My website has a new look, the first major redesign since 2013. Kelsey Scherer, Scott Kellum (@scott) and Roel Nieskens (@pixelambacht) brought back some of the spirit of my original site, including the black, pale yellow, and white color scheme and the spinning starburst on the logo. It already feels like home to me.

Visit marksimonson.com today. And while you’re there, you can read about the new design in my Notebook: https://marksimonson.com/notebook/view/new-site-design

#typedesign #fonts #websitedesign

I wholeheartedly believe that every man should watch this video, because i bet none can grasp quite how terribly women get treated, even at work, without being challenged

@thisisjofrank:
“I gave a talk at EMF titled "Men in Tech #YesAllMen", in which I told my experience of being a woman in tech. I was afraid to publish it in case it affected my current or future employment.

With all the current news I would like to add my 2¢. So here is the recording:”

https://youtu.be/WXL6K1lhvt0

Typical now works with Wakamai Fondue!

You can open a font from Typical directly in Wakamai Fondue for a closer look at its features and other technical details.

Typical is a Chromium-based extension that helps you identify and profile fonts used on websites, including their metadata, while Wakamai Fondue lets you dig deeper into what those fonts can do, from their OpenType features and variable axes to character coverage.

With the integration, you can go from identifying a font on a website to inspecting its features in Wakamai Fondue in just a click.

https://typicalhq.vercel.app

Wakamai Fondue by @pixelambacht

I hate to add more cynicism to the world, but:

I'm on a cheesy vaporwave roll. But I prefer pre-2022 so I have a good chance that it's not made with AI. So I found this:

https://whitespaceaudio.bandcamp.com/album/c-mydocu-1

It says "Originally released March 7, 2013" but I can find any trace of it.

Bad google-fu on my side? Simply super obscure musician? Or a cheap "no, this really isn't AI, trust me" signal?

Help Nadieh Bremer win and vote for her work in the category "Best Data Visualization" (and against CNN 😁). She's placed second right now and it would be fantastic to see her go first! https://vote.lovieawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/websites-mobile-sites/features-design/best-data-visualization

"The best you're ever gonna do with a clone is worse than the original."

And more type news. It just keeps coming!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hpnx9v2JrM

@SanderFocus Fun fact I just noticed: the (part of the) scrolltext screenshotted in the part with your portrait is mine! :-)

Hey, up for a tiny bit of *good* computer news?

My old C64 buddy @SanderFocus is a brilliant designer *and* pixel artist, and just turned 50!

A few of his scene friends made a beautiful little *handmade* demo which has 101 birthday wishes in there. The first scrolltext is by... his mom! 💖

Download the demo here: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=265013

I had a old Macbook sitting on, but idle, for a few days. I just turned it off, and found the ethernet-to-USB-C dongle was really warm.

Not worryingly hot, but definitely "electronic device doing things"-hot.

Is that normal for such a simple device?

The external harddisk and the Macbook itself were cold to the touch.

Looks like the C64 keyboard font thing I shared the other day is, I don't know what to call it, "prompt driven drivel"?

By the looks of the commits and the approach, is seems to be "here's photos, make a font" instead of carefully analyzing all the C64 keyboard variations, and meticulously drawing the letters.

Every time I see the possibility of LLM in coding in a slightly positive way, something like this grounds me again. I somewhat resigned to fancy autocomplete in code, but offloading the part where your heart and soul should go, is kinda depressing.

One of my main fears when adding features to Wakamai Fondue is that I stray away from its core mission of "making fonts less of a black box".

I want folks to drop a font, show what it can do, and get out of the way.

But every new toggle, checkbox, button, "show more" or other way for people to tweak the way the fondue reports seems like a potential "pfff, this looks too complex, never mind".

So this Unsung posts really resonates: https://unsung.aresluna.org/they-take-one-look-at-the-ui-and-abandon-it/

(Also, would you look at the update frequency *and* quality output of that blog?!)

What I really appreciate from @jectives is his critical eye and calling out foundries who clearly use AI, especially when it seems haphazard and not even helping anyone, or have small print that totally un-sweetens an otherwise good looking deal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGhrWv8vQCw

Also, font news!

Going through my photo archive I found some images taken with/for "A World Of Photo".

I totally forgot this app.

You'd get pings at random times an exchanged photos with someone else on the planet.

Sweet memories when we were all still in the "wow, there's a computer in my pocket, and it has a camera"-phase!

"The people holding up the internet"

A good-looking but somewhat depressing exposé about the people holding up current digital infrastructure as a hobby.

https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet

I just want to be 107% clear: I don't quote-boost this as an attack or snear at @stevewetherill. It's also not an anti/pro AI post. I mean this as a "what a time to be alive" post, with whatever mixed emotions that you can attach to that.

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@stevewetherill/117403995523456372

I have *so* mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I have had SO MANY HOURS of frustration the get cycles correct, debugging timing and raster bugs, staring at (in my case, 6502) machine language trying to grok why my code was off. If you told my 15-year-old me that in the future you can just *wish* for your code to work, and the robot genie will Make It So, taking intro account the peculiarities of the CPU, the machine language, all the hardware specifics of your computer, I would've let out the most heartfelt HALLELUJA you'd ever heard.

But on the other hand, the last bastion of human cleverness in coding is now also taken over by LLM-assisted coding.

I want my demoscene productions to evoke "how did they DO THAT?!", not "did they let AI do that?"

Does anyone have information on why some fonts have a creation date of 1/1/1904 in their metadata?

Over the years I've seen various "what is that font on the Commodore 64 keyboard" threads and recreations, and I just stumbled upon a new one.

https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/ (via @hackaday)

#retrogaming #retrocomputing #typography #fonts

Our site does not update a lot. But when it does you will be able to see it in your RSS. Currently tracking: books in the syllabus, research projects, and annual reports and galleries for the years. Subscribe to:
typemedia.org/feed.xml
(Thanks to @blag for suggesting and @pixelambacht for helping!)
#rss