and as part of a team that very much cares about doing the right thing — will be an honour. I wrote a bit more about the job on my blog.

The penultimate link I’ve got for you might not appear type-related at first glance, but my very talented friend Ty Finck has just released a word game for iPhone called Sixtep. I’ve been beta-testing the app for a few weeks now and it’s so good. It’s beautifully designed, of course, but also very addictive — in the best possible word-games-are-good-for-you kind of way. And, like everything Ty puts out, the app also has a gorgeous website, too (which uses the handwritten typeface Infamous by Laura Eddy). But what I really love about Sixtep is that Ty had the idea for the game while putting together a specimen for his most recent typeface…

… Wintyr, published on Ty’s Public Type Works platform. Wintyr is “monospaced and somehow warm, in spite of its name” and comes in nine weights with matching italics, plus a variable version that contains axes for controlling weight and slant. Go get it. Or the iPhone game. Or both!

Right, that’s enough for this edition. Did you notice I fixed some dark mode issues for the email, and improved things a bit for the browser version? I’ll forgive you if you didn’t spot the changes. Anyway, I’ll see you next time for the full details about Fine Specimens! While I’m preparing everything for that, let’s hope I don’t find a typo.