Hello and welcome to the last newsletter I’ll be sending in 2025. If you were here around this time last year, you might remember me promising not one, not two, but three ‘holiday’ issues, which I sent out over the festive period. What was I thinking? This year, I’m going to give myself a bit of a break. However, like those issues I sent at the end of 2024, might I suggest — if I may be so audacious — that you keep it in your inbox and dip in-and-out of it over the holidays? Let it mature nicely, ready for cracking open at a later date. Or use it as an escape pod when you need a break from the relatives.

Before I get on with this issue, a quick and shameless reminder that — as I mentioned last issue — my next book, Fine Specimens, is now available to pre-order from anywhere you choose to buy books! (The absolute best place would be an actual physical bookshop local to you, or bookshop.org.) It won’t be out until March, but if you pre-order it now, that decision will most definitely mature into one that benefits your future self. Promise.

Let’s kick things off with my eight favourite Adobe Fonts of the month because some absolute corkers have been added to the catalogue recently, including Mark Caneso’s variable family Please, which I’ve had the pleasure of testing out. It’s great to see it live for everyone to enjoy.

Amy and Jen Hood have published the second edition of Freelance and Business and Stuff and it is, of course, an absolutely beautiful-looking book. It’s not currently shipping outside the US, which is making me very sad, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for some international stockists.

Speaking of the Hood sisters, Jen has just released Cambridge — a serif typeface “inspired by the history and academic vibes around Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.” I love the specimen graphics for this so much, I had a hard time including just one.

Summer feels like a way off with all the Christmas vibes right now, but tickets are now available for both TypeParis Now26 (the one-day conference at the end of May) and TypeParis Summer26 (the six-week type design programme that starts on 2nd June). OG subscribers might remember that I attended Now24 (and documented it via a pop-up newsletter and, later, a summary issue of this newsletter) and I can thoroughly recommend it. And I have this vague idea that once my kids are grown up and the summer holidays are no longer as precious, I might try my hand at that type design course.

Did you see that ILT redesigned their blog? This is significant, of course, because ILT started as a blog longer before it became a font retailer. And it was via the original incarnation of the ILT blog that I got to know John Boardley.

How’s this for a segue: John wrote one of the six essays in my forthcoming book, Fine Specimens, and if you pre-order the book and then fill out this form on the publisher’s site, you’ll get a signed bookplate from me in the post and an instantly delivered PDF of John’s essay in your inbox. (For more info on Fine Specimens, please see my last issue. I’ll be updating my site with a proper page for it soon.)

My aforementioned friend Mark Caneso, who’s one of the those type designer / lettering artists who puts out a seemingly endless stream of amazing work (a lot of which is in Fine Specimens, by the way), has just published Different Strokes. Look at this wonderfully witty description:

Taking the form of a 24 page workbook (print or digital) filled with typographic tongue twisters that take terminology to task. Toss the tired type jargon you typically sling and turn this new verbiage into a visual vocabulary by taking on over 30 alliterative assignments.

Has Gotham really been around for 25 years? Apparently so. Firstly, I love that Tobias Frere-Jones has decided to publish an extensive retrospective on the typeface — especially given that, as he puts it, “these families are now further removed from their origin,” — and secondly, I love that he asked my friend Doug Wilson to write it. So head over to Designing Gotham, pour yourself something nice, and indulge in the true story of a proper modern classic.

Web typography geeks! You might know that I’m a big fan of fluid type scales in CSS, and Utopia is my go-to generator, but — in the words of Milena, Nesim, and Nils at 9elements — “sometimes, you don’t need a whole token system but a single interpolation between two values in a viewport range.” Yes! That’s where their Min-Max-Value Interpolation comes in.

And on the subject of fluid type in the browser, you might also enjoy the recently published Interactive fluid typography by Jesús Olano.

I’ve been a huge fan of the record label Ghostly International for many years now, having first discovered them through their signing of the likes of Tycho, School of Seven Bells, Phantogram, etc., and always admiring their approach to design, predominantly handled by the talented Michael Cina. We collaborated with Ghostly in a couple of issues of Lagom (shout if you remember!) and over the years, I’ve got to known Sam Valenti IV, the label’s founder and a valued subscriber of this ’ere newsletter. Sam emailed me recently to tell me about We'll Never Stop Living This Way: A Ghostly International Catalogue, a limited-edition, 488-page hardcover book. Wow, this thing looks absolutely gorgeous. Whether you’re a Ghostly fan already or not, who can resist this celebration of a label caring as deeply about its visual output as its musical output? If anyone’s looking for any last-minute gift ideas…

Lots of books in this issue. Murat Ertürk’s The Letters of Sakarya: In Pursuit of Commercial Artists and Sign Paintings covers the forgotten legacy of sign painters and horsecarts painters who worked in the Turkish city of Sakarya between the 1940s and 1990s.

The first section contains detailed biographies of 48 artists. These reveal how the tradition of vernacular lettering and decorative painting was passed down through the generations among these artists. The second section showcases the city’s typographic heritage across six categories, including nameplates, industrial zone signs, shop signs, and window lettering.

The talented husband-and-wife team of PintassilgoPrints have a brand new website. Known for their elaborate interlocking and lettering-like designs (I almost always use their typefaces to demonstrate what can be done when you have a multitude of ligatures at your disposal), Erica and Ricardo continue to put out some fantastic fonts.

Calling all motion graphics fans: variable fonts are in (the latest beta version of) After Effects! I’ve found that the easiest way to get someone excited about variable fonts is to show them being animated — they instantly get what being variable actually means — and this latest update means you no longer need to use a third-party plugin for AE. This excellent YouTube tutorial demonstrates how combining VFs with some lighting effects can lead to some pretty stunning results.

(Just before hitting ‘send’, my friend and AF colleague Jake published a lovely set of animation examples, too. Squeezing it in here, super last minute like.)

Strangers, By Spring is “a blog about escapism, romance, and rebirth” from Thomas Rumbold and Henry Desroches — two web designer-developers whose work I greatly admire, and who I recently had the pleasure of meeting IRL. I’m really into the glitchy image transitions and the SVG sorcery they’ve employed to make the type glitchy, too. This, plus the music, and of prose the prose itself, conjures a wonderful, dreamlike atmosphere.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a heartfelt thanks for being a subscriber. I really can’t express how much I appreciate you being here. I mean it! Your inboxes are precious, none of us have any time these days, and most email is absolute garbage, so I really do appreciate you lending me your email address and letting me sneak in every now and then with a bit of type nerdery. If you feel so inclined, don’t forget to add yourself to the T&S readers map and, after you’ve done that, have a lovely festive break!