I hope this email finds you in relaxed, wound-down holiday mode. But, if today is still a work day for you, please don’t feel you have to get to it before you clock out. In fact, unless you already have a super-chilled day planned, I’d love it if you kept this email for a moment where you can kick back and enjoy it while away from the demands of work. Resist the temptation, if you can, to bin this email along with all of those other unread ones filling up your inbox at the end of the year. I get it — I’ve just had an epic purge myself — but I hope this survives the cull and gets to accompany you in a cosy chair, perhaps with a little tipple and some festive tunes.

And oh, that reminds me: I’ve discovered a load of old but totally new-to-me Christmas music thanks to a wonderful Spotify playlist by Katie Clapham, who runs one of my favourite newsletters, Receipt from the Bookshop. (I’ve mentioned it before and probably will again.) Anyway, Elvis? Yes, really. I might even be a convert. And oh boy, I had no idea that Bob Dylan had recorded the giddy, Schnitzelbank-inspired, somewhat SpongeBob Squarepants-esque Must Be Santa. You’ll definitely need a drink for that one.

As promised, here are my favourite Adobe Fonts this week. That link will take you to a library, from which you can instantly add all the fonts, or choose to follow. I think this is a pretty neat feature and using it here has given me some ideas about how we could potentially improve it in the future, too.

I used some of those favourite typefaces — Panel Mono and Panel Sans Mono (and Hegante for the ampersand), all designed by my friend Mark Caneso — for a graphic to promote the newsletter on the socials:

If you’re into web typography — or even just curious about how the em box makes sizing type so difficult — read Why I’m excited about text-box-trim as a designer by Jason Bradberry (and I promise I’d decided to share this before I realised I was quoted in the article).

So glad to see that Jake has treated us to another entry on Make Type Work: a run-down of the typefaces used in Pinterest Predicts 2025 (which is an impressive piece of design in itself).

Really enjoying Granda from The Designers Foundry (found via Dense Discovery). It’s not just it’s got two slant directions — the Reclined style also reverses the contrast, too. (The “s” is a good character to play around with to see that at work.) I also love the microphone input in the type tester — turn it on, make some noise, and watch the variable font morph! Good fun.

Did you know the Letterform Archive is on Flickr? And did you even know Flickr was still a thing? Well, I did not know, but now I do, and now so do you. Hurrah! I’m very happy to see that Flickr is still going and what a perfect platform for this wonderful archive.

Fontwerk have a brand new website! Also, the foundry have updated their license. That might not sound tremendously exciting, but I get a lot of questions about font licensing and the reality is that it’s rarely as simple as it may first seem, and I’m always happy to see efforts by foundries and font distributors to simplify the process — and make updates in line with contemporary font usage, too.

And speaking of new websites, Dan Rhatigan now has a website for his foundry, Bijou Type — hurrah! So much nice type he’s put out already.

In her latest Typogram Product Update and accompanying video, Wenting demonstrates the app’s new features: a variable font gradient and glyph substitution. The VF gradient in particular is impressive work, and has reminded me to check out Typogram again.

The website I designed at the start of this year for Richard Lipton has now gone live! This was part of a load of sites I designed for my friends at The Type Founders (see also: P22, Ivy Foundry, Proxima Super Nova) and, just like the others, I was only responsible for the easy bit — all of the hard work was done by the developers and of course those wonderful type specimens.

Erik Spiekermann’s p98a workshop and Hacking Gutenberg initiative are moving to new premises.

We will continue to exist! We’ll be moving to smaller premises in the spring of 2025 – right next door – the p98a address will remain. There we’ll be able to maintain everything on a smaller scale: No employees, but 3 printing presses, lots of wood and metal type, our laser and Ludlow caster. Workshops in small groups by appointment are still possible, and we also keep running our online shop!

Remember last issue, when I included a GIF and said that I’d always wanted to include GIFs, but hadn’t for bandwidth reasons, but could include that one because its file size was acceptable? Well, here’s another GIF, which I had to include because it’s an excellent animated demonstration of interpolation / design space / variable font concepts, created by Erik van Blokland. His version was a video, so I had to run it through a converter to get it to become a reasonably sized GIF. Unfortunately the quality isn’t great, so please see Erik’s toot for the video version.

Not type-specific, but I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking in Trondheim, Norway, at the end of January! I‘ve spent a lot of time in this wonderful Norwegian city over the years, including when I lived there in the summer of ’08, and I can’t wait to head back to chat about non-conventional career paths / approaches in design.

If you’re in need of a last-minute present idea and you think it should be a book to give to the type-loving nerd in your life, please forgive the last-minute plug for my book, Universal Principles of Typography. And all is forgiven if you buy it from Amazon, since that’s probably the only place that’ll deliver it tomorrow. If not mine, then consider my all-time favourite books on typography, Ellen’s Thinking with Type (3rd edition), or Erik’s Stop stealing sheep & Find out how type works (4th edition). And recently I came across The Typographic Medium, by Kate Brideau, which I’ve not read myself, but it looks interesting.

Have a great holiday period, whatever you do, and that I’ll be back with ‘part 3’ before we’re all back at work. Oh, and do let me know how / where you end up enjoying these newsletters — photos of your festive reading setup will be very gratefully received! 🎄