Alright, I admit it: 2024 Elliot didn’t consider that publishing the third and final part of an ‘End-of-year typo-inspo’ series in January wouldn’t actually make much sense, given that it’s no longer the, well, end of the year. So now it’s up to 2025 Elliot to clean up the mess.

Anyway, hello! And happy new year if it’s not already too late to say so. (Yesterday, someone told me it’s only too late to say once you stop regularly writing the old year by accident. I liked that.) I hope you had a good break over the festive period. Did you read any of the previous two emails over a wintery tipple and some Christmas tunes? Please let me know if so. Photo evidence will be very warmly received.

I’m already feeling slightly stressed at not yet having published my annual review of the year over on the blog, so I’m going to keep this issue pretty concise. Please accept this as a short and hopefully sweet blast of inspiration to help fire up those creative cylinders.

Here are my favourite Adobe Fonts of the week! Are you folks enjoying these libraries? Should I continue sharing them? Should they be in every issue, or just every now and then? I’d genuinely love your feedback on this (and indeed anything else in the newsletter) if you can spare a minute. Audience participation, people!

In this week’s library, we’ve got: Venice Blvd by the always-awesome Hoodzpah; the modern classic that is Bello by Underware; the latest family, Nave, from my very dear friend Jamie Clarke; Dorival UI VF by Blackletra (see more below); Scale VF, which is yet another ps Type release; Violeta by Quintana Font (a new foundry discovery for me); Maiola — another modern classic — by TypeTogether; and Buddies from Sudtipos.

Here’s a quick blast of forthcoming type-related events (some of which I plan on attending): Fontstand’s annual typography conference returns to The Hague on 14th–15th March. This year’s ATypI conference is in Copenhagen on April 22nd–26th. TypeParis Now25 is, of course, in Paris — this time on 31st May.

CAST is a new foundry discovery for me and I’ve enjoyed spending some time on their website. Interesting to see that this is another foundry with a sibling project — CAST Studies — specialising in display faces with a more limited character set, available for a small price.

Really loved reading Getting (Back) Into It for 2025 — “advice on getting into the craft of sign painting from five people who have done just that” — by the prolific BLAG magazine, ahead of the launch of BLAG issue #6.

My friend Oliver Schöndorfer — who I’m sure many of you know as the blue-shirted host of Pimp My Type — has been learning calligraphy and sent me a beautiful Christmas card. It’s always nice when internet friends send you things in real life, but wow, look at that envelope! My kids were asking me who sent it, so I showed them Oliver’s video from last year on 10 Fonts for Stunning Holiday Designs. They watched the whole thing, which, honestly, is really quite the compliment.

New type from Simon Walker, AKA Beasts of England: Friend. I see you, cheeky “tf” ligature, and I doff my cap to you!

Piz Grotesk is “a modern typeface rooted in mid-century Swiss typography” from Serpentype. I love those GIFs. (Thanks for sending this in, Silvio!)

Ty dropped his latest f-bomb. Once again, 3 single weights from 3 different typefaces, all for $15. And here’s a reminder about Ty’s Public Type Works project, which I think is a super interesting approach to licensing / open-sourcing type.

Erik’s Serie57, published by neue, is getting an update that features ligatures in the monospaced version. What a great idea! Does anyone have any other examples of monospaced typefaces doing this?

Lynne Fisher updates the design of her personal site every year, and the new design plays with extending certain letterforms as the viewport grows or shrinks. Go on and resize your browser window — it’s fun.

While we’re on a web-centric note, Apple’s Jen Simmons wrote the excellent CSS margin-trim and line height units for 12 Days of Web, which covers the new and (if you’re of a certain persuasion) quite exciting developments giving us web nerds finer control over our typography. If you’ve ever come to one of my workshops and heard me moan at length about the hidden complexities of really controlling line height, this one’s for you.

A friendly reminder that if you’re designing a user interface and you’re changing font weight for interactions such as button presses, multiplexed typefaces can make your life a lot simpler by not adjusting width when weight is changed. (I wrote a brief explainer on Google Fonts Knowledge a couple of years ago.) One such typeface is the latest release from Blackletra, Dorival UI, which also comes as a variable font and was in my Adobe Fonts picks above.

Here’s another reminder for you: let me know where in the world you’re reading this newsletter by adding yourself to my Readers of Typographic & Sporadic map! Approximate location / nearest town is fine. Currently there’ve been 46 places added, but that’s less than 4% of you, so come on, now, don’t be shy!

This isn’t type-related, but because I know there are a few web nerds on this list, you might be interested to know that Manuel Moreale helped me fix (and dramatically improve) my site’s RSS feeds, so if you’re subscribed to this newsletter, my blog, my speaking events, or all three via the ‘everything’ feed, they should now all work as intended. I’ll post about this properly at some point for the, er, three people who might be interested.

Lastly, I’m going to leave you with a little tease: next issue, I have something big-ish to announce. A new thing. A type thing. I think you might like it. Some might even say that it’ll be… Fine. 🤔