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Fonts & Design

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I mentioned last time that I was looking forward to the Zoom lecture Design Pioneers: African American Graphic Designers You Should Know (recording at link) and it was great. I’m a hobbyist when it comes to graphic design so my historical knowledge is pretty basic and all the information was new to me. Since I’m a sucker for all things vintage, my favorites were Georg Olden, Thomas Miller, and Emmet McBain and I’m hoping to do deeper dives in the future.

Tried out one new tool, WhoCanUse, a site that shows how different colors may be perceived by users with visual impairments.

In font related news, I finally released something new! Tuper Super is a playful font made up of hand-drawn shapes with diagonal shading in the overlaps. Try it free for personal use or commercially for $15.

Recommended Independent by Lemon Studio Type. This geometric font has a sci-fi movie title card feel and can be downloaded for personal use at dafont or purchased for commercial use at Creative Market.

And read a really fascinating essay. The hardest working font in Manhattan by Marcin Wichary came out on Valentine’s Day which feels appropriate since it’s basically a love letter to a typeface. A long read full of gorgeous photographs and diagrams, it traces the history of Gorton across centuries and once you read it, you’ll see Gorton everywhere. As a side note, I want a Leroy lettering set so bad.

Books

Picked up Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac and couldn’t put it down. This book is essential reading if you want to understand how DOGE (not a real department) is currently destroying the US government. It’s not just the same incompetence, malice, and egomania, they’re using the exact same tactics as well. At some points the cringe is hard to handle; there are meeting scenes that feel more uncomfortable than the UK Office. All in all, it’s a real page turner even if you don’t usually gravitate towards business books.

No Elon Musk low in Character Limit surprised me too much because I’d already read its spiritual predecessor Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer. If you’ve ever suspected that Tesla is a monorail and Elon Musk is con artist Lyle Lanley from the Simpsons pumping a meme stock, this well-researched book will confirm your wildest misgivings. If I ran a bookstore, these two would be on an end cap together.

Podcasts

Tangentially podcast related, as a fan of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, I signed up for the virtual event The Great Chatbot Debate with co-host Emily Bender on March 25th. Should be interesting.

Otherwise, I’ll be honest, the only new podcasts I added to the mix last month were recapping the reality TV show The Traitors. But if you’re a fan, Rob Has a Podcast and First to Breakfast are both good.

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And you can try it for free for personal use. Tuper Super is a playful, hand-drawn font made up of geometric shapes with diagonal shading in the overlap.

The name comes from a Taskmaster line and I'm sticking with it even though even I can't keep the order of the words straight.

Download it here and if you notice any issues or have trouble installing, please contact me.

Coding, Fonts, and Design

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I had to set up a cookie consent management platform this month and it was a big “Google really is getting worse” moment for me. Maybe I’m romanticizing the results of a few years ago, but I swear the first two pages of a search like this used to be full of articles comparing the costs and features of major providers. Today, I found one neutral source (Top 12 Consent Management Platforms (CMP)) but it’s mostly ads and fake posts by the companies surprisingly ranking themselves number one.

The information shortage probably isn’t helped by the fact that a lot of platforms are tightlipped about pricing and really want you to do sales call. I eventually went with CookieYes because I appreciated their transparency and so far so good. It was easy to set up with Google Tag Manager. Integrating with Segment required a little more work but this repo saved me. 

My sister asked me to help her find a font she saw in an Instagram ad that could best be described as thick or blobby cursive. Although I couldn't find an exact match, I recommended a few from the search: Klangfarbe by Mysterylab Designs, Blank’s Script by Billy Argel (also available free for personal use), and Guava by Meg Burk.

Tried a couple new tools that I’m pretty happy with:

• After using Material UI for years at work, I decided to give Mantine a try on a personal project and my only real complaint was their color generator. Luckily, Shadowlord exists for generating different tints and shades.
• I don’t know how it took me so long to find an extension to take full page screenshots instead of doing it manually. Now I’m using the Chrome extension GoFullPage and it’s made my life so much easier.

Looking forward to these free online events in February:

• Letterform Archive is hosting a Zoom lecture called Design Pioneers: African American Graphic Designers You Should Know on February 11th.
• From February 25th to 27th, Deque’s axe-con 2025 will be online covering topics around digital accessibility in development and design.

Books

Finished Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher at the end of December. It’s a little jarring to run across the line “I don’t know what the United States will look like by the time you read this book, and in fact I’m anxious it will look even bleaker than I can yet imagine” in a book about inequity and homogeneity in tech published in 2017. Things definitely are bleaker today, with companies like Facebook taking a vocal stand against diversity, but I think that makes this book a more interesting what could have been. Also the chapter on the illusion of the meritocracy hits really hard.

Reading Technically Wrong, I was reminded of a book I’d previously read, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil, so it wasn’t surprising to see it referenced midway through. Weapons of Math Destruction examines how algorithms can exacerbate inequality by reinforcing the biases of their creators. With AI (or what we call AI right now), the risks of delegating decisions around school, work, health insurance, etc. to unaccountable black boxes seem even more obvious.

Podcasts

Speaking of tech’s rightward lurch, as a big fan of Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At newsletter, I started listening to Better Offline when it premiered last year but, it feels appropriate that I’m posting about it at a time when the industry deserves even more anger. At this moment, it’s especially cathartic to hear that you’re not imagining what he calls the “rot economy”, products getting worse (thanks Prabhakar Raghavan), bubbles preparing to pop (thanks OpenAI), and a general malaise engulfing the industry. 

System Crash is a new podcast by Paris Marx from Tech Won’t Save Us and Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine (which I just got from the library). The format may evolve over time, but for now it’s a good weekly wrap-up discussing events in tech from a skeptical perspective. 

And for something completely different, 99% Invisible’s episode on the history of the typeface Fraktur is an interesting listen. I usually post positive font content so this is a bit of a departure. 

Videos

He deserves worse as an out and proud fascist trying to destroy America but I still enjoy YouTubers realizing that Elon Musk is a fraud and a poser who lies about everything including his video game prowess. A lot of good content out there but my entry point was Elon Musk Fraud Gamer Situation is Pathetic by penguinz0.

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My sister asked me to help her find a font she saw in an Instagram ad that could best be described as thick or blobby cursive. Although I couldn't find an exact match (Klangfarbe below is probably closest), I did run across some good ones. I tried to include one free for personal use but the other two are commercial only.

The New Start (or Blank's Script Font because it's available as a duo) by Billy Argel.

Download at FontSpace or buy at Billy Argel Fonts.

Klangfarbe by Mysterylab Designs.

Buy at Creative Market.

Guava by Meg Burk.

Buy at Creative Market.

It’s almost 2025. Google Search is steadily getting worse. AI is flooding the web with dubious content and making it harder to know what’s even accurate. Social media is (mostly) for getting angry and discouraging links that might stop your scrolling. But, on a positive note, newsletters are all the rage.

So I’m jumping on that bandwagon! As everything gets harder to find (and since I don’t see webrings or blogrolls making a comeback), I want to highlight some of the tutorials, tools, podcast, books, and other content I find useful every month. Topics will be the same as here: programming, fonts, design, and tech in general.

Despite some overlap, this won’t replace posting here. I think longer posts like coding tutorials probably make less sense in a newsletter format. And I’ll keep doing font recs but hopefully with a little more motivation. Maybe if it’s not too hard, I’ll crosspost the whole thing here.

It also won’t replace my font release mailing list which goes out maybe twice a year (on a good year). If you’re interested, make sure to sign up for both.

I’m going to start collecting links for the end of January so sign up below and watch your inbox then!

One thing I like to do when national politics have me spiraling into a panic (or, shockingly, when they have me feeling optimistic) is volunteer with Tech for Campaigns. If you have experience in engineering/product/design/etc. and want to help build websites or run email marketing for smaller campaigns, it's a great way to connect with talented, like-minded people and feel like you're actually helping.

As part of that, I've seen a lot of campaign websites this cycle. Sometimes the candidates recommend designs they like. Sometimes I'm out looking for inspiration. Since the content on these sites is generally very similar, it's interesting to see the different design approaches.

So, in no particular order, here's my partisan, totally subjective, and very non-exhaustive list of the best political website designs from 2024.

Elissa Slotkin for Michigan

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This one is my favorite. Love the color palette, the background textures, and (most of all) the triangular decorative elements.

Lisa Blunt Rochester for U.S. Senate

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Nice use of background photos. The transitions in the issues and latest updates sections are worth visiting the site to check out.

Bryon Best For Congress

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A different approach to background photos that creates a very cool overflow effect.

Haley Stevens for Congress

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The colors here pop and they've managed to create a really eye-catching layout just using overlapping rectangles.

Madeleine Dean for Congress

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A little more muted but everything about this site is so clean. The opaque design flourishes are subtle but keep things from feeling boring.

Josh Harder for Congress

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Mostly included for the timeline on the Josh's Story page but the homepage layout is good too.

Tanya for Congress TX 27

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A lot to like here! The Texas flag as a book logo for a teacher, the ribbon/bookmark motif, and the angled backgrounds complementing both. It all flows together really nicely.

Sydney Kamlager – For Congress District 37

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Another example of an angled background pairing well with a logo.