Events you shouldn’t miss — and quite a few that I did

Because this issue’s a big one, and because I’m feeling confident that you’ll take me up on my suggestion to keep this in your inbox to read it over multiple sessions, I’d better start with the events. TypeCon is happening... checks notes... right now! (The main event kicks off tomorrow.) I’d love to go to one at some point. I’m especially jealous because I see that tonight’s party — hosted by Future Fonts — has free beers from Heck, the alcohol-free brewery recently launched by my friend Andy. Again: that party is tonight, folks!

The next event is a way off, so don’t worry, you can relax now. Goodtype are once again running The Kernference, except this time it’s… free! The Kernference Light is an online, one-day event that’s happening on 9th August. And if you can’t attend, the session replays will also be available to watch afterwards for free.

Wait, is it weird that I’m writing this issue and haven’t yet mentioned Berlin Letters, which I attended earlier this month? Those of you who came along for the ride via my pop-up newsletter Notes from a different (type)setting (thank you!) will be well aware of how much fun was had, even though I did end up having to skip some of the conference itself to see more of Berlin. Again, it was great to hang out with Emma, Marc, Jamie, Martina, and Francis (all pictured below), as well as Norman, Vitaly, Claire, Erik, and Susanna, among others. And congrats to Ulrike and Chris for putting on such a wonderful event!

And all this talk about an event that’s passed allows me to segue neatly into… replays! Last week, Amy and Jen Hood, of Hoodzpah, did an AMA on Maven. I somehow managed to miss it, but was relieved to see that the replay is now online. This was ahead of their forthcoming course on Maven, Visual Identity Branding: from Discovery to Logo and Design Language, which kicks off its next cohort on 17th August.

I have a load of sessions from Config saved to my ‘watch later’ list on YouTube, but Figma’s own Marcin Wicary’s was one I watched as soon as it was posted online. In defense of an old pixel will be adored by anyone old enough to remember pixel fonts, but is just a wonderful celebration of (insane!) constraints within type design. The fact that Marcin went and built a whole browser-based pixel font builder to support this talk is, well, pretty mind-boggling.

My friend Roel’s recent talk at CSS Day, Problems solved by OpenType, is well worth your time. If you’re not a CSS person, don’t let it put you off watching the replay: this is a really solid (and very amusing) overview of OpenType technology.

New-ish type goings-on

Kalina Glaze is a new COLRv1 font by Frida Medrano and, like all colour fonts, serves as an excellent demo of the tech. (But remember that COLRv1 browser support is limited for now.)

Dan Cederholm has recently released Dragönsteel — “inspired by heavy metal logos, 1980s role-playing games, and maybe dragons and dusty, leather-bound books.” To celebrate Drogönsteel’s release, Dan also created a dice game called The Vowels of Hell. Now that’s how you do a type specimen.

I love a good write-up, and Matthijs Herzberg’s detailed behind-the-scenes article on his typeface Mancine does not disappoint.

The other day, Jake and I were talking the other day about web fonts. Specifically, we were wondering: where do most people get their web fonts these days, and where do people learn about web fonts these days? This has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re currently working on together at Adobe Fonts — just a couple of web font nerds being curious about the industry — but if you’d like to share your thoughts on the subject, please consider taking this short survey we’ve thrown together. And obviously feel free to complete it anonymously if you want.

Take the web font survey

(Don’t worry, there are more questions than that.)

Foundry5 have just released Botanic Grotesque — the first font in their “nursery”, an experimental type design playground. Interesting to see so many foundries taking this approach; i.e. creating a sub-brand under which they release WIP fonts for smaller fees.

Type Together have released an “expansion and refinement” of Tablet Gothic — the family is now available as a variable font, has an increased character set including Vietnamese, among other refinements.

type.today decided to ask their network of type designers several questions about their work and type design in general. The third part in those findings recently went live as 20 questions from type.today: Part 3.

While perusing type.today’s journal, I noticed their interview with Gianpaolo Tucci, who spoke at Berlin Letters. The thing that fascinated me about his talk was not just how he’d used AI to create some genuinely impressive artwork, but also how he’d embraced the kind of, er, crapness of AI (my choice of words, not his) and celebrated those faults before they’re lost to technological progress.

Not new, but useful (perhaps)

While on the topic of Jake and I working together again, he recently resurfaced this feature InVision ran on us back in 2014: A Look Inside the Design Team at Typekit. August 2014, in fact, so pretty much a literal decade ago! Given that InVision will be closing imminently, I expect this URL won’t be around for much longer, so go and laugh at us trying to look like we were in a band before it’s too late.

I’m sure you’ve probably come across Sans Bullshit Sans — “the font that replaces every buzzword by a Comic Sans-styled censorship bar.” This font from my friend Roel is actually from way back in 2015, but it seems to be doing the rounds again on the interwebs (maybe because of his CSS Day talk, above?), so I thought it might be worth mentioning, especially as you lot might be interested to read Roel’s detailed write-up about how the font was made.

I’m a big fan of superfamilies, and somehow I’ve only just realised that the already impressive Cera Pro from TypeMates has a brush version.

Yesterday I was reading Silverstag Type Foundry’s font pairing guide — a PDF you get for free when you sign up to receive the foundry’s newsletter. So, you know, do that. I can’t give it to you here.

A new foundry discovery for me: Resistenza Type. Blimey! So much great stuff here. In fact I’ve just gone rampaging around their foundry page on Adobe Fonts, hitting every single “Add family” button until my finger hurt.

NaN have just released NaN Druid, a serif / sans combo designed by Anna Khorash and Reymund Schröder, who were behind NaN Hyena — another family that embraces its own inherent weirdness. “Conjured into a being of dual realms, the family features a serif and a sans-serif that share matching proportions and weights but diverge in their contrasting styles.”

I’m always interested to see the different ways in which type foundries handle trial fonts. Process — one of my favourite foundries from back in the day — have just launched their trial fonts, so now’s a good time to go and play with their library if you haven’t already.

Things that aren’t typographic in nature, but honestly why would you not love them?

My friend Matthew Smith, who many of you will know as @whale, has quit startup land and launched a decaf coffee brand called Wimp. I saw some early designs a few months back and it looked incredible, and sounded like a great concept, but an idea is one thing; executing is quite another. But Matthew’s done it. The playful, cheeky branding, buoyed by some excellent illustrations, tone of voice, and typographic decisions is just spot-on.

I started using Rise about a month ago because even though it feels like 2024 has been the year of new calendar apps and I was reluctant to try something else after settling on Notion Calendar, I’d just started at Adobe and needed to use all that Microsoft jazz, and hey, Rise supports it!

The other day I was reminded just how well designed John Hicks’ website is, especially the blog posts, and how this particular design hasn’t aged one bit. Inspo for my next (and always on the horizon) blog redesign.

This is definitely not typography related in any way, but I know I’m going to use this all the time, so consider this a public note-to-self: Artvee is a resource that allows you to “browse and download high-resolution, public domain paintings, posters and illustrations”. Found via Dense Discovery.

I noticed that Christian — who’s currently recreating a trip from 25 years ago and is hiking into the Alps — has a collaborative Google Map that shows where all his readers are in the world. I love this idea! Would you be up for adding yourself to a Typographic & Sporadic map, maybe just an approximate location, or your nearest town or city? This information wouldn’t be used for nefarious means — just a nice way of me getting a feel for where this newsletter is being read around the world. If you’re up for that, here’s the editable list. Let’s see if this works, eh?

Add yourself to the map

Lastly, I’m going to be taking a little break social media during the summer holidays, so if you follow me on all the usual places, you’ll notice me going pretty quiet there. I have no intention of pausing this newsletter during the summer holidays, but also I’m not going to give myself a hard time about needing to publish either.

Whatever you’re up to, whether it’s summer for you or not, I hope you’re having a great week. I’d love to know how and where and when you enjoyed this issue. I’m even tempted to use a sunglasses emoji. 😎 Oh, I did it. There it is. Oh boy. Send help.