I couldn’t not kick things off with a new font release from my very good mate Jamie Clarke, could I? Reel is a ‘flexi-case’ display typeface that allows you to mix upper and lowercase text without losing the neat rectangle you can usually only achieve with all-caps type. So you get the same visual presence as capitals, but less of the shouty-ness. I instantly added this one…

… to my library of current favourite Adobe Fonts! As with previous libraries, you can immediately add all of the fonts in Elliot’s 8 faves, summer ’26 to your own device if you’re signed into your CC account. Oh, by the way, if that link doesn’t appear to work at first, just hit refresh. This one contains the aforementioned Reel, Newlyn’s New Spirit, two new families from PSTL, and all four families from Character Type.

Speaking of Adobe Fonts, our design team launched a fun little side project a few weeks ago: Glyph Finder! If you’re looking to see how the design of a specific character varies across a random selection of different typefaces in our library, add whichever Unicode code point you like (if you know it), or take a random one for a spin (if you don’t).

I know I link to Hoodzpah a lot, but honestly the Hood sisters and their team put out so much good stuff, it’s hard not to. This time around, I’m linking to the beautiful new website for their HoodFonts foundry, designed by Trust Design Shop, and specifically their hot-off-the-press new typeface East Bay.

Glyphs 4 is on the way! The de facto type design app has its new version available as a public preview, with the official release coming very soon — perhaps in “a couple of weeks” according to this Instagram reel. Any Glyphs 3 license purchased now automatically gets a v4 upgrade once it’s out, and I know this because I’m on the cusp of buying a Glyphs license myself. (Yes, the desire to tinker with type design is calling me once again.) The image is a still from Rainer’s Typographics presentation last week.

The folks at NaN recently launched a new site in beta form: fonts.xyz is a new place to find fonts, currently distributing 31 foundries. The site’s design is very… how do I put this... opinionated, but then it does describe itself as an “indie type platform, built for (and by) the oddballs, the obsessives, and the originals,” so there you go. Léon Hugues’ LH Toast is pretty lovely, eh?

The prolific Marcin Wichary takes a look at transport displays in the latest issue of his newsletter, Good type against all odds. The animated example at the start of the issue explains how seemingly oblique type is actually different pixels of upright type being rendered gradually while scrolling, thus creating the optical effect of being slanted. So now you know!

Back in May, I spoke at Type&Faces and sold copies of Fine Specimens there. I signed a book for someone called Ellie, but it wasn’t until the next day that I realised I’d been talking to Ellie Heywood — a proper lettering / calligraphy superstar! The process reels she posts on Instagram are fantastic.

My mate Alen continues to put out a truly impressive amount of fonts, each packed full of alternates. SLTF Nestera is his newest release and one of SilverStag Type Foundry’s largest families, with over 170 ligatures and alternates over the nine weights and their matching italics.

I’m trying out Arcotype — an innovative new way of discovering fonts (currently those in the Google Fonts library, but hopefully more soon), made by Gabbi Soong — who sent me a very nice email after I’d signed up to say she was a reader of T&S!

Those of you working on the web might be interested to check out Matt Waler’s Container Query Typography Systems — a method for getting text styles to respond not to the entire viewport, but their parent’s container size. I need to put this into practice on a long-overdue redesign of my personal site.

I recently wrote an article about optical sizing on Adobe.Design. What we now call optical sizing — the practice of adapting a typeface’s design for different sizes to keep it readable — is a modern attempt to preserve the deliberate design variations that were found in different sizes of metal (or wood) type. In this piece, I cover a bit of history, where to find fonts with optical sizes, and how to manipulate the opsz axis in variable fonts.

Please forgive another bit of self promotion, but back at the end of May, I was on Diana Varma’s Talk paper Scissors podcast. This was my second time on the show (the first was shortly after the release of Universal Principles of Typography) and once again it was a real pleasure to chat with Diana, who asks some great questions. Unsurprisingly, we talked almost exclusively about Fine Specimens.

Last month, as readers of the now-complete pop-up newsletter will know, I was at TypeParis Now26 and one of the talks really captivated me: Mathieu Réguer spoke about the creation of Azimut, a family of three seemingly different (but deeply connected) fonts commissioned by the city of Strasbourg, intended to represent three different sides of the city’s rich typographic history. Here’s a quote from the accompanying essay by Dan Reynolds:

The typeface's Regular style is for more immersive-style reading, building upon half a millennium of typographic tradition. It is designed for text heavy lifting, as seen in literary books, essays or news websites. Azimut's Italic, referencing humanistic pen-based writing, is at its best when used to emphasize certain passages, and used within complex layouts. […] Azimut's Bold style is constructed, following early bold typefaces from the advertising age, it is meant to shout on book covers, posters or logotypes.

The interesting thing is that the designers wanted to enable non-type-savvy users to create interesting layouts, not by accessing things like OpenType features, but by simply switching between the three styles. And, because the uppercase is monospaced, it’s very easy to quickly achieve some interesting results, as you can see from this image:

While watching the day of talks in Paris, I was also really impressed by the work of Hélène Marian. It’s so varied and experimental, I’m struggling to sum it up in a way that’d do it justice, so please go and check out her portfolio site!

It was nice to sit in the audience with my friend Phil briefly at Now26, and I see that he recently recorded a webinar with Anna Damoli called Typographic Intelligence about how AI is reshaping the role of typography. I haven’t watched it yet, and you’ve got to register your details to get to the video, but I’m always interested to hear how folks like Monotype are talking about this stuff.

Fontastic Space is an interesting (albeit very obviously Claude-designed) browser-based tool for comparing two fonts’ vertical metrics side-by-side and assessing their suitability as a potential pair. I’ve seen similar things in the past, and there’s more to font pairing than maths alone, but this attempts to analyse various characteristics of the letterforms’ design (not just the metrics) to inform the pairing recommendation. Note: Google Fonts-only.

I always enjoy a good write-up about the process behind a typeface, and Rutherford Craze, of Mass-Driver, does them better than most. His deep-dive into the making of MD UI, released earlier this year but started back in 2020, covers what he calls “the most complex project he’s ever worked on by a wide margin.” I like his distinction between reading and interfacing.

Lastly, for about six months now, I’ve been writing a looooooong blog post about leaving Spotify, and I’d hoped to link to it in this issue. It’s still not quite ready yet, but if you’re interested, please do keep your eye on my blog because it’s going to be going up soon, I promise. No, really this time. For those of you who know what RSS is, you can always subscribe to the blog’s feed. Did you know you can even subscribe to this newsletter via RSS? It’s true.

Despite my apologies in the intro for the long gap between issues, I know the summer’s going to be crazy, so I’m going to be kind to myself and say that Typographic & Sporadic will return in late September — probably. I mean, if a burst of inspiration or important news or pocket of free time suddenly appears, then it might be sooner. But until then, happy fonting!