The world is an absolute mess right now and it feels like an indulgence to sit back and review the year that’s gone from such a self-centric view. But I also know that these annual reflections are a chance to express gratitude for how lucky I am, living in (and working from) a home that feels safe, surrounded by my family, getting paid to do something I love. So I’m starting this with a thank you to the universe and an acknowledgment of my privilege.
I must admit, though, that when I write these year-in-review posts, there’s a fair amount of (self-inflicted) pressure to capture the sheer amount of 365 days’ worth of, you know, being alive. Also, when I look back on the year, my dominant thought is of family time: the day trips, the walks in the countryside, the moments at home, mucking around with the kids, just doing everyday life. Really, I just want to fill this post with photos of my girls. But I very deliberately don’t put photos of them online (for a variety of reasons, including to prevent their likenesses being ingested by AI training models), so instead what I’m recording here ends up being a sort of ‘professional’ or ‘blog’ version of myself — a persona that really only reflects a very small portion of my life.
In the background, niggling away, is a certain sense of ‘argh, I need to be sharing all experiences online’ — a kind of ’photo or it didn’t happen’ mentality — and that’s... insane. I’m well aware. It’s a symptom of a society duped en masse by the allure of social media, and I’m still struggling, if I’m being honest, to break free from that mindset. Partly because I used to be a very ‘online’ person, I suppose.
Alright, with that off my chest, here’s a little glimpse at some of what happened in 2025, with most of the family stuff reserved for our own memories and photo albums.
The in-person events I spoke at in 2025 were tiny, then huge. The first was a little evening talk in Trondheim, Norway — a city that’s very dear to my heart, as I lived out there for the summer of 2008, back when I first went freelance (which I talked about in the 41st issue of my newsletter, From Trondheim, with fonts). The event was just me, talking to the lovely members of Grafill Trondheim in the back room of a pub about passion projects.
It was a lovely experience and a great chance to catch up with some Trondheim-based friends — and to revisit an area in which I’d spent some formative times. From that issue of the newsletter:
When I lived in Trondheim in the summer of 2008, I worked from a café (whose name I’ve forgotten, and which is now a restaurant) on this street every single weekday — and my Airbnb is directly opposite that building. Back then, it was a time of real change [...] I started life as an independent designer — and this café was effectively my first remote office. [...] Soundtracked by Neil Young’s Harvest, Bell & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister, and The Beatle’s 1 — three albums the café had on repeat, all day, every day — I’ve got very fond memories of my Norwegian summer and first foray into freelance.
(After sending out this issue, Mark Simonson pointed out to me that “Kalas” is set in a modified version of his Mostra Nuova. Worlds collide!)
My next event of the year, at Figma’s conference Config in May, was without a doubt the biggest speaking gig of my life, not just in terms of sheer size (3,000 people in the room itself and even more viewers on the livestream), but also in terms of the level of organisation. I even had hair and make up before going on stage!
Prep for the talk started very early on in the year. The proposal, a couple of rounds of feedback and amendments, remote practices, an on-stage tech check the night before, and about a million hotel room run-throughs later, the talk itself was all over in 25 minutes — but it felt like months of work. And I was super happy with how it went, despite an issue with some fonts not rendering (oh, the irony!), which thankfully I didn’t actually clock at the time, because that would’ve totally thrown me. You can watch the recording of it on YouTube.
It was also nice to be back in San Francisco after so long and relive some memories from when I was at Adobe a decade or so ago. I got to (briefly) see my current Adobe colleagues, make some new friends — shoutout to Dani and Dana — and catch up with some proper OGs, too — shoutout to Jessica (I finally made it to her shop!), Russ, Cameron, Doug, Hugo, Kyle, Keith, Lee, and Tim. (It also brought me immense pleasure to see Tim, Rogie, and Lauren absolutely killing it on-stage with a run-down of the new drawing tools.) Oh, and I finally got to hang with my typo-hero Marcin at the Figma offices.
2025’s third and final speaking event was online for The Kernference and it was a real honour to join a lineup with the likes of Ellen Lupton, Meg Lewis, James Martin, Brethren Design Co., and Julie Solvstrom. I updated and extended my Config talk and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. And I wore my Passenger t-shirt that Julie designed, too.
I also managed to go to a couple of conferences this year, just as an attendee. The first was WDC Bristol in October (where I’d spoken about 16 years ago, before I even moved to this part of the country (in fact, it was that trip that made me consider Bristol as a potential move)), and I went because I’d realised it’d be a great chance to meet (IRL!) a whole bunch of designer-developer types whose work and general IndieWeb vibes have really been inspiring me lately, like Henry, Thomas, Salma, Robb, and Jason. It was also a huge honour to see Scott pimp my book during his talk.
Then, in November, I headed over to Berlin to attend beyond tellerrand. I’ve spoken at three BT events over the years, and have been promising Marc I’d return as an attendee for far too long. It was so good to catch up with him, some old friends visiting for the event (Keir, who I travelled with, as well as John, Andy, Brad, and Christine), and a bunch of Germany-based friends (shoutout to Tobi, Bastian, Johanna, Tobias, Stefan, and Norman). Norman even took my portrait and made me look half-respectable, talented chap that he is:
A big chunk of 2025, outside of my day job, was spent putting together my next book, Fine Specimens, which will be published by Quarto this March. If you read last year’s review, you’ll notice that this was the book that started life as a Kickstarter project that failed to reach its funding goal, but then got picked up by the publisher of Universal Principles of Typography. I can’t say that I wrote this new book because a) it’s predominantly made up of beautiful type foundry graphics, and b) the text that is in there was supplied either by the foundries or the six folks I commissioned to write essays: John Boardley, Ellen Lupton, Erik Spiekermann, Laura Meseguer, Min-Young Kim, and Veronika Burian. So it was more of a curation / editing kind of thing — plus designing, of course.
Anyway, Fine Specimens is available to pre-order from anywhere you like to buy books (including Amazon, although you probably don’t need me to tell you that supporting your local bookstore would be better). If you do choose to pre-order it, fill out this form on the publisher’s site and you’ll get a signed bookplate from me and early access to the digital version of John’s essay.
In November, semi out-of-the-blue, the Spanish edition of Universal Principles of Typography appeared. I was aware that the publisher was in the process of selling the book’s foreign translation rights, but then I was tagged on Instagram by a bookshop in Madrid, and there it was! Translated, typeset, printed, published, and on-sale in Spanish-speaking countries all over the world. Wow. What a lovely surprise!
I haven’t yet put any details on my Books page, but probably should at some point. I also haven’t actually got a copy of the book! Hoping the Spanish publisher might be able to furnish me with one, though.
Although I’ve been pretty abysmal at publishing new blog posts this year (I managed, er, two), I won’t beat myself up too much because my efforts have been focussed on my newsletter, Typographic & Sporadic, which I still genuinely love writing and publishing. I sent out nine issues in 2025, it now has around 1,700 subscribers, and it feels like the perfect antidote to social media. As I say in the footer of each issue, the newsletter “is made by me with zero AI, zero ads, and zero consideration for any sort of algorithm.” I’m really happy with how the newsletter’s going, and I always get very nice replies from readers, although it’d be nice to add some more subscribers, of course. So if you feel like lending me your email address, I’ll try not to disappoint.
I did miss running any pop-up newsletters in 2025, but I have plans for one fairly soon. Watch this space! Or, better yet: sign up for the next one.
Despite my poor blogging stats, I have actually given the website itself some attention recently: over the Christmas holidays, I finally added Fine Specimens to the Books page, and also updated the content of the Home page and Links page.
And earlier in the year, I was very kindly helped out by Manuel, who did some great under-the-hood work on the site, including fixing all of my RSS feeds, getting OpenGraph images and previews working properly, and some general structural / URL rewiring.
And, although subtle, the newsletter got a few very subtle design updates, too, both in terms of the issue pages that live on this site (here’s the most recent example) and the actual in-client email design itself. Here’s a comparison between the previous issue (left) and new issue (right) in the Gmail iPhone app 🤢 to show the subtle design tweaks. In short: better use of space! Probably only noticeable on mobile screens.
Sadly, designing emails is still about as hard as it was when I first tried it in 2004, but the folks at Buttondown have been very helpful in — and they even added in a fullscreen CSS editor when I asked for it!
In addition to the trips to Trondheim and San Francisco for the speaking gigs, I enjoyed a week in New York with the Adobe Fonts Design team in September...
... and I was fortunate enough to indulge in a good amount of travel purely for pleasure, too: a family holiday to southern France in the May half-term, where we stayed in a beautiful old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, overlooking a river not far from Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, just before the property was sold and taken off Airbnb…
... and another family holiday to Lefkada, Greece, in August. Again, pretty much every picture has my kids in it, so here’s one of the crazy blue sea at Egremni Beach:
Plus there was the aforementioned Berlin trip for beyond tellerrand in November. All in all, including transfers, I clocked up 14 flights in 2025, which was… possibly a bit too much. I think some carbon offsetting is due.
At the end of August, we also managed a family camping trip, right on the border of Somerset and Devon, on a campsite in a beautiful little valley called Cloud Farm.
2025 was a continuation of my accidental music-making hiatus: I didn’t release or even create any new music under my Other Form alias, and I’ve put this down entirely to falling out of love with techno and that side of electronic music. I barely listened to anything in that world and instead have fallen back in love with metal, rock, and guitar-based music. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true, since I’d never stopped listening to those genres anyway, but I’ve felt compelled to play guitar more — no doubt spurred on by Gwen learning guitar, too — and have been tinkering away with a multi-effects pedal I bought for myself her. One of my goals for 2026 is to actually record (and maybe release) some of these guitar-based compositions.
Aside: one night in April, Gwen asked me to draw her something she can copy when she woke up in the morning. This hopefully fairly accurately captures her vibe:
Despite my lack of musical output, I did put together a new Other Form website, mainly as a way to experiment with building with AI. It’s funny: in the few short months since I did that, the tools have leaped ahead and I feel like my own understanding of those tools has improved a fair bit, too. Maybe I’ll redo it again (and again and again)?
Speaking of music-listening, I’m currently working on a blog post about music streaming services, which I hope to publish soon. I’ve been attempting to leave Spotify, but none of the competitors are a perfect replacement, and the post is meant to highlight the differences between each. Watch this space.
Gig-wise, we went to Billie Marten’s album launch at Rough Trade Bristol and took the girls, too, which was great — for their first ‘proper’ gig, they got to stand right at the front of the stage and even got to meet the artist afterwards! While Billie was signing CDs, Gwen gave her a portrait she’d made for her that afternoon. Girls, gigs are only downhill from here.
Sam and I also managed to get to Arc Tangent and see Mew perform one of their final gigs. It’s shameful that it took us this long to go, as the festival is just 20 minutes up the road from us, near where we often go hiking.
2025 started with me working for Adobe Fonts as a contractor and ended with me working for them as an employee. I didn’t have that on my bingo card, as the cool kids say, but I was overjoyed to rejoin the team when the opportunity arose. And although my day-to-day isn’t really that different from the contracting period, I’ve been surprised at how different I feel with a bit of stability in my life. It’s not just a case of having a steady income; it’s more that the background pressure to ‘put myself out there’, especially on socials — a pressure I didn’t even realise I was experiencing until I wasn’t — has been reduced a bit. Of course, I still have books and speaking gigs to promote and all that, but no longer having to worry about my next move, even subconsciously, has come as a very welcome change.
I spent a lot of time reading newsletters this year, and the stability of a full-time job meant that I could take out paid subscriptions to a bunch of membership programs and help support inspiring people making great work. Some of my favourite subscriptions include:
Like a lot of people, I’m really done with Instagram. I hate it. Actually, no, that’s not true. I enjoy seeing friends posting their family adventures, their nice meals out, their new pets, and their travels. I also love seeing people make art and share their projects and poke fun at the absurdity of the world with silly memes and insightful cartoons.
What I actually hate, I suppose, is the apparent need to be active on Instagram and social media in general in order to not drop off everyone’s radar. I wouldn’t really care about dropping off the radar if I was just posting photos and videos for friends and families, but I’d like people to buy my books, and sign up to my newsletter, and attend events I’m speaking at, etc., and in order to do that, I need to post on social channels — and I sincerely wish that wasn’t the case. So I’ve been keeping it ticking it over, and yes, I still waste far too much time consuming everyone else’s content on it, but generally speaking I’m enjoying being on Bluesky and, to an extent, Mastodon (which both feel somewhat like early Twitter, but both in different ways) more than I am being on Instagram.
I felt that 2025 was the year that personal websites and indie alternatives to big tech started to gain a bit more traction. I started using (and paying for) Kagi as my primary search engine, following a glowing review from The Verge. I started using (and paying for) Raycast. I started paying for (but not yet using) a Proton account. I lamented The Browser Company’s transition from Arc to Dia, but started to love that app, too, until they were acquired by Atlassian — at which point I returned to Safari, and then made it much more bearable thanks to Wipr. I continued to use (and pay for) Notion as my second brain, but didn’t get on with the much-anticipated Notion Mail. I still use (and pay for) Mimestream as my desktop email client, although I’ll have to move if I transition from Google to Proton at some point.
2025 was a pretty good year for film and TV, wasn’t it? Some film highlights, listed in the order I watched them, according to my Letterboxd diary (and not limited to films that actually came out in 2025) included Nosferatu, Walking Out, Dream Scenario, The Outrun, The Order, Little Siberia, A Real Pain, The Painted Veil, Companion, The Last Showgirl, Bring Them Down, Days of the Bagnold Summer, Flow, Sinners, Frida, The Promised Land, A House of Dynamite, and Train Dreams. TV-wise, I absolutely loved The Studio, Severance, Fallout, Shetland, Scavengers Reign, Mr & Mrs Smith, and The Last of Us, as well as rewatching The Storyteller with the kids on a Sunday evening after dinner, just like I did when I was their age. Sam is also continuing on her mission to make me watch old episodes of Jonathan Creek and I might now be a convert.
Okay, time to wrap this up, despite lots still being missing. I don’t usually use these posts for listing goals, but hey, let’s go with it. Here are some in no particular order:
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