Welcome to the blog!

It's basically a reverse chronological record of my bookmarks with the occasional release announcement. Not sure where to start? Here are some of my most active tags:

Better Offline

Better Offline is a weekly show exploring the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society - and interrogating the growth-at-all-costs future that tech’s elite wants to build....

As a big fan of Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At newsletter, I started listening to this podcast when it premiered last year but, maybe it’s appropriate that I’m posting about it at a time when the tech industry deserves to have even more anger hurled its way. 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. It’s also a good time to jump in because both the end of year and CES episodes are great listens.

Trying something new with a newsletter

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!

Demo poster for Abhartach, a funky display font

This year has been busy and I've been a little distracted. But, with everything out in the world looking pretty bleak right now, it's nice to spend some time focusing on things that are... nice.

Abhartach is a funky font by Fontdation (seemingly also known as Twicolabs). It has a late sixties feel while also being modern. I also really love the sample images here. Free for demo use only.

Download a FontSpace or by at Creative Market.

Best 2024 Campaign Website Design

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.

Demo poster for Gremlin, a boxy outline font

I've recommended a couple TypeFactory fonts already but Gremlin is also a good one. It's a boxy outline font and free for personal use. My only complaint is that it was a little hard to look up by name because SEO really prefers the title font from the movie Gremlins.

Download at FontSpace or buy at Creative Fabrica.

My sister went to the Culinary Institute of America and I've watched every episode of Top Chef and yet somehow I'm just hearing about the big type wall they have there? And it looks amazing and has a name like Gastrotypographicalassemblage?! Very disappointed with the people and television shows in my life.

Hexadecimal color code for transparency

Hexadecimal color code for transparency. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets....

I've been back to this Gist so often lately. 8 digit hex codes are a great alternative to RGBA if you're using a styling library like Emotion or a React component library like Material UI and you want to store your colors as 6 digit hex codes. They allow you to change opacity by adding two characters to the end with string interpolation. For example, a white background at 50% opacity would be written background: #ffffff80 or, in JavaScript with a variable, something like background: `${theme.background}80`. The only catch is remembering the alpha codes and that's where this link comes in handy.

I believe the Gist was originally created back when support was mostly limited to Android (which is why the examples add the alpha codes to the beginning) but, according to Can I use... support is pretty widespread today.

And as a bonus, people in the comments have provided the list in different formats like objects and arrays.

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They're joined by special guests and talk about everything...

I've really been enjoying listening to people who know way more than I do separating what's real from what's just hype when it comes to AI. Instead of being dry, a lot of the topics they cover are pretty comical in their ridiculousness.

My only complaint: I think hosts Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna have NPR-style soothing voices and sometimes find myself lulled into missing a point and forced to rewind.

I was looking at ocean themed fonts recently and Ocean Wave by 177 Studio really caught my eye. The wave illustrations inside each letter are fantastic and so detailed. Free for personal use only.

Other honorable mentions in my search were Spirited Away by DaptsFonts and Squid Junkie by Måns Grebäck.

Download at FontSpace or buy on Creative Market.

Horseshoes & Lemonade Version 3!

I made some changes to my most popular font! I'm not as fastidious when it comes to versioning fonts but 3.0 seems about right since this is the third major change to the family.

This update includes:

Adding a new Horseshoes Outline variation
Improving kerning on Horseshoes
Making minor tweaks to characters that felt a little awkward in Horseshoes and Horseshoes & Lemonade
Bundling up some bonus assets (retro seamless backgrounds and illustrations) in PSD, PNG, and SVG formats

Give it a try here and if you run into any issues, please let me know! And if you previously purchased a commercial license and would like a copy of the new commercial files, send me an email at lauren@laurenashpole.com.