mastodon 4.6.9Design + type + text. Solidarity forever. Views are my own.
Header set in Proxy Condensed (https://vault.commercialtype.com). Avatar: Tesla Dynamo by Nikola Djurek.
I live in a largely immigrant neighborhood. Lately I’ve been doing some community work that involves signal groups and whistles and meeting in church basements—and also getting vetted. During a recent one-on-one an organizer asked me what had radicalized me and unthinkingly I blurted, “Monotype buying FontShop.”
So-called AI is an environmental issue, a labor issue, and an ideological issue. That’s it. I will die on this hill. We should push back as much as we can.
This morning I got a notification from Mastodon via email, subject line: “Updates to our terms of service.” My body automatically tensed up, because usually this portends enshittification, but then I relaxed: https://typo.social/terms-of-service/2026-04-01
Thank you, typo.social team 👏
“So I could wait for the perfect cartographic client to come along, or I could just start drawing.”
Write in a way that feels true to you. There is no “right” way. There is no magic bullet beyond care, and honesty, and trying.
“There is a particular relief that comes with finding your niche. Not the market segment kind. The kind where the granularity of your thinking stops registering as excessive and becomes, simply, the floor.”
I *love* this dek.
A cogent and exquisitely written recap of the Fontstand conference by Mikina Dimunova: https://fontstand.com/news/design-news/the-granularity-of-origin-fontstand-in-berlin
I occasionally (often?) talk about stuff that is not exclusively type-related. But for me type is so integral to absolutely every aspect of life that it never occurred to me not to be interested in and curious about everything.
I’m wary of how things get normalized; I’m wary of how things harden into norms.
“There’s no faster path to burnout than the stubborn refusal to admit defeat: you learn to recognise quality much sooner than you can achieve it.”
https://mass-driver.com/article/md-ui-a-typeface-for-interfacing
So much talk these days of the American “empire” unraveling and American hegemony unraveling and I’m just walking around muttering, “Good, good!”
Pump up the x-height: @greg@typo.social’s Focal Maxi came out earlier this summer and is already in use in the real world https://commercialtype.com/catalog/focal/focal_maxi
Sorry to be so cringe.
“Covering a variety of scripts and linguistic contexts, this volume explores the plurality of historical and contemporary engagements with, and interpretations of, the printed and written word in various artefacts, printing technologies, and writing systems.”
https://www.cphc.org.uk/script-print-and-letterforms-in-global-context
I’m not sure why – maybe it’s the general tenor of the times, maybe it’s my inner landscape, maybe it’s both – but for some reason I’m remembering this wonderful essay by Helen Rosner. Edited by Jess Zimmerman.
https://medium.com/the-archipelago/not-everyone-feels-this-way-7e21574a2dfd
Aw, this is just sad. Sometimes it feels like the world is turning into a giant casino.
Being a synesthete means that certain things remind me of certain other things, and the connections aren’t necessarily obvious. Terza Reader’s italic makes me think of soapstone. I love the hard softness of it.
Oh, look—Ionic Modern by @greg@typo.social and Paul Barnes, released today by @commercial@typo.social https://commercialtype.com/catalog/ionic_modern
And Paul wrote an essay about it, with lots of great images: https://commercialtype.com/catalog/ionic_modern
Blistering words from Lawrence Wilkerson on Democracy Now this morning; worth a listen.
