The slides and transcript from a great talk by Maggie Appleton, including this perfect description of the vibes we get from large language models:
It feels like they’re either geniuses playing dumb or dumb machines playing genius, but we don’t know which.
Chat is rarely a suitable interface for most tasks. Here, Maggie Appleton explores and prototypes some alternatives.
A short list of opinions on typography. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it’s all fairly sensible advice.
Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.
At Clarity last week, I had the great pleasure of introducing and interviewing Linda Dong who spoke about Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. I loved the way she looked at the history of the HIG from 1977 onwards. This collection of videos is just what I need to keep spelunking into the interfaces of the past:
A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.
A good ol’ rant by Vasilis on our design tools for the web.
A terrific piece by Maggie Appleton that starts with a comparison of graphical user interfaces and command line tools—which reminds me of the trade-offs between seamless and seamful design—and then moves into a proposed paradigm for declarative design tools:
Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes
A whole lotta nice fonts—most of them variable fonts—from Indian Type Foundry.
A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.
Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.
Now apply that to software:
Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.
Seb picks his top ten typefaces inspired by calligraphy.
A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.
HTML sits on a boundary between the machine, the creator, and the reader.
The typography of horology.
You don’t have to use web fonts—there are some pretty nice options if you stick to system fonts (like Georgia, Charter, and Palatino).
A trashcan, a tyepface, and a tactile keyboard. Marcin gets obsessive (as usual).
I’d watch this game show:
Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.
Ever wanted to set some text in 70% Times New Roman and 30% Arial? Me neither. But now, thanks to variable fonts, you can!
A treasure trove of case studies and interviews.