Deafening Silence: ATypI’s 2026 conference in Sharjah is overshadowed by the controversial platforming of ParaType’s Alexandra Korolkova.

https://monokrom.no/essays/deafening-silence

I’ve been impatiently waiting for @kentlew to launch his new foundry/website so I could immediately get a license for his Haffner type family. It’s my favorite text typeface of the 21st century so far and I’ve been pestering him to release it for the past decade or so.

I’m also looking forward to seeing more of the Parling type family (which is working great on the new website, designed by @jasonsantamaria) and reading more of Kent’s thoughts in his new Journal (available via RSS).

Congrats Kent!

https://typo.social/@kentlew/117513059953896190

Well, friends, now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve launched my own foundry and website.

https://kltype.com

Also: announcing the release of Haffner Text, a contemporary oldstyle with heft and substance, originally designed for TIME magazine and now available for retail license.

And introducing Parling — a sort of Benton-meets-Verdana homage to quintessentially American sans-serifs, an industrious gothic with an affable personality.

Boosts appreciated, especially those with reach beyond my tiny orbit!

#ad #announcement

Apropos of everything, I’m finally being more proactive about making regular local backups of my data from websites/services I trust but would still be devastated to unexpectedly have lost forever, e.g. Flickr, Mastodon, Letterboxd, LibraryThing, Discogs, last.fm, my web hosting companies, etc.

What a stupid timeline we live in where this seems like an urgent necessity.

Casting Italian Nebitype mats on an American Ludlow type caster!

This past summer I was researching and experimenting a lot to make Nebitype Mats compatible with the Ludlow caster. Historically, there were some printers doing that, but it was impossible to source an old conversion stick. The only one I found was in Australia, with a printer that could only communicate via Facebook and no email. He somehow posted some photos on my request, but then decided to go ahead and construct my own stick. With the help and skills from my local mechanic, we finally figured it out (after several attempts) and it now works wonderfully.

Watch the full Video from my latest poster on my website www.babyinktwice.ch or insta.

Greetings from Switzerland!

Today I learned about “suffragette coins”, where suffragist activists used letter punches to stamp “VOTES FOR WOMEN” into the faces of kings on British money.

https://www.britnumsoc.org/images/PDFs/2016_BNJ_86_10_Stamped.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_penny

It’s a bummer that the whole concept of “social media” now has such a bad reputation. I see people talking about how horrible social media is, but really the problem is corporate, manipulative, ad-centric, hyper-capitalist, surveillance-tech, engagement-at-any-cost forms of social media.

Social media can still be wonderful when its underlying structures aren’t horrible. But thanks to all the major corporate platforms, many people just lump all social media together under one horrible umbrella.

The latest article in the Dunbar Design Repository is a conversation between researchers @ferdinandulrich @typeoff and myself. I reached out to both of them after hearing Ferdinand’s talk at the @fontstand Conference in Berlin, and specifically a question Dan asked regarding archiving current digital type design work. I was investigating similar issues so I wanted to ask them what a type design like myself should keep in mind for future researchers.

Full article here: https://cjtype.com/dunbar-design-repository/articles/archiving-the-future/

Learn to leverage your python skills to draw and modify fonts (UFO) with Python and the “pen protocol”. 4 Tuesdays online with @arthurfontzarelli. Starts October 27. https://coopertype.org/events/curveto-drawing-fonts-with-python-and-the-pen-protocol-2

Is there a modern image compression tool for macOS that offers anything even close to the control from Photoshop’s “Save for Web (Legacy)”?

Specifically, something with options to:
– Limit the color depth to a specific number of (customizable) colors
– Choose different dithering methods
– Choose different color reduction methods
– Choose different compression methods
– And, perhaps most critically: preview the results visually, with estimated file sizes

I know of tools with visual previews but nothing close to the options. Similarly, there are tools that offer plenty of options (and even better compression), but no preview and/or graphic UI.

Surely I can’t be the only person who wants something like “Save for Web (Legacy)” but with newer formats like APNG or WEBP.

Charging for links. Instagram can go fuck itself. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/10/12/instagram-charging-for-links/

well look who’s paying to rub elbows with nazis

disappointing but not surprising

A very enjoyable essay on a little-known design project by Ladislas Mandel:
https://www.skritur.eu/article/mister-mandel

Launching the Discord app feels like walking into a casino.

New font on @futurefonts today, Simulacra: https://www.futurefonts.com/benjamin-tuttle/simulacra

RE: https://typo.social/@monokrom/117370375020234071

Quel honneur !

Here is an interview that Frode Helland, a talented type designer from Oslo, did with me some time ago. It has just been published online.

I have to admit that my work has rarely been understood so well, especially by someone who didn’t know me personally. I am both surprised and very flattered by this. It is a real boost, at a time when doubt is quite present.

A big thank you to Frode for his curiosity, his insight, and for giving my work such a special place on the brand-new website of his type foundry, Monokrom, which I warmly invite you to discover.

🖤

https://monokrom.no

One of the things I love about membership to the Museum of Printing in Massachusetts (https://museumofprinting.org) is the printed quarterly newsletter they send in the mail. In many ways it’s just a low-frills, local-feeling newsletter, with wholesome photos of volunteers and even a section where they print emails they get.🥹 But then there will also be articles by type historians like @onpaperwings, profiles on interesting technology/people from the early digital design era, articles on the history of kerning, etc, etc. There’s a lot of interesting content on typographic history that can’t be found anywhere else.

It’s not especially academic (or well-designed) for a publication from a printing history museum, but that’s part of what makes it fun and enjoyable.

Halloween season in the USA starts the day after Labor Day. Those are just the rules, sorry not sorry.

Adding 4 Lighter weights to all 3 slanted styles of Racquet tomorrow on Future Fonts in the form of version 0.2. If, I don't know, you want to purchase a license at a discounted price, now would be the time to do it. Or whatever.