Hello and welcome, especially to all you new folks who signed up during my talk at Converge in Brighton! (Note to self: always run a book giveaway that involves email signups while on stage.)

The bulk of this issue was drafted on a cold autumnal Sunday morning, written in a variety of coffee shops while my eldest daughter did her weekly extracurricular activity in the city. Three-ish hours of dedicated writing time is, in theory, a real gift, and I ran this same routine last year while working on my book. But Sunday mornings aren’t actually the best time to be taking up a valuable table in a café, and a large part of this productivity window is usually spent balancing my polite awareness that I shouldn’t be occupying a potential brunch space for a hungry couple, with the acceptance that hey, I did just pay £4.50 for this V60. This juggling act is not without its stresses, and the politeness always wins, so much of this ‘uninterrupted’ Sunday writing time is actually spent moving onto the next place. In fact, I didn’t even manage to complete this paragraph without a guilt-induced move from Odd Shop to Bakesmiths.

But you’re here for the typography, not the thrilling adventures of my café-hopping, right? And if you’re new here (hello, Brighton folks), the way it works is like this: I gather a load of links for you (the ones in bold are the main ones) that are mostly typographic in nature. Some are vaguely type-related. A couple are just totally off-topic. And I usually add a smattering of what I’ve been up to lately. After the last issue of Typographic & Sporadic, a friend told me (delicately, politely) that they thought it was a little on the long side, so I’ve tried to keep this one shorter. Plus, so much of my free time this month has been taken up with doing #inktober. Why do I do this to myself?

Fontfabric have put together a nice little Instagram post on using OpenType features in Figma. This might not be news to you typography pros, but I’d recommend sending it the way of your friends and colleagues who haven’t yet seen the light.

My super talented internet friend Luis Mendo, whose illustrations I could stare at all day, launched his membership programme, Mundo Mendo, a couple of weeks ago. Apparently I was the first Bold-level supporter — hurrah! — and so now I do legitimately spend a good chunk of most days staring and staring again. If you follow Luis online, you’ll be aware of his feelings on social media, and starting his own membership programme is intended to serve as an antidote to putting money into the pockets of Zuck & co. I’m into that.

My friend Claire and her husband Darren have just launched their children’s stationery brand, Odd Goose. “Everything you need to write, draw, doodle, puzzle, work, play and think on paper.” The range of products in their catalogue having only just launched is seriously impressive. I especially love their how it’s made page.

I bought Ulrike Rausch’s Liebe Heide colour font a while ago and I love it, but it’s great to see that she’s released a regular (i.e. vector) version called Liebe Heide Fineliner. It comes in five weights and numerous alternates to help it feel like real handwriting.

Stephen Nixon’s Kyrios — the typeface used to set the word ‘Sporadic’ in this newsletter’s logo — has been updated to v0.3. It’s a pretty big update (check out the release notes) that includes weights (and a variable weight axis), a stylistic set to enable blackletter-style uppercase forms, and numerous other improvements. Kind of wild that this is only v0.3, since this is way more feature-complete than most fonts out there. I also fully support Stephen’s belief that fonts are magic.

Related: the detailed design process behind Shantell Sans (the typeface created by Stephen Nixon and Anya Danilova, based on Shantell Martin’s handwriting), is a fascinating read. I also agree that fonts are cool, too.

Brandon Nickerson (who is one of those one-person type foundries who manages to put out so many fonts that, honestly, I guess he just doesn’t sleep) has just released Hellmade. When I started writing this issue, it was free for its few days of release, but hey, I took too long to send this out and now it’s, er, not free. Sorry. I try. But it’s still very reasonably priced, and of course perfectly timed to fuel a whole load of Halloween-themed design paraphernalia.

Here’s an actual time-limited tip for you: my friend Francis Chouquet is currently selling a bundle containing all of his fonts for €29 — but only until the 21st. That’s just a few days away, so get in there quick.

On my blog, I recently wrote that opting out of Meta’s AI training data isn’t the solution you think it is. The motivation for this post came from realising that many people are missing a huge part of this whole AI content-scraping debacle. Any objections to Meta AI — even if made via the official privacy controls — are effectively meaningless, because (IMHO) there are still two huge issues for those who’ve opted out:

Firstly, Meta’s AI models have already been trained on your data up to the point of objection and there’s no way to un-train them just because an objection is now in place. (Imagine reading a book and then attempting to forget everything you’d read in it.) Secondly, and most importantly, even if it was possible to somehow remove your data and have Meta’s AI magically un-learn everything it gleaned from your content, other companies’ models have been and will be trained on all of it. The big ones. The small ones. Tomorrow’s next hot AI startup that hasn’t even launched yet. If your content is publicly viewable, it has been and will be used to train numerous AI models, just like any other content on the web.

I’m curious about your thoughts on this. Let me know by reply!

A new foundry discovery for me: Type Salon, based in beautiful Ljubljana, Slovenia. I can’t remember where I found them from, but to someone, somewhere, I doth my cap.

If you’re the kind of person who’s subscribed to my newsletter just to get news about new font releases, I’ll be the first to tell you that there are others out there who do a much better job than me. The new(ish) site Atlast of Type, from Dan Burzo, is one of those.

My very dear friend Marc Thiele is hosting the next beyond tellerrand event in Berlin next month — 7th and 8th, specifically — and apparently there are still some tickets left. I can honestly say that beyond tellerrand is one of the best creative conferences that has ever existed, and I thoroughly recommend you grab a ticket while you still can. Among the very impressive speaker lineup are old friends of mine, such as Jessica Hische and Paddy Donnelly (who also happens to be one of my kids’ favourite author-illustrators).

In the last issue I mentioned a couple of sites I designed for The Type Founders that recently went live — Proxima Super Nova and Ivy Foundry — and since then, another one has gone live, too: this time, for P22 (which is kind of three foundries in one). The library’s massive and it was fun helping design their (hopefully) robust filtering system. And again, it was great getting to work with CSS magician Roel, the TTF team, and those gorgeous specimen graphics.

More ‘me’ news! Sorry. New subscribers might’ve noticed that I managed to cobble together a way of sending over a free, 10-chapter sample of my book, Universal Principles of Typography, when you confirmed your email address. But if you were already a subscriber (that’s most of you) and you’d like one (hopefully that’s some of you), please just hit ‘reply’ and I’ll send you over the download link.

And speaking of the book, I’ve got the opportunity at the moment to place a bulk order with the publisher and get a box full of books that I can then sell to you directly. But before I place that order, I’d love to know how many people might be interested in buying one from me directly. If that’s you, again, just hit ‘reply’. I can sell it to you for £25 (plus shipping), and I’ll happily sign your copy if you’d like, too.

My friend Fiona Finn (oh my, that’s another paragraph I’ve started with “my friend” — sorry, the nepotism here is rife!), who I met through Bristol’s Letter Luvvers collective, was responsible for the this year’s Machina Bristronica merch. MB is the city’s festival for synth nerds and, despite being a synth nerd, I couldn’t attend this year. I wish I had because then I could’ve got one of these amazing tote bags. Fiona’s lettering was based on ADSR modulation paths and circuit schematics. IYKYK!

I’ve recently been enjoying Jez Burrows’ newsletter, Dept. of Enthusiasm, and have found that almost everything he recommends resonates with me in some way. One in particular (and the subject of the first issue) is Blüte, Gerüst by Phil Smith — an improvised phone(!) recording of Phil playing in a bar in Berlin from 2017. My interest was piqued when Jez said:

The phone records not just the piano, but life happening indifferently all around: birdsong, traffic, the variable murmur of customers ordering drinks. Sometimes the music seems to be in cheerful conversation with it all. A two-tone siren wails in the background and the piano pauses, repeats it back like a myna bird. There's a moment around 6:38 that still makes me smile every time I hear it, when a distant car HONK falls perfectly in the space between two notes. […] What makes this all so magical to me, and why I've listened to it hundreds of times over the past few years, is that it's just as much a recording of a place as it is of a performance.

For those of you wondering if there’s a type connection in all of this, well, yes, there is. Oh, and despite knowing Jez for well over a decade now, I had absolutely no idea he’d written two books until about two days ago.

And here’s a link for you that is absolutely not related to type in any way, but one I think many of you will enjoy: Receipt from the bookshop is a newsletter written by Katie Clapham, who owns an award-winning independent bookshop by the sea in England’s northwest. She says:

I open the draft when I open the shop, detail the day’s customers and transactions, and then send it out to readers before I go home.

There’s also an additional post if you upgrade, but I recently became a paid subscriber just to support the main one, which genuinely brings a smile to my face every time I read it. If you like bookshops, you’ll love it. (Found via Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s newsletter, Meanwhile. (Daniel definitely likes bookshops.))

Okay, I’m going to stop it there because it’s got pretty long, despite my attempts to rein it in. But, before I go, please can I leave you with a short bulleted list of reminders, all a little self-promotion-y in nature?

• The Kernference — the online conference hosted by Good Type — is happening very soon. If you buy a ticket using my affiliate link and use the promo code LETMEUPGRADEYA, you’ll get the upgraded ticket that contains workshops (usually $100) for free.
• I’m teaching a two-day typography workshop in Zagreb next month and have decided to run my pop-up newsletter, Notes from a different (type)setting, while I’m out there, so sign up to come along for the ride. As with my other pop-ups, I delete the list once the last issue’s been sent.
• Add yourself to the Readers of Typographic & Sporadic map! Approximate locations / nearest city is cool; this is just something that brings a smile to my face, letting me know that I’m not just shouting into the void.
• Lastly, again, please let me know (by replying to this email) if you’d like to buy my book directly from me so I know how many to order from my publisher.