TTF/OTF

Thoughts in Text about Fonts or Other Things i Find

Whose Font is it Anyway?

The industry cheers a redraw of Arial and condemns AI training in the same breath. Four centuries of type history say ownership was never a fact about who made what; it is a capacity, and you own what you can defend.

Design Fundamentals: Craft

The second pillar: craft. The industry's founding story is a fable of diligent pioneers, and the fable is structural. What the story of the hand and the eye conceals is who actually owns the library, the tollbooth, and the standard.

Visible by Proxy

Type designers could afford reclusion because distributors managed the reader relationship. AI hasn't disrupted that system; it's made it more efficient, at the designer's expense.

Cooked.

AI is here now, and like every tool that expands access, it has triggered a familiar kind of panic. Designers are asking whether their jobs are at risk. Whether the work will disappear. Whether something essential is being lost. These

Design Fundamentals: Identity

Of the pillars that shape contemporary design, identity may be the most difficult to interrogate. Craft can be critiqued. Commerce can be debated. Passion can be absorbed into labour politics. But identity feels different — harder to handle. It is lived

Another Low for Liberal Design

There has been a lot of noise in the design world this week about a declaration from the United States Secretary of State to switch government correspondence from Calibri back to Times New Roman. Designers are upset. Twitter is doing

What Happens Next

Every time I try to imagine my next career move, I end up thinking about design. Not the Instagram version of it with the mockups and the variable font animation loops, but the real thing. The work, the people, the