The June digest is here!
Featuring news and updates from
@rosetta, @simoncozens, @plain_form, @letterformarchive, @glyphsinfo, @FontClubBelgica, @anya, and many others
Plus a great selection of new and updated fonts curated by @MatthijsSluiter
Specifically coding for type tools: AI has consumed the code and documentation that this type community developed and shared, supported and explained for free. For decades. I recognise the patterns that we designed in AI output. Now you must pay tokens to get to the same thing, and then you pay for a course to raise your professional profile? That is not how skills work, that is how scams work.
Another small thing I realized is being taken away by AI. Insignificant in the big picture, but still another AI killjoy.
When my kids and I see handwritten text, we try to see if it was a font or true lettering. I'd point out if letters were exactly the same, or if perhaps alternates might be at play. If not, it was probably lettering. A fun little game to play with so many letters around us in the real world.
But AI today seems to make its own "lettering" when generating text in an image. And this adds enough irregularities in the letters to make it seem like handmade lettering. The initial joy of "hey cool, they took the effort to craft something" is now being extended by "...or is this AI generated". I don't like it.
Campagne voeren tegen 'douchebags' die 2 minuutjes 'te lang' douchen?
Voer liever campagne tegen datacenters en andere 'sociopatische superslurpers' die onnodig honderden miljoenen liters drinkwater verspillen! #AGVindebat
Dit en meer zei ik net bij APB: https://amsterdam.piratenpartij.nl/algemene-politieke-beschouwingen-waterschap-amstel-gooi-en-vecht-2-juli-2026/
I just hired @dlanham to do artwork for the FilePond landing page and I haven't been this excited in a long time :D
Ooh! It looks like Safari/Webkit might finally join the club of browsers that let your fine-tune font metrics!
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/68431
This'll give you control over:
- ascent-override
- descent-override
- line-gap-override
I hope this PR lands. The issue for it has been open for almost six years: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219735
FENwright, a FEN-to-Chessboard font, is a very clever font that turns a Forsyth-Edwards Notation of chessboard pieces into a real chessboard! (Well, a digital one on your screen)
I like that the font is just an 8 kilobyte WOFF2!
Try it out here: https://philatype.github.io/fenwright/
Or read about how it was made: https://medium.com/@kosalsen/how-i-built-a-chess-rendering-engine-inside-an-opentype-font-27e4a4d520e7
Arabic-Modular-Geometric-Color
Animating the image with the mono axis of Recursive.
Thanks for your insights and help y'all, rolls are on the way!
Photography friends! 📸
I want to buy a present for a friend, whose hobby is photography. He shoots on "35mm film". On old cameras. That's basically all I know.
Current plan is to buy him a bunch of Kodak Gold 200 rolls, as per first hit in my search engine.
Anything better I can get?
I don’t post about it as much, but I’m still designing rad #icons !
Pixel is here as part of the newly-released Font Awesome 7.3 — 244 icons ready for all your chunky, retro needs.
A #VariableFont with a sine wave and variable harmonics. And including some clipping ;)
I used to send stuff* to the US all the time. In padded envelopes reused for the 5th time, in shoddy cardboard boxes with lots of brown tape, with a bunch of old fashioned stamps slapped on them.
No return address, no forms. Just a package with an address and some stamps.
The other day I sent something to the US again, and I spent 20 minutes filling out a form online. Had to find a product code of the thing I wanted to send which was either a HS-code, GN-code, Taric-code or Intrastat-code. Felt like I'd done a month's work of bookkeeping when I finished 🤓 😴
* stuff = tapes, vinyl, fanzines, disks, books, hardware
Hey guys! I announce my new Glyphs plugin, BubbleKern2!
I’ve just done a lecture at ATypI Stanford where I announced it. It now uses poly lines instead of Bézier curves, it’s got a dedicated tool, and can export a custom font that contains an experimental bubble table.
https://github.com/Tosche/BubbleKern2
I have a version of a post on my blog and I put a copy of it on Medium. And I edited it on Medium and now want to download that version. Medium SAYS this is possible, but all the suggestions they (or Gemini) make seem to be to currentlly non-existent Medidum menu selections. I just now wasted four hours on this. Has anyone successfully downloaded posts from Medium in the last year? I'm a paid-up Medium subscriber and I'm working on a desktop Windows machine.
A correspondent from China writes with an important correction: AI generated fonts are not just "production ready"; they are commercially available and in use for major projects. They've completely landed.
New video out 😁 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3TvslrXKbc
Interesting bug in an old test environment that I haven’t seen before. Let me lay it out: PS-based WOFF, Firefox 52.9.0, Windows 10. It does NOT happen with TT-flavoured WOFF. Here’s two screenshots – one at 256px, one at 258px.
I think it’s obviously doubling the lengths of off-curve handles. Why? That I don’t have a theory for.
Well, my inner 8-year-old thought this was funny 🙊