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.

Tuesday, May 5th, 2020

Times New Arial

Ever wanted to set some text in 70% Times New Roman and 30% Arial? Me neither. But now, thanks to variable fonts, you can!

Monday, May 4th, 2020

FEMME TYPE – Celebrating Women in the Type Industry

A treasure trove of case studies and interviews.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2020

FontGoggles — Interactive Previewing and Comparing

A really nice open-source font-previewing tool for the Mac.

Sunday, June 9th, 2019

VOCAL

Each typeface highlights a piece of history from a specific underrepresented race, ethnicity, or gender—from the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Argentina to the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Wednesday, January 30th, 2019

Programming Fonts - Test Drive

Monospaced fonts you can use in your text editor. Most of them are …not good. But then there are gems like Mark Simonson’s Anonymous Pro, David Jonathan Ross’s Input, and Erik Spiekerman’s Fira Mono. And there’s always good ol’ Droid Sans.

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019

What would a world without pushbuttons look like? | Aeon Essays

A history of buttons …and the moral panic and outrage that accompanies them.

By looking at the subtexts behind complaints about buttons, whether historically or in the present moment, it becomes clear that manufacturers, designers and users alike must pay attention to why buttons persistently engender critiques. Such negativity tends to involve one of three primary themes: fears over deskilling; frustration about lack of user agency/control; or anger due to perceptions of unequal power relations.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2018

Optimise without a face

I’ve been playing around with the newly-released Squoosh, the spiritual successor to Jake’s SVGOMG. You can drag images into the browser window, and eyeball the changes that any optimisations might make.

On a project that Cassie is working on, it worked really well for optimising some JPEGs. But there were a few images that would require a bit more fine-grained control of the optimisations. Specifically, pictures with human faces in them.

I’ve written about this before. If there’s a human face in image, I open that image in a graphics editing tool like Photoshop, select everything but the face, and add a bit of blur. Because humans are hard-wired to focus on faces, we’ll notice any jaggy artifacts on a face, but we’re far less likely to notice jagginess in background imagery: walls, materials, clothing, etc.

On the face of it (hah!), a browser-based tool like Squoosh wouldn’t be able to optimise for faces, but then Cassie pointed out something really interesting…

When we were both at FFConf on Friday, there was a great talk by Eleanor Haproff on machine learning with JavaScript. It turns out there are plenty of smart toolkits out there, and one of them is facial recognition. So I wonder if it’s possible to build an in-browser tool with this workflow:

Drag or upload an image into the browser window,
A facial recognition algorithm finds any faces in the image,
Those portions of the image remain crisp,
The rest of the image gets a slight blur,
Download the optimised image.

Maybe the selecting/blurring part would need canvas? I don’t know.

Anyway, I thought this was a brilliant bit of synthesis from Cassie, and now I’ve got two questions:

Does this exist yet? And, if not,
Does anyone want to try building it?

Saturday, September 1st, 2018

Conversational Semantics · An A List Apart Article

I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.

HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.

Tuesday, July 17th, 2018

Font Playground — Play with variable fonts!

A fun way to play around with the options in variable fonts.

Tuesday, July 10th, 2018

Pattern Library First: An Approach For Managing CSS — Smashing Magazine

Rachel goes into detail on how she uses pattern libraries—built with Fractal to build interfaces. I know it sounds like we paid her to say all the nice things about Fractal, but honestly, we didn’t even know she was writing this article!

After discovering Fractal two years ago, we have moved every new project — large and small — into Fractal.

Friday, July 6th, 2018

Fonty: the new way for testing web fonts

This is very neat! Test out how Google Fonts will look on your website: type in your URL and away you go. Works well on mobile too.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

Untold AI: The Untold | Sci-fi interfaces

Prompted by his time at Clearleft’s AI gathering in Juvet, Chris has been delving deep into the stories we tell about artificial intelligence …and what stories are missing.

And here we are at the eponymous answer to the question that I first asked at Juvet around 7 months ago: What stories aren’t we telling ourselves about AI?

Monday, June 11th, 2018

Fontjoy - Generate font pairings in one click

This looks like fun: it’s like a clever slot machine for pairing typefaces.

I thought the “machine learning” angle sounded like marketing bullshit, but it’s genuinely fascinating.

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