Link tags: letters

Friendly Indie micro-publishers

From Patrick Tanguay:

A list of small micro-publishers — most of them run by one person — putting out great content through their websites, newsletters, and podcasts.

On User Tracking and Industry Standards on Privacy | CSS-Tricks

Prompted by my post on tracking, Chris does some soul searching about his own use of tracking.

I’m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising.

He brings up the point that advertisers expect to know how many people opened a particular email and how many people clicked on a particular link. I’m sure that’s right, but it’s also beside the point: what matters is how the receiver of the email feels about having that information tracked. If they haven’t given you permission to do it, you can’t just assume they’re okay with it.

Letters to the future

On one hand, it shows optimism, hope and compassion for the future of the planet. On the other hand, it shows the ever lasting detriment of our actions when it comes to single-use plastic.

Letters to a Young Technologist

A handsome web book that’s a collection of thoughtful articles on technology, culture, and society by Jasmine Wang, Saffron Huang, and other young technologists:

Letters to a Young Technologist is a collection of essays addressed to young technologists, written by a group of young technologists.

Our Favourite Uses of Typography in Watches

The typography of horology.

Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters: Advances in Derp Learning

A genuinely interesting (and droll) deep dive into derp learning …for typography!

Robin Rendle › Newsletters

A rant from Robin. I share his frustration and agree with his observations.

I wonder how we can get the best of both worlds here: the ease of publishing newsletters, with all the beauty and archivability of websites.

Google font to SVG path

Cassie pointed me to this very nifty tool (that she plans to use in your SVG animation workshop): choose font from Google Fonts, type some text, and get the glyphs immediately translated into an SVG!

Notifier — Convert content sources to RSS feeds

A service that—amongst other things—allows you to read newsletters in your RSS reader.

CSS { In Real Life } | How to Accessibly Split Text

This is why we need an nth-letter selector in CSS .

Language and the Invention of Writing | Talking Points Memo

Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.

Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters — by Craig Mod

After musing on newsletters, Craig shares how he’s feeling about Instagram and its ilk:

Instagram will only get more complex, less knowable, more algorithmic, more engagement-hungry in 2019.

I’ve found this cycle has fomented another emotion beyond distrust, one I’ve felt most acutely in 2018: Disdain? (Feels too loaded.) Disappointment? (Too moralistic.) Wariness? (Yes!) Yes — wariness over the way social networks and the publishing platforms they provide shift and shimmy beneath our feet, how the algorithms now show posts of X quality first, or then Y quality first, or how, for example, Instagram seems to randomly show you the first image of a multi-image sequence or, no wait, the second.8

I try to be deliberate, and social networks seem more and more to say: You don’t know what you want, but we do. Which, to someone who, you know, gives a shit, is pretty dang insulting.

Wariness is insidious because it breeds weariness. A person can get tired just opening an app these days. Unpredictable is the last thing a publishing platform should be but is exactly what these social networks become. Which can make them great marketing tools, but perhaps less-than-ideal for publishing.

Text Effects - a Collection by Mandy Michael on CodePen

Mandy’s experiments with text effects in CSS are kinda mindblowing—I can’t wait to see her at Ampersand at the end of the month!

Segmented type appreciation corner

Marcin built this lovely little in-browser tool to demonstrate how segmented type displays work at different sizes.

90 Minutes | Type Supply

Tal Leming’s thoroughly delightful (and obsessive) account of designing the 90 Minutes typeface for U.S. Soccer.

FIFA has strict regulations that govern the size and stroke weight of numbers and letters used on official match uniforms. This made me unbelievably paranoid. I had a nightmare that one of the national teams would be set for kickoff of an important match and the referee would suddenly blow the whistle and say, “Hey, hey, hey! The bottom stroke of that 2 is 1 mm too light. The United States must forfeit this match!”

Berlin Typography – Text and the City // Buchstaben und die Stadt

A blog dedicated to documenting the letterforms on display in Berlin.

Google Noto Fonts

Google’s Noto (short for no-tofu; tofu being the rectangle of unicode sadness) is certainly ambitious. It has glyphs from pretty much every known alphabet …including Ogham and Linear B!

Typography for User Interfaces | Viljami Salminen

The history and physiology of text on screen. You can also see the slides from the talk that prompted this article.

Library of Babel

This is simply wondrous! A microcosm of Borges’s story made real on the world wide web.

We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested — in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library’s books, only awaiting its discovery.

Ari Weinkle — Feelers

By far the creepiest type experiment I have ever seen.