Tim Brown, organized

Form and feeling

2025-05-21T21:00:00Z

Christopher Alexander, The Process of Creating Life:

You know the feeling which the thing will have. But you do not yet know the form. In fact, you keep having to change the form, because as the work unfolds, you find out many, many details which have the wrong feeling, which do not function, in response to the whole, as you thought they would. Because you keep the feeling constant, you have to change the form.

Daily cultural updates with AI

2025-02-02T18:30:00Z

My pal Matt Colyer recently explained how to use ChatGPT’s 4o model to craft a sophisticated, information-dense prompt to then pass to the o1 model — which can in turn provide rich responses.

I’ve used this technique a few times already, to wonderful effect. One example is a daily cultural update.

Each morning, while I’m AeroPressing my coffee, ChatGPT reads aloud several pieces of news. So far: I learned about Islamic geometric art and reached out to Ahmad Angawi to thank him for his inspiring work; I heard about fashion trends, then studied how algorithmic changes have influenced aesthetics; And, I laughed with Eileen about a robot cat designed to blow on hot liquids.

Generally, subjects like art, music, literature, and architecture are fascinating and nourishing for me. But I have a hard time dipping into these topics, maybe because of the limited time I allocate. Editorial features are too elaborate, and social algorithms (especially the atrocious shorts format) are too fragmented. What I needed was an assistant to toss a few things my way each day, and be able to dig in if something sounded interesting. So for a week now, I’ve been using ChatGPT as just such an assistant. Let me explain how I set it up.

How I set up daily cultural updates

Initial setup: First, I asked 4o for guidance on improving my cultural awareness in a way that would not be overwhelming. It gave me the typical numbered-list feedback, encouraging me to diversify what I read, watch global trends, and broaden my exposure to art and music, suggesting and linking to a variety of sources online.

4o as prompt-writer: Next, I asked 4o to use this information to write an expert prompt for o1, so that o1 could craft a plan for cultural exercise and help me build good habits. As part of this prompt-building, I instructed 4o to use its web-searching ability to find supporting information (o1 can’t do that) and to make sure that the plan centered on a daily briefing. 4o then wrote me a prompt for o1 (essentially an essay full of links).

Over to o1, and back: Finally, I copy/pasted the 4o prompt to o1 and received in response a structured plan for daily cultural briefings. Copying the o1 plan back into a new 4o chat with scheduled tasks enabled (another thing o1 can’t do), I asked ChatGPT to act as my assistant, scheduling a daily cultural awareness update at 7:00AM.

🎭🎶📚

I appreciate Matt sharing this tip about using 4o to write better prompts for o1. I’ve also used it to create a dedicated chat for surprise-me style deep-dives into topics that interest me, and to set unique career goals that match my interests and aptitudes. It’s exciting to use AI as a tool in these ways.

Pableaux’s Cajun Cleanup

2025-01-27T15:00:00Z

Today I learned that Pableaux Johnson has passed away, so in his memory I’m sharing with you a recipe he gave me — you’ll love it, even if you never cook this dish. May he rest in peace.

I met Pableaux in New Orleans in 2011, as Bryan Mason and I got ready for TypeCon. Pableaux, laughing, told me I looked like a cop and guided us to breakfast at a friend’s new restaurant. The food was delicious, but what I remember most is how Pableaux made me feel welcome, and the strength and generosity of his joie de vivre. As we left breakfast, Bryan gifted me a book written by the proprietor, which kindled in me a new appreciation for cooking. I kept in touch with Pableaux, who encouraged me by sharing guidance and recipes, including this article he wrote. Enjoy.

Cooking Up a Turkey Bone Gumbo

The aftermath of any authentic Thanksgiving feast involves a heapin’ helpin’ of leftovers. It’s just part of the package. How else would we sustain ourselves through the rest of the long weekend? The accepted Thanksgiving follow-up activities — long naps and mile-high evening sandwiches — are time-honored traditions that make this holiday one of America’s favorites.

For most people, the leftover tradition begins and ends with building “the Ultimate Turkey Sandwich” — a gargantuan structure slathered with layers of mayo, candied yams, cranberry salsa, and just about anything else that graced the banquet table hours earlier.

But if you limit your post-feast snacking to sandwiches, you’ll be missing one of the great American holiday dishes — the infamous Turkey Bone Gumbo.

After a full day of cooking the feast, Cajun cooks all over south Louisiana celebrate the day after Thanksgiving with a bubbling pot of dark gumbo, thick with chunks of leftover bird and spiked with spicy chunks of smoked sausage.

Since the recipe starts with the stripped turkey carcass, this edible ritual makes the most of the holiday bird. A long, slow simmer efficiently removes any bits of meat still clinging to the bones and results in a thick, rich base for the gumbo. It’s a simple (though somewhat time consuming) two-step process, but well worth the effort.

If you don’t have the time to cook up a batch on the day after Turkey Day, wrap up the carcass for freezer storage until you have a free day around the house. It’s the perfect low maintenance activity for a lazy early winter’s afternoon.

This twofold recipe comes from the cookbook “Louisiana Real & Rustic” (1996, William Morrow & Co.), a great collection of recipes from Emeril “The Bam Man” Lagasse (New Orleans’ new full-contact food phenomenon) and Marcelle Bienvinue (Cajun Lousiana’s foremost culinary storyteller).

Turkey Broth
1 turkey carcass
3 ribs celery, cut into 4-inch pieces
2 medium onions, quartered
4 quarts water, or enough to cover carcass
2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
4 bay leaves
Place the carcass in a large stockpot. Add the celery, onions, water, salt, peppercorns, and bay leaves.

Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to medium, and simmer, uncovered, for three hours. Remove from the heat. Skim any fat that has risen to the surface.

Strain through a large fine-mesh sieve (or simple colander). Reserve any meat that has fallen off the bones and pick off any meat that may still remain on the carcass.

Reserve the onions and celery for gumbo. Use immediately or store the broth in quart containers in the freezer.

Makes about 2 quarts (or enough for 1 gumbo).

Turkey Bone Gumbo
3/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup flour
2 cups chopped onions
1/2 cup chopped bell peppers
1/2 cup chopped celery
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 pound smoked sausage, such as 
  andouille or kielbasa, chopped
2 quarts turkey broth
reserved onions and celery from broth
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 tablespoons chopped green onion
Combine the oil and flour in a large cast iron pot or enameled cast iron Dutch oven, over medium heat.

Stirring slowly and consistently for 20 to 25 minutes, make a dark brown roux, the color of chocolate.

Season the onions, bell peppers, and celery with the salt and cayenne. Add this to the roux and stir until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the sausage and cook, stirring often for 5 minutes. Add the broth and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, uncovered for 45 minutes. Add the reserved turkey meat and the reserved onions and celery and cook for 15 minutes. Add the parsley and green onions.

Serve in soup bowls with rice. (Filé powder can be added at the table according to personal taste.)

Serves 8.

🦃🦴🥘

If you try this recipe, let me know — so I can reply as Pableaux replied to me, the first time I made it. 😁

Updates

27 Jan 2025: “No matter what you think you know, keep on asking questions. It’s a big world out there, and there’s always more to learn.” — Pableaux in 2019, writing about gumbo in a personal essay at Serious Eats.

D&D with ChatGPT

2024-12-05T22:01:00Z

Growing up, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) had always intrigued me. A neighbor with whom I was friendly but not very close had all these mysterious books and beautiful dice, and he tried to explain things to me … but we didn’t have much time to get into it.

Then a few years ago, I picked up a starter set to try playing with my older girls. I acted as the Dungeon Master (DM) and read the story to them, explaining how to play while keeping one eye on the instructions. They liked imagining their characters and playing with the dice, but it wasn’t a very memorable experience.

Fast forward to yesterday. I suddenly wondered, can ChatGPT be the DM, provide the story, and take care of remembering all our stats, abilities, and inventory? Heck yeah it can!

Yes, I can absolutely be your Dungeon Master (DM) for a Dungeons & Dragons game! Since you’re new, I’ll guide you through everything step by step, keeping it fun and simple.

We used ChatGPT to create our own characters, track stats, and play out a unique story. My daughters completely loved making up their own characters easily — Frostfang, a cat wizard and Shadow, a wolf rogue. Plus, I could play along with them as Cool Blue, a human fighter named after the Gatorade I was drinking. It was great to experience a story we could guide, but didn’t need to totally invent. We are searching an enchanted forest for dragons to tame and ride. The forest is full of warrior cats because my 12yo insisted on this. And every so often there’s a platypus involved because my 7yo is partially playing.

At this point, what we’re doing probably does not count as Dungeons & Dragons, but we’re having a blast. We’re rolling physical dice to determine outcomes, exercising special abilities ChatGPT created for our characters, and moving through a rich choose–your-own-adventure story with challenging battle sequences. A great family activity for dark winter evenings. We’re definitely going to do more of this during holiday downtime.

Here’s an example response after we made a decision:

Investigating the Scale: Results

Your team carefully examines the glowing dragon scale from all angles, piecing together its mysteries.

Frostfang: Arcane Insights

• Roll (14 + 3 = 17): Success!
Frostfang’s eyes narrow as they trace the faint magical runes etched into the scale’s surface. They recognize these as dragonbinding glyphs, ancient magic used to create bonds between dragons and those deemed worthy.

The scale is clearly more than a trophy—it’s a key to establishing a connection with a dragon. Frostfang deduces that finding and taming a dragon will require this scale as proof of your worth.

Shadow: Perceptive Observations

• Roll (5 + 4 = 9): Partial success.
Shadow sniffs the scale and catches faint traces of sulfur and ozone—likely from the fiery dragon construct—but nothing else stands out. They growl softly in frustration, muttering, “It smells like… magic and burning rocks.”

Cool Blue: Physical Examination

• Roll (18 + 1 = 19): Success!
Cool Blue feels the scale’s surface, noting that it’s cool to the touch despite its faint glow. It’s lighter than expected but incredibly durable, hinting at its draconic origin. Turning it over, Cool Blue notices that the scale has a slot or groove on the underside, as if it’s meant to fit into something larger—perhaps a pedestal or artifact deeper in the forest.

What the Party Discovers

The glowing scale is a powerful artifact that serves two purposes:
1. Dragonbinding Key: Proof of your worth to bond with a dragon.
2. Part of a Larger Puzzle: The slot underneath suggests the scale is part of a more significant artifact or device that you may find deeper in the forest.

Next Steps

1. Follow the Map: Return to the map and choose the next path (Shadowed Hollow or Crystal Glade).
2. Discuss as a Group: Talk about what you’ve learned and how to proceed.
3. Rest and Prepare: Heal up or recover before moving forward.

What does your group do next?

Onward! 🐉

Practicing Typography 003

2024-12-05T22:00:00Z

🎙️ Notes from Practicing Typography 003:

Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable:

All devices need to interact. If a thing does not interact, it will be considered broken. Over the past few years I’ve been collecting stories of what it is like to grow up in the digital age. As an example, one of my friends had a young daughter under five years old. Like many other families these days, they didn’t have a TV, just computing screens. On a visit to another family who happened to have a TV, his daughter gravitated to the large screen. She went up to the TV, hunted around below it, and then looked behind it. “Where’s the mouse?” she asked. There had to be a way to interact with it. Another acquaintance’s son had access to a computer starting at the age of two. Once, when she and her son were shopping in a grocery store, she paused to decipher the label on a product. “Just click on it,” her son suggested. Of course cereal boxes should be interactive! […] The dumbest objects we can imagine today can be vastly improved by outfitting them with sensors and making them interactive.

Typography Advisor GPT

2024-12-01T22:00:00Z

Introducing Typography Advisor. As an experiment, I made this custom version of ChatGPT to help when I’m designing with text and working on layouts. Like regular ChatGPT, I find it most useful when getting started or when I feel stuck — it can inform decisions, suggest next steps, and aid in exploration.

Intelligence technologies can accelerate our natural design habits. We already act as our own advisors by observing, referencing schema, and balancing unknowns in order to make predictions and discover new possibilities. With technology assistance, we can challenge ourselves to grow by considering advice that might not naturally come to mind. Like a second brain.

Typography Advisor is different than plain ChatGPT in a few ways that I hope make it more useful and tolerable: I have instructed it to be thoughtful, to limit jargon, and to link out to good resources often rather than trying to answer every question. Its strengths are in clarifying concepts, promoting learning, encouraging study, and providing context.

To make that happen, I preloaded this GPT (that’s what ChatGPT calls custom versions: Generative Pre-trained Transformers, or GPTs) with knowledge of my writings on typography. Annoyingly, Typography Advisor now biases towards my writings because of this preloaded knowledge. I’ve added many instructions to try to quiet this, but it’s an ongoing struggle. I also don’t trust its code generation or image analysis yet, so I’ve added warnings to responses that involve those kinds of content.

It’s not perfect, but I thought Typography Advisor was worth trying as an experiment. If you test it out, tell me via email or social. ChatGPT doesn’t share any details about how people are using this, so direct feedback is the only way to improve.

Practicing Typography 002

2024-11-22T22:00:00Z

🎙️ Notes from Practicing Typography 002:

Laura Kalbag, Accessibility for Everyone:

Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of others. It’s what makes us good at creating products for other people as we can better understand their problems and create solutions that fit their needs. It’s always easier to create products for people who have the same needs as us, since we understand our own requirements—and the reasons behind them—better than anybody else. Many successful products are created when people “scratch their own itch.”

The problem with creating products to suit only our needs is that, in the tech industry, we are largely people of similar ages, abilities, backgrounds, and educational and financial statuses. We end up creating products for people just like us, forgetting that other people may have requirements that differ from, or even conflict with, our own. To create more useful, usable products, we need to understand and care about differing needs.

Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design:

There is a tendency to think that to delight someone with design is to make them happy. Indeed, the work may do that, but more appropriately, the objective is to produce a memorable experience because of its superior fit. The times that design delights us are memorable because we sense the empathy of the work’s creator.

We feel understood, almost as if by using the work, we are stepping into a space designed precisely for us.

Marjorie Jordan and Kathy Crowley, Reading Needs Its Next Gutenberg Press: The Next Wave in Reading Technology for Education, Employee Productivity and Beyond:

Since early in the 20th century, researchers have documented that individuals respond differently to text format. More recent research has shown that small changes to text format can improve individual reading outcomes. Adults can improve their reading speed by as much as ten pages per hour by changing the font alone. For children, Readability Matters has seen an instantaneous change to reading fluency, the speed of accurate reading, of up to 50% or more. (Advancing the Reading Ecosystem) Personalized reading formats are not just a solution for struggling readers. While a small number of readers did not benefit from a change to the alternative formats offered, both of these studies demonstrate results for individuals of all reading ability levels. In a proof of concept conducted with Adobe, improvements occurred for students reading at the 23rd and 99th percentile of their peers. Strong readers and struggling readers, adults and children, all have the potential to experience improved reading outcomes using a technology-enabled model of reading with personalized text formats.

Practicing Typography podcast

2024-11-08T21:00:00Z

Hey, I started a podcast. 10m long, super casual, may not keep it up. But close friends said kind things, so I’m gonna publish and see what happens. RSS, Spotify, Apple, Overcast.

🎙️ Notes from Practicing Typography 001:

Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS by Jen Simmons and Elika Etemad, with Brandon Stewart. Note that my audio credits only Jen by mistake.
Feedback needed: How should we define CSS masonry? by Rachel Andrew.

Christopher Alexander, The Process of Creating Life:

Possibly the most basic and necessary feature of any living process is the fact that it goes gradually. The living structure emerges, slowly, step by step, and as the process goes forward step by step there is continuous feedback which allows the process to guide the system towards greater wholeness, and coherence, and adaptation. This is obvious, of course. To a biologist or ecologist it is self-evident.

Yet in architecture it is far from self-evident. Neither the process of design, nor the process of construction in modern conventional processes work like this. Instead there is a conception of a desired end-state (the design), and the system of architectural and constructional processes is geared up to producing this desired end-state, efficiently, and at all costs as it was initially defined — almost entirely without realistic feedback and improvement and adaptation while the processes are going on.

Flexible Typesetting is now yours, for free

2024-10-26T23:00:00Z

Originally published in 2018, Flexible Typesetting has sold thousands of copies and given a new generation of designers fresh mental models to craft meaningful, multidimensional typography. It is required reading in elite design programs and has encouraged the rethinking of core curricula.

Few things in my career have been as rewarding as writing and sharing this book. I’m so excited to give it to you for free. Download the PDF.

I hope you’ll recognize the significance of this moment we share together in the living story of graphic design.

Many people think of the web as just another medium, like print or film, and glamorize each new platform or device as the next big thing when, in reality, these are mere happenings in a vast new layer of our world — a plane where human beings should enjoy greater power, individuality, and dignity.

Flexible Typesetting is my attempt to guide you in the practice of design on this new plane. From Chapter 1’s philosophical framing, to Chapter 2’s prioritization of text and reader, to the multidimensional considerations in later chapters about picking fonts, shaping text, and managing compositions, this book blends vital typographic tactics with rhetorical questions that challenge the reader to reason deeply about beauty.

Although I’m proud of having written this book, and although it continues to help me drive product work at Adobe toward accessible, readable, respectful outcomes, my goal has always been to find you and inspire you to contribute to our shared story.

It’s the first how-to book on contemporary typography that keeps its promise.
— Frank Rausch

My sincerest thanks to A Book Apart for starting and growing one of the finest brands in design education, and for inviting me to take part in the journey. Many thanks.

To my fellow ABA authors: It has been my great privilege to be in your company, it’s an honor to have first published my book in a collection alongside your fine works, and I look forward to supporting your inevitably awesome future efforts. Solidarity!

It saddens me that ABA has closed its doors, but all things end. This was a special experience that I will always appreciate. Later, I may reformat Flexible Typesetting as a web reading experience. For updates, get your copy of the book.

Journal, 25 May

2024-05-25T23:40:00Z

🪕 May 25th. It’s a warm, lazy Saturday and I’m sipping 1Q84 which I don’t love, but which like other Murakami novels puts me in a mood to appreciate music — that, I do love.

Then I happened to check my friend Donny’s blog and learn about Remembrance. Thanks to the magic of my favorite streaming service and some nice little speakers, lively, soulful banjo and piano now float through my living room with the gentle breeze of the ceiling fan and our dogs sound asleep.

Journal, 3 May

2024-05-03T15:00:00Z

🌷 May 3rd. Bright and breezy. Bears and bees have woken up, with warm sun over the past few days. Sparrows, woodpeckers making their morning noise. New growth abounds.

Smart typography tools

2024-04-09T18:45:00Z

As I mentioned in a recent interview, inventing typographic intelligence technologies is what I do at work. So I thought I’d elaborate: Imagine spell check for design, with advice about choosing fonts, setting line spacing, rearranging text, and more. I’m guiding a small team as we decide what to check for, how to make changes, and how manual/automatic the controls should be.

The hard part is, well, all of it. Design decisions are interrelated, and there are no correct answers (despite what snobs may say). Landing an acceptable user experience is tough. And the deafening roar of “AI” makes it challenging to focus.

But although it’s difficult, creating smart typography tools is worth doing because human beings need to take better care of one another. Better tools can help designers scale their empathy and show the business value of being more considerate.

Good typography means many different things to many different people. While there is no “correct”, there are contexts, conventions, and cultures. By designing from many different flexible, multiscriptual, accessible points of view simultaneously, we can craft compositions that respectfully respond to fit individual readers. Practically speaking, this is unreasonably complicated. But with assistance it becomes possible.

If a computer is a bicycle for our minds, then typography is a bicycle for our words, helping them to reach further and have a greater impact. Smart typography tools will let us go up a few gears, providing sensitive, high-level controls to manage low-level details. The algorithms that power these controls can be fine-tuned by experienced users, and can provide targeted domain-learning materials to help everyone stay sharp.

Typography is way too hard these days. While doing a good job should require some effort and investment, it often feels like we waste our energy and money poking through nests of angry features, trying out fluffy apps that claim to save us time, or setting up (and maintaining) elaborate systems that aren’t much fun. There must be a better way to apply our skills and knowledge.

Flexible, digital creations could match and, over time, even transcend the design quality of history’s finest printed works if we exercise care, honor diversity, and elevate the baseline functions of our design tools. Typography can show us the way.

Time with my family

2024-04-03T18:45:00Z

Now in my mid-forties, I increasingly appreciate time spent with my spouse, children, siblings, and parents. Nothing nourishes and uplifts me more, comforts me more in uncertainty, or provides me with more clarity and energy to focus on projects in life and work than spending time with my family. It is a great privilege and a blessing that these relationships are positive.

Dedicated self-reflection led me to prioritize family time, and systems are now in place to preserve the likelihood of my spending time in this way.

Eileen and I meet daily to plan our days and support one another. In focused moments, I listen to each of my daughters talk about what they’re doing or excited about, and sometimes I take them on “truck dates” where we go somewhere nearby with a snack and talk for a little while.

I chat with each of my parents at regular times each week. I tried this with my brothers, but our combined schedules make it too unpredictable. Instead, we message occasionally and annually we hang out for a weekend, doing the stuff we used to do as kids.

It’s hard to capture how special these times are to me, and how deeply satisfying it is to have invested my life in these ways. I have tried, in Oliver Burkeman’s words, to treat each experience “with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it” … and to also recognize that it is “incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all”. Quotes from Four Thousand Weeks.

Journal, 25 January

2024-01-25T23:00:00Z

🌲 January 25th. Rain and warm temperatures melted the blanket of snow from our yard. Some of my stress has melted away too, after a solid workout this morning, breakfast with Eileen and our 6yo (who flipped a pancake piece to the dog), and lunch with my friend and colleague Ivan Bettger.

Work-wise, we’re nearing the end of a six-week scope of effort. Achieving our goals was at risk because a key task became complex, but my teammate Jason shared news today that everything had fallen into place just in time. I’m looking forward to sharing with the broader team our gains on the two tracks as planned. Plus, we enlisted two additional helpers and found out we’ll be hiring to grow the team.

Oh, and another work project sped up considerably this week. A whole team of talented designers got busy using a tool we prototyped last year. What they’re cranking out looks great, and they gave us valuable feedback to improve the tool.

My mind has been mostly on this work recently. It’s a critical moment, transitioning two disruptive concepts that we’ve prototyped into standard projects that move through the usual process. I feel proud that when Adobe finally hired a prototyper to work with me 1:1, we started producing concepts that became high priorities for the company.

Human existence should be like a river

2024-01-12T23:00:00Z

Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old:

An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

My goodness, this is beautiful.

The place isn’t the thing

2024-01-03T18:25:00Z

Rick Rubin interviewing Daniel Kaluuya:

DK: The junction nature of London is London. The kind of people coming in and out…

RR: That’s what makes London London, that cycle.

DK: Yeah yeah, it’s the Somalis, it’s the Kosovans, there’s a new wave. Come in, leave, come in. That whole thing about “things are always supposed to stay the same” ... holding onto that is hurting yourself … the place isn’t the thing, it’s the people.

Practicing Typography Basics

2024-01-02T15:40:00Z

I recently recorded a short video series that Adobe is now releasing on YouTube as part of the Foundations of Graphic Design series. In these videos, I cover making body text easy to read, catching attention with display text, guiding readers through information, and learning how typography feels.

Many good “typography basics” videos already explain the worldly importance of typography and illustrate terminology. So instead, I wanted to emphasize the intangible practices and judgments that make a difference for great typography and help us stay sharp.

Thanks to Sandeep Kulkarni for championing domain expertise. Shout-outs to Wendy Strauss, Shanti Sparrow, Meghan Ryan, Jessie Smith, Amanda Dowd, Brian Wood, and the whole Learn team. Thanks to Ben Welch for helping me set a down-to-earth tone, supplying great examples, and sharing audio advice.

Buy my book, Flexible Typesetting, and level-up to sophisticated digital typography by building on the basics in these videos. Get 50% off with code: FTBASICS

Budgeting with YNAB

2023-12-30T22:25:00Z

For many years I’ve been a happy You Need A Budget customer, and as we head into 2024 it continues to be an important part of my financial strategy. Saving up for emergencies and big expenses, hedging fluctuating categories, checking digital envelopes before making a purchase, and tracking all bank transactions in one place are habits that give me peace of mind and help reduce stress in stressful times.

YNAB is a rare and valuable service that makes responsibility easier and helps me take good care of my family. Sign up with this referral link and we each get a free month.

Journal, 29 December

2023-12-30T03:40:00Z

🎄 December 29th. Rainy and warm. Very grateful for holiday vacation time. As Eileen and I drove to pick up the kids from a sleepover we discussed definitions of done for our quarterly goals, then I time-blocked the calendar when I got back to my iPad. Listened to Rick Rubin on Huberman. Revisited Rick’s book The Creative Act and highlighted many sections.

Read a stack of books with my 6yo, including some Elephant and Piggie and a few pages of her new Highlights puzzle book. Finished reading the first Warrior Cats novel because my 11yo insisted. It was a fun read, and fun to discuss with her, though I still have trouble remembering the many characters’ names (which change repeatedly).

Played Ravine with my older girls, a cooperative board game they got for Christmas that involves foraging and crafting for survival after a plane crash. Our party died several times from storms, animals, and poisoned mushrooms, but then we lucked out by finding permanent shelter in a cave.

To finish the day we had a candlelit dinner of pasta/quinoa with family-recipe homemade sauce and opened bottles of Montepulciano and sparkling cider.

Visionaries

2023-12-23T19:31:00Z

Rick Rubin, interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger:

RR: When you list the great directors that you worked with, if you think of each of them, would you say there are any qualities that they all shared? What made those people so great, from your perspective?

AS: All of them had vision. When they tell you the movie that they want to do, they will look out into emptiness and tell you of what the movie will be about. And what’s important in this movie, and how you should play the role in this movie, and what they’re trying to get across. So they were visionaries ... all of them had a vision. They had the guts to do it. They didn’t think small, they thought big. And they didn’t listen to the naysayers.

Listened to this yesterday, and it was just what I needed to hear. What an inspiring interview! An early Christmas present from two legends. I appreciate Rick’s deep curiosity and Arnold’s forthright guidance.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

2023-12-22T14:00:00Z

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. Entertaining dual stories, linked psychologically. I didn’t understand all the connections. “Inklings” seemed unnecessary, but maybe that was the point? Was the real world also psychological? In any case it had the Murakami effect of making me want to grocery shop, listen to music, and drink whiskey. (Via Talin Wadsworth.)

Drawing comics

2023-12-21T03:57:00Z

Thanks to Veronica Lewis for tips on alt text for comics.

Feedback is a gift

2023-12-20T20:07:00Z

I’m fortunate to work with an excellent manager. She gives me freedom, encourages me, and helps me grow. With her guidance, I spent 2023 regularly interviewing customers and managing the prototyping of two concepts that became high priorities for our team (one of them our top priority). It was a wonderful learning experience, feeling out new processes and facing the pressure of strong interest in nascent plans.

But while I was learning and growing, my team was struggling to understand me (and my projects). I know this because my manager gathered feedback from my colleagues, collating and sharing it with me as part of a new coaching process. The feedback touched on my strengths, but I focused on the “areas to improve”.

To be frank, when I first got this feedback I felt many negative emotions. I felt angry, embarrassed, and discouraged. I felt my colleagues judged me unfairly, and I criticized myself as I thought back over the months. I couldn’t settle these negative emotions, so late that evening I dumped all the feedback into a text file and spilled out my reactions line-by-line. Theraputic!

Next morning, after taking a fresh look, I distilled the feedback into five priorities — and realized that my super-smart, hard-working colleagues had given me a playbook for how to be a better teammate and how to improve all of our working lives. These priorities aligned perfectly with the quarterly goals I had just set for myself, so I included them as “coaching improvements” in each relevant goal’s definition of done. Because I have confidence in knocking out quarterly goals, I know I can address this feedback too and make positive changes.

Coincidentally, I recently listened to the Huberman Lab podcast episode with Dr. Adam Grant, in which Grant describes the concept of a “second score”. He tells a story about giving a workshop to high-ranking military officials and receiving tough feedback (they felt he had wasted their time), effectively a low score. Grant felt bad, just like I did. And rather than settle for this, he responded by trying to get a high score on how well he responded to the first score. The second score reflects how well we take feedback.

I’m grateful for my colleagues’ advice, grateful for my caring manager, and grateful for my ability to respond with understanding and agency. And I’m shooting for a high second score.

Ridiculous, at first

2023-12-19T20:04:00Z

Jane McGonigal, Imaginable:

This is how you become a pioneer. And it’s something I’ve seen again and again: it’s so much easier to come up with new innovations, to imagine new products and services and businesses and art forms, when you play with ridiculous, at first, ideas — because far fewer people are thinking about and getting ready for these “unthinkable” futures. You get to the ideas first.

You must shift your focus

2023-12-18T19:24:00Z

Jody Rosen, The Genius of Lionel Messi Just Walking Around:

If you ask any astute observer – an experienced coach or player or tactically tuned-in analyst – how to understand the game, they will advise you to take your eyes off the ball. There may well be an analogous precept, with a German name, in philosophy or art history or mechanical physics. The idea is this: to apprehend the main thrust of the narrative, to really wrap your mind around what’s going on, you must shift your focus from the foreground to the background.

Making me want to articulate the product management challenges of oscillating between broad awareness (which drives good decision-making) and directed storytelling (which drives clarity). Especially tough during periods of technological disruption, when swinging from one to the other must happen frequently and quickly.

(Via Jason Kottke.)

Journal, 17 December

2023-12-17T15:16:00Z

🍂 December 17th. Humid and warmer than usual, rain in the forecast. Standing in the morning air, typing this in one hand while Zeke pulls on his leash. Zeke is my six-year-old shepherd mix, he had ACL surgery back in August and is almost back to normal now.

The neighborhood is quiet, but the woods are lively. Merlin Bird ID picks up Junco, Chickadee, Nuthatch, Woodpecker, Robin, Goldfinch. Wishing to go hiking with my daughters, but between the weather and our usual Sunday responsibilities I don’t think it’s in the cards.

Today’s agenda is week planning, meal prep, setting this week’s workouts and vitamins, processing mail, and tidying up. Eileen and I do most of this together, over coffee, and it’s a highlight for me each week. We’ve recently subscribed to a physical Sunday newspaper too, so we may read a bit. Oh, and we’ll figure out what’s left to prepare for Christmas.

Managers should ask

2023-12-15T03:43:00Z

Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution:

Instead of asking what their company does best today, managers should ask, “What do we need to master today, and what will we need to master in the future, in order to excel on the trajectory of improvement that customers will define as important?”

Without that trust

2023-11-17T23:00:00Z

Robin Rendle, The Next Wild Thing:

Making something as good as this requires an especially rare quality from a multi-billion dollar company though: you have to trust your employees to go find that thing. Without that trust you can’t build anything good, let alone great.

Personal branding as a contribution

2023-02-05T17:00:00Z

Brad Frost recently highlighted his old gold about personal branding:

Jobs, technologies and trends come and go, but you as an individual remain. (...) My personal website is my home base ... the glue that ties everything together. (...) It becomes the canonical link for you as a person.

Having a canonical link about oneself is handy, and as Brad says it can lead to new opportunities and new friends. Over time, it’s also satisfying and centering to reflect on all you have built, written, and shared — nostalgia that, as Clay Routledge explains, increases optimism and confidence, and reaffirms identity. Your personal website helps you know yourself.

But even with all these incredible benefits, my personal website is not a priority at work, nor is it a priority at home. I get many of the same benefits at work and at home in different, less public ways, so it sometimes seems like I have the bases covered ... but when I neglect my site, it feels like something is missing. I struggled to understand why, and I found myself asking, “Why does my website matter so much to me?”

The answer came as I studied Clay Christensen’s teachings. He was an author and business professor focused on innovation (he wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and other books, introducing concepts like disruption and sustaining vs. growth innovation). Toward the end of Christensen’s life, he wrote the book How Will You Measure Your Life?, explaining how innovation principles can apply to ourselves as individuals — and how business habits often cloud our judgment in our personal lives.

My website matters to me because it reaches other people (like you, dear reader). It’s a way, however small and subtle, of showing others that I care. My website is a place for playing, studying, and appreciating in a way that others can witness, and I hope that through it I may set an example, influence attitudes for the better, and contribute some good in the world.

CSS forces

2022-05-04T17:00:00Z

Flexibility causes pressure that makes layouts look bad. We can relieve that pressure in isolated ways thanks to CSS calculations, interpolation, and container awareness, but we lack a means of interconnection that would help maintain balance in compositions.

CSS forces are values that travel from a high-pressure area to other, low-pressure areas to help layouts reach a comfortable equilibrium.

Let’s assume that this layout looks good.

Good-looking designs are hard to make. People have practiced design for centuries, and by practicing we develop our judgment about what looks good. Design may not always succeed, or feel appropriate, and we may not always agree about how good something looks, but practitioners share a general sense of overall quality or goodness.

Next, let’s assume that this layout has changed in a way that does not look good. Maybe it feels like there’s too much empty space. Maybe short paragraphs are looking weird. Maybe heading sizes seem like they need adjustment. Whatever is going on, certain pressures are causing disruption.

Layouts change for many reasons. As designers of flexible compositions, we need to understand that there is inherent balance in good-looking typography, and that this balance is disrupted by pressure that results from layout changes.

Pressure is easiest to grasp when we look at text blocks in isolation, as we did in Chapter 6 of Flexible Typesetting:

Relieving pressure gets easier with practice, because we develop schema about available options and we have experiences that inform our judgment about which options to apply in which circumstances. But relieving pressure in isolated text blocks isn’t enough to bring flexible layouts back into balance.

To achieve an active balance throughout a composition, we should borrow a concept from fluid dynamics: pressure-gradient forces.

Wikipedia:

The pressure-gradient force is the force that results when there is a difference in pressure across a surface [and it] is always directed from the region of higher-pressure to the region of lower-pressure. When a fluid is in an equilibrium state (i.e. there are no net forces, and no acceleration), the system is referred to as being in hydrostatic equilibrium.

Sounds like a recipe for balanced, fluid layouts! (Never mind that in meteorology high-pressure areas feel more comfortable and low-pressure areas mean rain. My point here is that pressure gets distributed to balance a system.)

Observing and relieving pressure shouldn’t be an isolated exercise. Pressure creates opportunities for forces to distribute relief throughout a layout. Practically speaking, this means we need the ability to recognize pressures, apply forces, and prioritize forces.

For example, a flexible line spacing value in one container could influence margins that surround the text block. That change in spaciousness may mean that nearby headings need size or spacing adjustments to stay feeling connected.

Or a scaling heading’s font size could influence a root variable that controls a measurement system, thereby affecting other parts of the composition in ways that should trickle into remote property relationships.

Always with you, it cannot be done. — Master Yoda

I don’t know how to make this idea real, but I sense the need for it to exist. Experiments with CSS variables in Vue, as well as my limited understanding of CSS module scripts, make me want to believe it is possible. I have wished for things before, and it has worked out well.

For flexible design to look as good as humans are capable of making things look, our container-oriented constraint systems need a key counterpart — a content-sensitive relationship system that balances flexible layout by prioritizing and directing forces according to pressure.

Helpful resources on racism & police reform from Jason Kottke

2020-06-13T01:00:17Z

The reason that black people are in the streets has to do with the lives they’re forced to lead in this country. And they’re forced to lead these lives by the indifference and the apathy and a certain kind of ignorance — a very willful ignorance — on the part of their co-citizens.

That's James Baldwin, excerpted by Jason, who prefaces it by saying:

Hi. I wanted to take today to compile a sampling of what Black people (along with a few immigrant and other PoC voices) are saying. [...] I am trying to listen. Is America finally ready to listen? Are you ready?

In recent weeks, kottke.org has helped me focus on people, words, and images that both deserve and demand my attention and support. I am extremely grateful when Jason steers his resource-gathering and social analysis efforts & skills toward current events in the service of people who are disadvantaged and/or suffering.

For starters, listen. Please, today, set a timer for 10 minutes and try to absorb some of this:

Listening to Black Voices Amid Murder, Violence, Protest, and Pandemic

Consider these as a set, and think about how this compounds hardship over generations:

“Increasingly Rightwing” Police Unions Have Made Policing More Dangerous In America — Violent policing is systematically protected from accountability & consequence.
Nixon Started the War on Drugs to Target Black People & the Antiwar Left — That system of protection has racist roots by design.
“The Game Is Fixed” Against Black People in America — And this is how it makes people feel. Kottke: "I’ve never heard the long, shameful, and deadly history of white supremacy in America summed up any better or more succinctly than Jones does here."

And so much more:

A Short History of Housing Segregation in America — Devastating.
Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop — Kottke: "This essay corroborates what activists have been saying about the police for decades."
Police Abolition: The Growing Movement to Defund the Police — Kottke: "What would a system oriented around public safety look like if it was designed from scratch rather than just piling more responsibility onto and funding into increasingly militarized and unaccountable police departments?"

Jason has also highlighted stunning art, rich literature, and arresting performances by Black creators. A goldmine of things to follow up on, support, and share further.

Using variable fonts should be easier and more fun

2019-09-27T15:09:23Z

Recently I asked these questions on Twitter:

Are you designing with variable fonts? Do you feel like you understand them?

People’s answers vary quite a bit. I shared my own answers, too. Then, after my friend Erik made an analogy to understanding Unicode, I extended this analogy to emoji UI:

Using variable fonts today is like looking up smiley faces in Unicode code charts. You can do fine if you try. But compare that to using emoji in iOS. UI needs to help show that variable fonts are fun and easy — stacks of sliders are not.

It’s high time for innovation in typographic experiences generally, but boring and technical variable font interfaces and workflows will continue to block all but a few people from enjoying and expressing the format’s capabilities.

National Teacher Appreciation Week 2019 deal for educators

2019-05-07T17:00:00Z

This week, educators can get a free ebook version of Flexible Typesetting, plus an invitation to the private Slack group where readers and I share ideas about lesson plans. Send me an email describing your teaching work in two sentences, and I’ll send you a code to download the ebook at no charge.

Published in July, Flexible Typesetting is already required reading in elite design programs and has encouraged some to rethink core curriculum. Let's keep the trend going.

Thank you!

I offered this deal back in January too, and more than 100 teachers took me up on it. Learning from them has been excellent, and I'm sure I have a lot to learn from you, too.

My teachers

Finally, thanks to the teachers who continue to influence my life. From the acknowledgements of Flexible Typesetting:

Thanks to George Laws for opening my mind to the abstraction, balance, and systems in graphic design and type, for his mentoring, and for our breakfasts. Thanks to Arthur Hoener for introducing me to typography and giving me work opportunities that catalyzed my career. Thanks to Anne Galperin and Clif Meador for helping me think critically and find confidence. Thanks to Mr. Mahon for making me feel at home in art class. Thanks to the elementary school teachers who shaped and cared for me, including Mr. Weiss, Mr. Cafon, Ms. Oliver, Mr. Schmidt, and Ms. Hart.

January deal for educators

2019-01-04T17:00:00Z

Teachers on my new book, Flexible Typesetting:

An outstanding text if you want to learn how to set harmonious text both on the web *and* print. 10/10
— Thomas Jockin

Students, designers, developers, and even the most seasoned typographers will gain insights into how to set type for the web and beyond.
— Amy Papaelias

Having read Tim Brown’s Flexible Typesetting ... I’m convinced I have to completely rethink my approach to intro type (at the very least).
— Maurice Meilleur

With a refreshing clarity found throughout Flexible Typesetting, Tim Brown explains what’s important in setting type for the web, but also why and how it’s important.
— Tobias Frere-Jones

Published in July, Flexible Typesetting is already required reading in elite design programs and has encouraged some to rethink core curriculum. Let's keep the trend going.

From now until the end of January, educators can get a free ebook version of Flexible Typesetting, plus an invitation to the private Slack group where readers and I share ideas about lesson plans. Send me an email describing your teaching work in two sentences, and I’ll send you a code to download the ebook at no charge.

Well, that was excellent

2018-12-29T17:00:00Z

Wrote this on September 3rd, then got so busy I forgot to post it:

I just returned to my desk after my first Adobe sabbatical — four weeks' time off for having worked at Adobe for five years. Along with the standard, two-week vacation time and our one-week company shutdown in July, that makes a total of seven weeks' vacation this year. The winter holidays ahead will make it eight.

What an incredible privilege it has been, and is! This amount of paid leave is life-changing. In 2018, Eileen and I took the kids on a vacation and two camping trips, we reorganized 10 years of basement clutter (making our house 50% bigger), and we spent lots of time with extended family. I also read a few books, did some cooking, and generally took my mind off work for a while.

Now that I’m back at work, I feel supercharged. The peace of mind I gained from all my time off has made me feel very focused, and my fresh eyes have made it easier to see all the moving pieces in projects. I feel unstoppable.

Whoever decided that Adobe should offer paid sabbaticals, company shutdown weeks, and other generous time-off opportunities was very smart.

As I publish this, I'm in the middle of that winter break I mentioned. The focused, unstoppable feeling I had back in September never went away. I spent the fall months learning from people all across this giant company, collaborating on strategy, and designing new typographic tools. 2019 is going to be fun.

Until then, though, I’ll continue playing Minecraft with my two older girls and reading books to my youngest — if I must! 🥰

Trying out an iOS publishing setup

2018-11-03T17:00:00Z

It isn’t entirely comfortable yet, but I believe I now have a way to easily write and publish this site’s Jekyll-based posts from iOS — without writing code or actually running Jekyll. I can write in Ulysses and use the standard share feature to publish.

The key pieces are a customized version of Ryan Daigle’s iOS shortcut, the iOS app Working Copy (Ryan’s post explains how these two things work together) and Netlify, which automatically deploys my site from a GitHub repo with each commit. That’s one really nice thing about this setup — change management happens automatically.

Updating posts and working on other aspects of my site is possible on iOS too, although it’s even less comfortable: using Working Copy’s WebDAV Server feature as a remote site in Coda, I can edit easily ... but then I have to go through some motions to get the edits committed and pushed. Working Copy is a powerful app, but its Repository view does not inspire confidence. (And now that I’m done editing this post in Coda, let’s see if I can get it updated via Working Copy and live on my site...)

Frank Chimero’s ladder

2018-10-30T17:00:00Z

Five minutes ago, to my embarrassment, I realized that the ladder analogy I used in Flexible Typesetting was based on Frank Chimero’s ladder analogy from The Shape of Design. Frank wrote in Chapter 1:

The creative process could be said to resemble a ladder, where the bottom rung is the blank page and the top rung the final piece. In between, the artist climbs the ladder by making a series of choices and executing them.

I wish I had realized this at some point during the three years I worked on my book, becuase I would have loved to cite Frank’s excellent book — a book that deserves an active spot on your shelf (even though it is available to read online for free). I loved The Shape of Design, and as you can see it deeply influenced me.

No doubt Frank’s work and writing will continue to inspire me, and to shape the core of my thinking so much that I will again forget it was he who catalyzed the ideas (or, simply, gave them to me).

I sorta left Twitter

2018-09-29T17:00:00Z

For many years, Twitter felt like an amazing place to share what I was doing, to meet new people, and to help spread positive energy and good ideas. I did all of that, and I loved it. But Twitter gradually became awful.

It came to my attention years ago that on Twitter, harassment goes unchecked. This began with GamerGate, reached its height with our disgraceful president’s continual presence, and by the time #DeactiDay rolled around I was already checked out. I regret actively using the service for as long as I did, because in retrospect it is very clear that Twitter never cared about the people who were being harassed. Along with these principled reasons for spending less time on Twitter, the company also changed its API, which meant that the app I liked best for using it (Tweetbot) lost some good features.

Twitter has severely disappointed me. I haven’t deactivated my accounts, but I don’t use them like I once did. I try to acknowledge people who mention me, and promote friends’ stuff if I see it, but I don’t intend to share my own ideas there for the foreseeable future. I may post occasionally to remind Twitter followers that I am active elsewhere.

I have moved over to Mastodon for now (@timbrown, @typesetting). But Mastodon also has its share of harassment issues, and currently lacks a Tweetbot-quality client. Going forward, I will try any new service that seems promising. I have also begun a Jeremy-Keith-style, hosting-and-syndicating of my own brief thoughts. This again has its drawbacks — I can’t easily post from iOS (my setup runs Jekyll), and I haven’t even tried to get any reply/follow anything going (if that’s even a possibility).

In summary, I’m using social media in a rather messy way these days, and using it a lot less. I miss it, but I’ve had enough of the world’s current offerings. I would pay a good chunk of money, monthly, for a solidly-designed social network built with the right priorities.

Hey Siri, take a memo

2018-09-28T17:00:00Z

When I’m preparing a new talk for speaking engagments, it often begins as a messy process. I’ll jot down an outline, then I’ll go over it in my mind while I’m driving or doing chores. In those moments, when I’m doing other stuff, I find voice memos to be super useful.

I’ve been using a program called RecUp (formerly DropVox) that begins recording immediately when I start the app, and saves the resulting file to Dropbox. It’s an incredibly solid app that I have relied on for years. When I’m back at my desk, I listen to the voice memos & transcribe them — that gets my brain going, helps me flesh out the outline.

Today I upgraded to iOS 12, and I saw that the native Voice Memos app now syncs with iCloud. And there’s a new shortcut to ask Siri to begin recording a voice memo (Settings → Voice Memos → Siri & Search → Shortcuts).

It’d be tempting to switch if this worked while the phone is locked, because that’s the only thing I dislike about my RecUp system. I can say, “Hey Siri, open RecUp” and the recording begins ... but only if the phone is unlocked.

Tempo experiments

2018-09-27T17:00:00Z

Some Adobe colleagues are prototyping a new tool and taking a fresh look at typographic features, so they asked me and Wenting to help. For this week’s meeting, I made a couple examples showing how several kinds of whitespace can be simultanously adjusted (part of Cyrus Highsmith’s tempo idea from Inside Paragraphs):

Here’s tempo changing automatically as text block width changes. See how the top paragraph’s tempo gets tighter and looser? The lower paragraph does not change tempo.
And here’s the same experiment, but with tempo as a manual adjustment. Mess around and see what looks good to you.

This led to all sorts of interesting conversations about exposing the more specific sub-properties at play (letterspacing, word spacing, etc.), and about incorporating variable fonts with a width axis (or traditional fonts with multiple widths).

But the most intriguing issues it raises are about whether and how to provide smarter default settings (as in the automatic example).

For which people, in which situations, do preset values and behaviors make sense? What if the presets could be tailored to a person’s own preferences (for example, someone who generally prefers looser text)? What if a brand’s flexible typesetting presets went wherever that brand’s fonts went?

We already know how to tailor measurements to specific typefaces, and we know where that could lead. The bigger questions are about context — applying presets and recommendations with tact and care.

His Dark Materials

2018-09-27T00:00:00Z

His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Fun to read, but a little weak. The knife and the bear are cool, but on the other hand some parts of books 2 & 3 felt too sappy. The mixing of the worlds, and reasoning behind the whole business, are what felt weak to me. But then again I saw this on my daughter’s 4th-grade recommended-reading list, so “a little weak” is totally appropriate strength depending on the audience!

Revamping gender in old children’s stories

2018-08-10T17:00:00Z

One of the side projects I’m working on is editing and republishing children’s stories by Thornton W. Burgess. I often read the stories to my daughters, and they’re delightful. Burgess was a naturalist, so the animal characters are anthropomorphized with personalities that give you an idea of the animals’ different behaviors and habits.

But I noticed something as I read the books: more than 90% of the characters are male, and the few female characters exhibit stereotypical traits (emotional Mrs. Quack, nagging Jenny Wren). So as I’ve been reading the stories and marking them up in HTML as I go, my daughters and I have been dutifully switching a bunch of the characters from male to female or from female to male. We have a 50/50 ratio going.

This is good, but I wonder what other improvements I could be making. Now’s the time to figure that out. It feels terrible to admit this, but I feel completely ignorant when it comes to gender issues.

Should I make some of the characters’ genders ambiguous? Should I use different pronouns? What percentage of the characters should be like this? Are there specific animals that lend themselves best to the right kind of portrayal? — I don’t mean to be insensitive by asking that, but I think about birds, for example, and the tendency for male birds to be more brightly colored.

Anyway, I’m not sure where to begin. If you have any tips, I’d appreciate them.

Flexible Typesetting Acknowledgements

2018-07-24T17:00:00Z

Thanks to friends and family who worked with me and supported me as I wrote Flexible Typesetting. These acknowledgements are from the back of the book.

Since A Book Apart opened its doors for business, I have admired these books. It’s an honor and a privilege to have written one. My thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman for setting himself apart — for striking a helpful, caring tone in his writings; for fiercely advocating for openness, collaboration, and community on the web; and for building businesses that cement these values. Thanks to Jason Santa Maria for his humility, his visual work, and writings – which have always inspired me – and for designing this beautiful set of books. Thanks to Mandy Brown for her leadership and her encouragement, and for showing me the power of a great editor.

Thanks to Katel LeDû for her contagious enthusiasm, her patience, and her diligent work running A Book Apart. Thanks to Caren Litherland for editing me. Caren’s kind words kept me going, and her critical eye brought clarity to this text. I could not have accomplished this without her support and guidance. Thanks to Ray Schwartz and Juliette Cezzar for their incredible expertise as technical editors; their empathy for readers improved this book tenfold. Thanks to Tina Lee for shepherding the earliest versions of this book. Thanks to Bram Stein for writing his Webfont Handbook; years ago, he and I strategized about how these two texts could harmonize, and it’s exciting to see our plan in action. Thanks to Jessica Hische for writing my foreword. Jessica is well known for her beautiful lettering, but she’s an equally gifted writer—helpful, straightforward, and kind. Thanks to the production crew at A Book Apart for making this book real. Thanks to Mike Monteiro and David Demaree for their advice about publishing.

Thanks to Greg Veen for our many private discussions about the nature of flexible typesetting, and for his evergreen support. Thanks additionally to the other managers in my career – Matthew Rechs, Bryan Mason, Carolyn Guyer, Megg Brown, and James Roy – for their leadership, and for shielding me from nonsense so the ideas in this book could take root. Thanks to Jeff Veen, Ryan Carver, Andy McMillan, Robert Eerhart, Toby Malina, Marci Eversole, Vitaly Friedman, Gavin Elliott, and Jared Spool for having faith in me and giving me a platform. Thanks to the Typekit and Type teams, and to all of my friends at Adobe, for your profound care toward people who make type and practice typography.

Thanks to George Laws for opening my mind to the abstraction, balance, and systems in graphic design and type, for his mentoring, and for our breakfasts. Thanks to Arthur Hoener for introducing me to typography and giving me work opportunities that catalyzed my career. Thanks to Anne Galperin and Clif Meador for helping me think critically and find confidence. Thanks to Mr. Mahon for making me feel at home in art class. Thanks to the elementary school teachers who shaped and cared for me, including Mr. Weiss, Mr. Cafon, Ms. Oliver, Mr. Schmidt, and Ms. Hart.

Thanks to Ray Schwartz for geeking out with me about web development. Thanks to Chris Silverman for his perpetually fresh eyes and articulate feedback. Thanks to Donny Truong for his openness and hustle. Thanks to Ethan Marcotte for the invaluable discussion and his unparalleled optimism. Thanks to Bram Stein, Scott Kellum, Elliot Jay Stocks, Jake Giltsoff, Wenting Zhang, Weston Thayer, Indra Kupferschmid, Chris Coyier, Dave Rupert, Andrew Johnson, Ivan Bettger, and Tobias Frere-Jones for exchanges and collaborations that bolstered ideas in this book. Thanks to Kevin Davis and Joe Juriga; rest in peace.

Thanks to my friends in the Nice Web Type Slack for continually reminding me how much there is to learn about typography. Thanks to friends who gave me feedback on early drafts of this book: Greg Veen, Ethan Marcotte, Donny Truong, Robin Rendle, Bram Stein, and Frank Griesshammer. Thanks to writers who have inspired me over the years, especially Dan Cederholm and John Gruber.

Thanks to my friends at the St. Remy Volunteer Fire Department for their patience and understanding, and for their service to our community.

Thanks to my family for their love and patience as I concentrated on this book. Thanks Mom, for encouraging and supporting me throughout my life. Thanks Dad, for teaching me to think deeply. Thanks Mom S., for feeding and housing me while I learned to make websites. Thanks Dad S. for repeatedly asking when I would write a book (this is it). Thanks to my brothers, Greg and Ken, for being awesome-o. Shout-out to my sisters- and brothers-in-law, and my nieces and nephews. Love you all.

Thanks to my three beautiful, gifted, funny, kind, powerful, appreciative children, Kate, Julie, and Lori. Daddy and Mommy worked hard on this book, and you can work hard on things too. Make time to listen, speak, read, and write. I love you.

It is an immeasurable privilege to share my life and work with such wonderful people, and I profoundly appreciate each of you.

But my deepest appreciation, my most humble thanks, and all of my love, go to my wife Eileen. She alone truly understands what it meant for me to write this book. For years, she has tolerated burdens that would have exhausted my patience in a week if our roles had been reversed. Her loving support, encouragement, and selflessness deserve a book of their own. I will treasure her example for the rest of my life.

Spotlight for Typographics

2018-06-16T17:00:00Z

I was on standby to do a “spotlight” at Typographics — a quick word at the microphone in between the main conference speakers. They didn’t need me after all, but here’s what I would have said:

Hi everyone, my name is Tim Brown. I started my career as a web designer, and now I’m Head of Typography at Adobe. If you want to know me better, check out Typekit Practice or read an article I wrote, Paying for Type.

I wanted to thank all of you for your patience with Adobe, and your faith in our Type team. Thank you for the opportunity to affect the business of type design and the practice of typography. This is a very special moment in history for both.

And I need your help. I wrote a book called Flexible Typesetting, for A Book Apart, because the web has changed typography. I need you to read this book so that we can talk.

Right now, we don't have words to describe the work we're doing when we set type in multidimensional, relative ways. And we don't have the right tools for doing that work. Join me in understanding what has changed and figuring out what we need.

This is my first time at Typographics, and it has been excellent. Thank you for your time, and thanks to the folks at Cooper for putting on an incredible event.

And it really was incredible. Beautiful summer days in the heart of New York City, in historic buildings of The Cooper Union.

I especially enjoyed TypeLab – the chill, alternative track of the conference – with its informal presentations, demos, discussion, and live lettering. Whiteboards & chalkboards everywhere. Saw friends I hadn’t seen in years, and met some great new ones. Definitely going to attend again.

2017–2018 quarterly catch-up

2018-05-27T17:00:00Z

A special quadruple quarterly report (lol). I got way behind on this sort of planning. Turns out having a baby while writing a book and working full-time makes you sorta busy. Here are some things I did in the past year, as well as older accomplishments less recent (that I am retiring from the home page).

Done over the past year

Finished writing a book about flexible typesetting for A Book Apart. May 2018
Launched Font Packs. May 2018
Helped release Minion 3 by Robert Slimbach (check out the preview page). Apr 2018
Renovated our front porch. Oct 2017
Welcomed my third daughter into the world! Jun 2017

From a while ago

Retiring this stuff from Recently:

Led several teams of people to design new typography tools. May 2017
Reorganized & painted bedrooms. May 2017
Built basement shelves like this. Apr 2017
Read Zita the Spacegirl books (Legends/Return) with my kids. Mar 2017
Gave a virtual seminar at UIE’s UX Symposium. Mar 2017
Got through a bout of Lyme disease. Feb 2017
Set a variety of projects in motion. Jan 2017
Bought new smoke detectors. (Replace yours every 10 years.) Dec 2016
Built a workbench. Dec 2016
Voted, then spent time processing the election results. Nov 2016
Helped launch Typekit Marketplace and Typekit Platform at Adobe MAX. Nov 2016
Talked about variable fonts with Jeff Veen on his podcast, Presentable. Oct 2016

Coming soon: Flexible Typesetting

2018-05-25T17:00:00Z

It is a beautiful book, well-conceived, painstakingly executed with a fine attention to detail. I can't believe that you want to do web design: what a horrible place to do fine typography, a refined practice for which you obviously have an eye.

That’s a note from one of my favorite teachers, Clifton Meador, about my final project one semester (a typeset, bound book). I learned so much from Clif, and I can understand why he felt that way about web design. But 15 years ago, when I received that note, I felt there was something special about typography on the web.

Now, after building dozens of websites, learning a lot, and helping many people use fonts as Head of Typography at Adobe, I know why typography on the web is so special. So, I wrote a book to explain it.

My new book is called Flexible Typesetting, and it will be published by A Book Apart this summer. I absolutely cannot wait for you to read it, because we have so much to talk about. That’s all I’ll say for now. Follow @typesetting and @abookapart on Twitter. And for a sneak preview of the book, listen to Shop Talk Show episode #314.

Update: A Book Apart #27, Flexible Typesetting.

RSS Club

2018-02-12T17:00:00Z

Oh, I like this RSS Club idea very much. What a bunch of nerds we are. Thanks to Dave for the fun idea! I don't have much to say right now, but I wanted to get this set up properly.

Got an iPad a week or two ago, and sorta bummed about my site setup. I use Jekyll and GitHub, but I don't have any kind of deployment in place — I just FTP up the compiled Jekyll. But I can't compile Jekyll on the iPad. I've considered setting up deployment from GitHub, like Pages with a custom domain, but then I'd either have to commit all the squirrelly, weird, hidden stuff on my site, or break all the links. That stuff is clearly important.

Adobe and NASA

2017-10-07T17:00:00Z

My colleague Sairus Patel recently attended an internal Adobe conference for principal scientists, and I loved this anecdote he returned with:

If you want to change the world by influencing people’s creativity, you join Adobe. Just like in the 60’s if you wanted to put a man on the moon, you joined NASA.

Resilient Web Design

2017-07-22T00:00:00Z

A little while ago, while I mowed the lawn, I listened to Jeremy Keith’s excellent Resilient Web Design. Jeremy often tells good stories about how the web came to be, and here he has distilled those into a great one, citing specific people’s contributions to the web’s existence and complexion, and using history as a means of laying out fundamental principles that ensure the web’s continued success — which is to say, human achievement.

On collaboration over time:

The history of human civilisation is a tale of cumulative effort. Each generation builds upon the work of their forebears. Sometimes the work takes a backward step. Sometimes we wander down dead ends. But we struggle on.

On control:

Relinquishing control does not mean relinquishing quality. Quite the opposite. In acknowledging the many unknowns involved in designing for the web, designers can craft in a resilient flexible way that is true to the medium.

On progressive enhancement:

This layered approach to the web allows the same content to be served up to a wide variety of people. But this doesn’t mean that everyone gets the same experience.

On the future:

I wish I could predict the future. The only thing that I can predict for sure is that things are going to change. I don’t know what kind of devices people will be using on the web. I don’t know what kind of software people will be using on the web. The future, like the web, is unknown.

Galapagos

2017-07-15T00:00:00Z

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut. What caught my attention most in this book was the narrative structure. The narrator has witnessed an entire timeline of events, but describes them in a patchwork, here and there, before things begin to fit together, hinting at this or that and providing clarity later. Along the way, there are thoughtful and humorous reflections on humanity.

I can see why reviewers liken Vonnegut to Mark Twain. They’re both humorous authors, although this novel is the only Vonnegut I’ve read, so I don’t know that he’s always like this. But it reminded me of this from Twain’s How to Tell a Story:

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular.

The Earthseed Series

2017-07-10T00:00:00Z

Great books. Very engaging pace, no boring spots. Reminded me of The Godfather movies, how the first book was the main story and the second book was a combination of flashbacks and present day. Such a shame about Lauren’s daughter and Marc. I felt bad about that, but if the story had wrapped up with a happier ending it wouldn’t have felt right.

Aside from being a good story, there was a lot to think about.

Like how Lauren cared about her idea more than her ego:

I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them. If it happens that there are other people outside somewhere preaching my truth, I’ll join them. Sower, p. 125

And how she absorbed storytelling from her father. Story was critical to gathering support for her ideas:

My father loved parables—stories that taught, stories that presented ideas and morals in ways that made pictures in people’s minds. … Because he believed stories were so important as teaching tools, I learned to pay more attention to them than I might have otherwise. Talents, p. 14

But could story have helped even more? Could she have spread her ideas differently? She wonders about this early in Talents, and I was thrilled to see where that went toward the end of the book.

My “talent,” going back to the parable of the talents, is Earthseed. And although I haven’t buried it in the ground, I have buried it here in these coastal mountains, where it can grow at about the same speed as our redwood trees. But what else could I have done? Talents, p. 21

It was interesting to see how Lauren planned for disruption:

We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!” Sower, p. 55

And her reflection on survival:

We’ve become very competent makers and repairers of small tools. We’ve survived as well as we have because we keep learning.

They serve as part of our thorn fence. Cactus by cactus, thornbush by thornbush, we’ve planted a living wall in the hills around Acorn. … It will, when it’s working well, encourage people to approach us by the easiest routes, and those we guard 24 hours a day. It’s always best to keep an eye on visitors. Talents, pp. 27–28

Related to survival, Lauren’s thoughts on hiding from the news:

Gray and Emery Mora and one or two others say news bullets are enough. They say detailed news doesn’t matter. Since we can’t change the stupid, greedy, vicious things that powerful people do, they think we should try to ignore them. No matter how many times we’re forced to admit we can’t really hide, some of us still find ways to try. Well, we can’t hide. So it’s best to pay attention to what goes on. The more we know, the better able we’ll be to survive. Talents, p. 81

These novels were published in the 90’s. Jarret is a candidate for US President. Take a look at the phrase he uses:

Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. ... “Help us to make America great again.” Talents, pp. 19–20

And Lauren’s take on the mindset of older people:

Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. Sower, p. 57

While we’re at it, here’s some more older-person thinking. Very similar to the vibe I got from older family members when I was trying to get my first design job — they hadn’t seen it done before, and had more faith in traditional institutions:

Bankole isn’t the only one of us who doesn’t see the possibility of doing anything he hasn’t seen done by others. And…although Bankole would never say this, I suspect that somewhere inside himself, he believes that large, important things are done only by powerful people in high positions far away from here. Therefore, what we do is, by definition, small and unimportant. Talents, p. 71

But it’s not just older folks. Some young folks grow up expecting a certain kind of success. When they don’t achieve it (because they can’t, because it’s an unreasonable expectation), they get depressed.

She wants a future she can understand and depend on—a future that looks a lot like her parents’ present. I don’t think that’s possible. Things are changing too much, too fast. Sower, p. 128

There’s an intriguing concept in the novels about company-towns — towns purchased and run by corporations. They appeal to people because of their relative stability and safety, but it comes at the cost of freedom.

That’s an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery. That might work in Christopher Donner’s America. Labor laws, state and federal, are not what they once were. Sower, p. 121

And this devastatingly, unfortunately, prescient observation about private education leading to widespread violence. America is headed this way, unless we revitalize public schools and pay teachers much greater respect:

And no one thought about what kind of society we were building with such stupid decisions. People who could afford to educate their children in private schools were glad to see the government finally stop wasting their tax money, educating other people’s children. They seemed to think they lived on Mars. They imagined that a country filled with poor, uneducated, unemployable people somehow wouldn’t hurt them!” Talents, p. 368

Lastly, shelter is good:

That night, I lay awake beside Bankole, listening to the sounds of the sea and the wind. They’re good sounds as long as you don’t have to be outside. Talents, p. 141

Thanks to Mandy Brown for recommending these books.

My friend’s daughter

2017-06-26T17:00:00Z

Today I sent this email to my family:

Hi family,

My friend Eric Meyer, who founded and runs An Event Apart with Zeldman, lost his daughter to cancer on her sixth birthday. It was heartbreaking. Eileen will tell you how upset it made me. Rebecca was Kate’s age.

Over the ten months following her sudden onset of cancer, the total cost of coverage was 1.6 million dollars. Eric’s and his wife’s small business insurance paid $991k. Without that insurance, he would have gone bankrupt and lost his home.

This could happen to any of us, and it will happen to many people if the senate passes their health bill, which is in truth a tax cut for rich people. Thankfully our democratic senators in New York are forcefully opposed to this bill.

Please, if you know people in other states, encourage them to demand that their republican senators vote NO. Encourage them to threaten with their future votes. Suggest this website, which makes calling your representatives super easy: http://5calls.org

Please do this even if it makes you feel uncomfortable. Shout it on Facebook. Email people. Spread the word about Eric’s story. Your action will mean the difference between life and death, health and hardship, for families and children all over this country.

Don’t let me down.

Tim

Reading and sharing

2017-06-23T17:00:00Z

I love to read. But taking time off work this week (to help my wife around the house as we prepare for our new baby) has given me a chance to reflect on how little reading I do.

When I am reading and sharing ideas about what I have read, I feel like my best self. I want more of that feeling. I want my children to see me reading, and I want to show respect to others by sharing my experiences.

I enjoy fiction, philosophy, and ideas about why the world is the way it is and what might happen next. Some books, I can’t put down. I read them in a day or two. Others are what I call “sipping” books, and I’ve been working on them for years.

Some of my favorite books are written in a kind of journal entry format. It follows that I enjoy keeping up with friends’ blogs. I study typography- and web-related books and blog posts, many of which are meant to be referenced or worked through, rather than read, but still give me the opportunity to think and share.

Got a Kindle this year. It’s a struggle to decide whether to read physical books (the feel, the sound, the smell), or read them on the Kindle (dictionary, highlights, access, no clutter). One thing I like about a physical book is that if I enjoy it I then have a reminder on the shelf, and something tangible to share with family and friends.

I’m wondering if acknowledging what I read, along with a substantial visual (a book cover image?) and any highlights or notes, could feel just as good as having a physical book. Mandy Brown’s A Working Library and Donny Truong’s book reviews are inspirational. I also like Marcin Wichary’s photos of piles of books.

Maybe I could list my piles of books here on my website, and link them to blog post entries with highlights/notes. Maybe I could even print some of those out, to keep on my shelf and share with others. That might make a pretty nice gift — a physical book or gift card, plus a printout of my highlights/notes from that book, and a word about why I think the person might enjoy it.

2017 Q1–Q2 report

2017-06-22T17:00:00Z

A special double quarterly report. Here are some things I did so far this year, as well as older accomplishments less recent (that I am retiring from the home page).

Done last quarter

Led several teams of people to design new typography tools. May 2017
Reorganized & painted bedrooms. May 2017
Built basement shelves like this. Apr 2017
Read Zita the Spacegirl books (Legends/Return) with my kids. Mar 2017
Gave a virtual seminar at UIE’s UX Symposium. Mar 2017
Got through a bout of Lyme disease. Feb 2017
Set a variety of projects in motion. Jan 2017

From a while ago

Retiring this stuff from Recently:

Helped announce variable fonts. Did an interview for Fast Company. Had an idea about specifying CSS instances relative to an “anchor point”. Sep 2016
Noticed that type sized in pixels or viewport units ignores user font-size preferences. Sep 2016
Wrote about flexible typography with CSS locks See the responses from Jake Giltsoff and Bram Stein. Aug 2016
Tried using Anchor.fm to share audio thoughts about fallback fonts, display text, and reading distance. Aug 2016
Spoke at the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup in Kingston, NY (just a block away from my office). Jul 2016
Finally hung the glass sign I gilded in John Downer’s 2011 TypeCon workshop. Jul 2016

2016 Q4 report

2017-01-27T17:00:00Z

Time for another quarterly report. I'll list some things I did in the past few months, and retire accomplishments less recent.

Done last quarter

Bought new smoke detectors. (Replace yours every 10 years.) Dec 2016
Built a workbench. Dec 2016
Voted, then spent time processing the election results. Nov 2016
Helped launch Typekit Marketplace and Typekit Platform at Adobe MAX. Nov 2016
Talked about variable fonts with Jeff Veen on his podcast, Presentable. Oct 2016

From a while ago

Retiring this stuff from Recently (plus the stuff from Q2 2016):

Moved my family photos and videos to a network attached storage drive with redundancy (thanks Ryan!) and into Apple’s Photos service for easy access. Mar 2016
Made my newest talk, Typesetting Body Text, free on Vimeo. Feb 2016
Drove a fire truck. Feb 2016
Studied Christopher Alexander’s books: The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment. Jan 2016

Quarterly report

2016-10-10T17:00:00Z

Time for another quarterly report. I'll list some things I did in the past few months, and retire accomplishments less recent.

Done last quarter

Helped announce variable fonts. Did an interview for Fast Company. Had an idea about specifying CSS instances relative to an “anchor point”. Sep 2016
Noticed that type sized in pixels or viewport units ignores user font-size preferences. Sep 2016
Wrote about flexible typography with CSS locks See the responses from Jake Giltsoff and Bram Stein. Aug 2016
Tried using Anchor.fm to share audio thoughts about fallback fonts, display text, and reading distance. Aug 2016
Spoke at the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup in Kingston, NY (just a block away from my office). Jul 2016
Finally hung the glass sign I gilded in John Downer’s 2011 TypeCon workshop. Jul 2016

From a while ago

Retiring this stuff from Recently:

Wrote & published a lesson at Typekit Practice: Caring about OpenType features. Lots of people helped make it happen. Dec 2015
Launched Typography Supply, an inventory of typographic tools. (with Andrew Johnson) Dec 2015
Redesigned this website. Dec 2015
Managed the introduction and announcement of Frere-Jones Type on Typekit. Dec 2015
Managed the introduction and announcement of Morisawa fonts on Typekit. Oct 2015
Presented a UIE virtual seminar on typesetting body text. The crew at UIE is incredibly professional, and this was a great experience. Oct 2015
Wrote Math is not God for Dear Design Student. Sep 2015
Wrote Uncertainty is part of the job for Dear Design Student. Aug 2015
Wrote The web is terrible for typography! for Dear Design Student. Jul 2015

Blueprint For Citizenship

2016-07-28T17:00:00Z

Following up on the introductory note in my last post about politics, I thought of one way I would like to become more responsible as a citizen. It’s something I’ve had in mind for a while, and something that will take a lot of time, but I’d like to start.

I admire President Obama for a number of reasons, but one early thing that he did really stuck with me in particular. He shared The Blueprint For Change, a written account of various issues and his position on each one.

President Obama’s Blueprint For Change (PDF)

Here’s my plan

I’d like to make my own blueprint. A "Blueprint For Citizenship". Because when I read the news, I have feelings — but I rarely do anything about those feelings. I never bother to articulate them. I just go back to my own work, my own life. That doesn’t feel like good citizenship.

To sprinkle a bit of typography in here, Jan Tschichold wrote:

Feelings remain rather unproductive unless they can inspire a secure judgment. Feelings have to mature into knowledge about the consequences of [decisions].

Voting, and arguing about politics, based on feelings is immature. I would rather vote using knowledge about the consequences of putting certain individuals in charge to represent me.

So I got started today by visiting this page at WhiteHouse.gov about state and local government. I found two kinds of things on that page that are going to help me with my personal Blueprint.

First, mixed into the text, I found a variety of government institutions and positions mentioned (lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, auditors, commissioners, senate, assembly, etc.). I’m going to learn more about these, and specifically the ones in my own community.

Secondly, in the footer of the page there’s a list of issues (which can also be found here). I’m going to use this list, as well as President Obama’s original Blueprint, to come up with my own list of issues, so that I can gradually articulate my position on each one.

It’s embarrassing to admit that I have been an irresponsible citizen. I wish that I had paid more attention in school, and in scouts. Community stuff always bored me. I didn’t realize how much my attention mattered. But I want to be better. Owning my shortcomings is a good first step, and if I can encourage others by sharing these ideas about how I’m trying to change — even better.

Politics

2016-07-24T17:00:00Z

“I hope to be a more responsible citizen at some point,” is something I wrote when I recently redesigned this site. It’s true, I do, although I’m not exactly sure what that means. Paying closer attention to my community? Participating in political processes like voting? Helping others do the same? I’m not sure how best my abilities can serve us.

Meanwhile, I thought I’d share with you something that I do right now. Years ago I set up a mailing list for my family and close friends. I mostly use it to send them photos of my kids, but occasionally I’ll use it to send excerpts of articles that I feel are important.

I avoid in-person discussions about politics; however, I find reading and sharing text to be a rewarding and thoughtful exercise. So, today I sent three emails to my family. I did this in the same way that I began writing about typography — by sharing excerpts of things I read, not my own writing.

Here are the emails I sent today:

History tells us what will happen next

Trump says he will Make America Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well any statistics. He is using passion, anger, and rhetoric in the same way all his predecessors did — a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself. You can blame society, politicians, the media, for America getting to the point that it’s ready for Trump, but the bigger historical picture is that history generally plays out the same way each time someone like him becomes the boss.

On a wider stage, zoom out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps and Putins are waiting in the wings, in fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.

We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way — all things are connected and affecting each other. (Medium)

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome.

And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization.

...

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war? In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.

But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred.

…

What makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics is his response to enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way.

Supporters have attacked hecklers with sometimes stunning ferocity. Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest.

...

Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. (New York Magazine)

Responding to cruelty with kindness

Normally I would have blocked him, or sent him something cutting & then blocked him. But for some reason—maybe because I heard this week's This American Life, which discusses responding to cruelty with kindness...or maybe because he wasn't all-CAPS-ing epithets at me—I didn't block him. I wrote this... (link now broken, unfortunately)

Quarterly report

2016-07-11T17:00:00Z

Time for a quarterly report. I’ll list some things I did in the past few months, and retire accomplishments less recent.

Done last quarter

Shared ideas about new typographic tools with Adobe design leadership. Imagine the previous bullet about algorithms and machine learning, plus my thoughts over at Universal Typography. June 2016
Talked separately with the Typekit team, Adobe researchers, and Jon Gold (who recently penned a couple of great blog posts), about algorithmic typography and machine learning. June 2016
Started this blog. Hello world. May 2016
Called in to Shop Talk Show. Chris and Dave were kind enough to share my thoughts on modular scales and vertical rhythm. May 2016
Worked on design patterns for Typekit integrations. More about that later this year. April 2016

From a while ago

Retiring this stuff from Recently:

Talked with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert on Shop Talk Show #172. This was amazing! I’m a huge fan of the show. Jun 2015
Spoke at An Event Apart San Diego. Thanks, as always, to Toby, Marci, Stephen, Mike, Sean, Eric, and Jeffrey. Nothing like AEA. Jun 2015
Wrote Good looking typography for Dear Design Student. May 2015
Wrote Paying for type for Dear Design Student. Apr 2015
Gave the closing talk at Industry. Gavin Elliot puts on a stellar event, and Newcastle Upon Tyne is a beautiful place. Apr 2015
Spoke at An Event Apart Seattle. Amazing event, beautiful city, very cool hotel, and the best speakers dinner ever. Mar 2015
Spoke at An Event Apart Atlanta. Demonstrated a new kind of typesetting tool that uses font metrics to offer recommended font-sizes, line lengths, and line heights, and simulates the result in multiple contexts at once. Feb 2015
Wrote about Typekit’s ethos. Feb 2015

Remember this moment

2016-06-22T17:00:00Z

Every day, I wake up and can’t wait to start work. It’s been that way for at least ten years. This is such an exciting moment. For sharing ideas, making tools, and actually practicing typography. We are designing in the fourth dimension, and we are disoriented.

Later, when we look back, I want to remember that I tried hard to understand this moment's historical significance, and its potential to influence the future, as I decided how to spend my time. I want to remember that I was careful. That I paid attention. That I enjoyed trying to orient myself.

And I want to remember that it was incredibly frustrating. My brain and hands want to design with tools that don’t exist yet. Only time and effort will make those tools real, and waiting – having to spend my life convincing others about the significance of this moment, and having to refocus my energy repeatedly as we crawl toward answers – is agonizing.

Making time to read

2016-05-27T17:00:00Z

My work at Typekit has been intense lately because we’re making big changes, and that means lots more communication to coordinate everybody (plus, you know, doing the work we communicate about). I have more active side projects than ever, and they're going well. My schedule works for me. I have plenty of time with family and friends.

But I don’t read or study the work of others as much as I used to. I don't pay attention to other people the way I used to, and I don't like this at all. Reading blog posts and articles is how I got where I am, professionally. It's why I have the ideas I have, and it's the basis of my relationships with good people (“Hey, I liked what you wrote...”). Playing with a technique or an idea somebody shared has always helped me think.

Reading time can be hard to justify, even to oneself. There is no deadline. It's not going to move any immediate projects forward (most likely). And it often feels like a waste of time, especially if your interests are diverse. But it's important. Most great work is the product of collaborative thinking.

Jeffrey said that if you don't write, you don't know what you think. Well, if you don't read, you don't know what you could think.

Pressure calendar

2016-05-09T17:00:00Z

Sometimes I make a pressure calendar — a quick, disposable calendar that helps me think clearly when I feel overwhelmed. Here’s one I made the other day.

I use pressure calendars when my to-do list is full of tasks that seem equally important, or tasks that could each consume all of my available time (like when I have speaking engagements or deadlines approaching). A pressure calendar shows me how much time I have, and helps me spend that time wisely.

It’s a printout from my calendar app, so for starters I can see scheduled commitments. If I have family visiting for a few days, for example, I know I won’t be working in the morning on those days. If I have travel plans, I know I’ll spend the night before packing. And so on.

I draw horizontal lines on the printout to divide days into thirds. Into the available chunks, I pencil in tasks. This helps me judge available time realistically, because I know I can expect four hours of productive time in each third of a calendar day. What can I get done in four hours?

In practice, things never go exactly according to my penciled-in plan. Stuff happens, so I cross off the days that have passed, erase as needed, and sketch out new plans. Although this kind of editing can get messy, it helps to be able to wrap my head around my tasks in a time-related way without having to use software. Hassles and overhead that wouldn’t normally bother me can really stress me out when I’m under pressure.

I refer to the pressure calendar constantly until I no longer feel overwhelmed — and then it’s amazing. Amazing to see how much I accomplished in a short span of time. Amazing to reflect on the stress I felt. And amazing to take all that stress, crumple it up, and toss it in the trash.

Hello world

2016-05-04T17:00:00Z

Now I have a personal blog. Thanks for reading. Look, it even has an RSS feed. I don't know what will go here yet. Probably the sort of things I put in personal stuff and recently.

I have wanted to start this for a while. Feels good. Making websites is harder than it used to be, but better, and I still love doing it. Nothing like having your own place, and making it yours.

On Web Typography

2014-08-06T00:00:00Z

Jason Santa Maria wrote a book on web typography.

To say that Jason’s ideas and designs have influenced me is an understatement. I have followed his blog since version three. Years later, we started talking and he encouraged me to write for A List Apart. Soon after, we started working together on Typekit. I can show you many instances of my work that improved dramatically because of his feedback or example.

That same influence pervades this book. It’s not only an education in solid typographic fundamentals, written by a designer who deeply understands the web and has profound respect for design history — it’s a sneak peek at the way Jason practices design, full of advice so great and so plain that you simultaneously smile and smack your forehead because now you get it.

Read an excerpt, and buy the book.

On headlines:

Many folks, myself included, tend to use sans serifs for headlines. It comes down to simple geometry: most sans serifs can be packed in tighter than serifs because the letters take up less space. This allows for more characters per line and a larger type size.

On margins:

Without a healthy margin around our text, our words will feel congested like a highway on-ramp at rush hour. In general, I like to allot at least around 1.5–2 ems of margin around body text.

On word association as a method for choosing typefaces:

Rather than scrolling endlessly through pages of typefaces and getting tangled up thinking, “Is this the right one?”, come at it from a different angle. Ask yourself: what do I want my design to convey? Think of words that describe the feelings or moods you’d like to impart.

On typographic systems:

Like any good system, typography provides a method to accomplish a task. A typographic system establishes hierarchy, meaning it helps us prioritize content based on individual elements and relationships between them. It also helps our readers easily scan chunks of information and understand what they’re looking at. When done right, a typographic system feels intuitive, like an unspoken set of instructions.

On balance in typography:

Typography is a pursuit that combines the best of history, writing, math, artistry, and craft. No one thing rules over another. Sometimes the math won’t add up, but the type may look right. When that happens, you need to rely on your instincts.

Originally published on Medium.

Molten leading (or, fluid line-height)

2012-02-03T17:00:00Z

This is not a demo. I’m only explaining a need as I see it. I don’t have the JS chops to make it real. Maybe you do?

Updates

Mat Marquis made Molten Leading and this nifty demo
Jim Jeffers made jQuery-minLineHeight

Original post

When a responsive composition meets a viewport, there are different ways to fill space. What interests me most here is a fundamental triadic relationship in typesetting — that of a text’s font size, line height, and line length. Adjusting any one of these elements without also adjusting the others is a recipe for uncomfortable reading, which is one reason designers have such a difficult time with fluid web layout.

One way to fill space is to scale text while keeping its proportions intact. This preserves the size/leading/measure relationship, and can work really well for some experiences (see Mark Hurrell’s post on orientation and fluid grids). But an increase in font size can be jarring to readers; A larger font size affects reading distance comfort. If I were to rotate my iPad while reading, and the text scaled up, I can imagine needing to hold the device a few inches farther away as a result. This is not what designers want to have happen to text intended for reading.

In retrospect, this was a bad example. Some designers and readers may not want this to happen, but others epxect rotating a device to scale the type.

Another way to fill space is to use fluid widths. The problem in this case is that CSS line-height is tied to font-size, which is rooted in browser font sizing and environmental resolution, while line length is based on width, which is rooted in viewport dimensions. So a carefully balanced relationship among font size, line height, and line length easily breaks down. We end up with line lengths that feel too long, font sizes that seem too small, line spacing that feels too tight or loose.

What we need is a fluid way to set line height. Web designers should be able to define line height as a range, like we do with min- and max-width. I made a simple page to visualize how I’m thinking about this. Molten leading would maintain a specific font-size while adjusting line-height based on width. In other words, I would essentially like to tween a paragraph from this:

width: 15em;
line-height: 1.3;

To this:

width: 36em;
line-height: 1.4;

So that it would be possible to find line height dynamically at any given point in between:

width: 30em;
line-height: 1.371428571;

To find that line-height value, I used this formula: ((current width − min-width)/(max-width − min-width)) × (line-height − min-line-height) + min-line-height = line-height. With actual values, that’s: ((30em−15em)/(36em−15em)) × (1.4−1.3) + 1.3 = 1.371428571.

What I’m not sure about is how to get the min/max widths of an element that are needed for this formula. If CSS authors routinely defined elements’ min-width, max-width, line-height, and some kind of min-line-height, that’d of course be ideal for this:

p {
  max-width: 36rem;
  min-width: 15rem;
  line-height: 1.4;
  -js-min-line-height: 1.3;
  }

But that’s not always practical. Often, the width limits of a given text block will be determined by percentage-based inheritance (66% of the parent element, which is 85% of its parent element…). It’d take some box model math to identify those narrow/wide limits. A script would have to figure out, for a given element, how wide/narrow can this grow?

If it’s possible to glean that information from existing CSS rules, then the only thing designers would need to define explicitly is a minimum line height. That value could be passed as a function argument, or maybe found in the CSS by looking for that -js-min-line-height rule in my example above.

This feels like a step toward more natural typographic behavior on the web. I’m just not sure where to go from here.

Also, for what it’s worth, Andy Clarke talked about this in 2010. His solution was to use media queries:

Type tip: As the width of the measure (line width) becomes wider, leading (line-height) should be increased to aid readability.

How can we solve this, and adjust the amount of leading as the width of a browser window changes? With CSS3 Media Queries.

What I’m talking about is augmenting CSS with range rules (effectively, min/max line-height) that don’t yet exist, but should for the sake of fluidity.

Breakpoints and range rules

2012-01-27T17:00:00Z

Think about the responsive nature of any particular web experience as a continuum of being. Along this continuum, on one axis, the experience can grow wide or narrow. Along a different axis, it can be near or far. Along a still different axis, it can be coarse or fine. There are many axes.

As a designed experience moves along a particular axis, it grows uncomfortable for any number of reasons: paragraphs feel too narrow or wide; font size feels too large or too small; elements touch or become awkwardly distant from one another. To cope with this discomfort, we use breakpoints. Breakpoints are moments of change. They allow us to make design adjustments that are only possible by changing the value or presence of CSS properties. We should invoke breakpoints as they are needed by our designs.

However, some design adjustments just happen in ordinary CSS. Properties like floats, positioning, minimum/maximum widths, and relative units of measurement (percentages, em, rem, unitless line-height) help us negotiate the collective moments between and among breakpoints. Think of these as range rules. Range rules are behavioral limits baked into CSS. For instance, if a column uses a min-width and/or max-width, these are rules that govern its range of motion. When elements in a layout float, but then bump against the limits of adjacent elements, this is a natural part of CSS — there is a range of acceptable behavior.

Range rules are not bounded by breakpoints. A fluid composition could use no breakpoints at all, and still the natural interplay of CSS behaviors could be evident. In a case like this, elements could stack, float, reflow, and resize, with all behavior governed by flexible CSS rules that permit a range of possible existence.

Range rules are also permeable. Breakpoints can trigger changes at any point along any axis of an experience continuum, and have the potential to both purposefully modify and accidentally disrupt the range rules they intersect. For instance, a breakpoint may cause a composition's font size to increase after a certain viewport width is reached, and this may occur before or after a paragraph within that composition has reached its max-width. And if that same paragraph's max-width is em-based, the rule that governs its range now has different absolute limits than it once did (it can grow wider now, because the unit on which it is based has become larger).

Responsive design is about rules, not truths. When we design responsively, maybe it would help to think of elements in a composition as having range rules that coexist and do not necessarily align, rather than treating the continuum of experience between breakpoints as something to be hopped over.

Does this make sense?

I wrote this post in a pretty authoritative tone, but I don't exactly mean it that way. I found it most comfortable to write as if I were, like, explaining the scientific properties of web design. I am still not sure that this makes sense. Please let me know what you think.

Thanks to Ray Schwartz and Chris Silverman for their feedback and general awesomeness. Thanks also to Mark Boulton, Nathan Ford, and Alex Morris, whose tweets today helped motivate me to articulate this all (those guys are incredible, they were already writing about zones/ranges last year!).

New: Notes blog

2009-04-21T17:00:00Z

When I started writing Nice Web Type in college, I did not want to blog. Seven years, a backpack full of web typography resources, some moleskines full of thoughts, and time spent with a great bookmarking service can change one's mind.

It is impossible to know everything. I never wanted to blog because I feared I had neither an expert nor a unique voice to lend. So I read, and learned, a lot.

When I was privileged to use the bookmarking service Ma.gnolia, I began to share the things I was reading and the ways in which I interpreted those things. I did not want to stop! I contributed bookmarks to Ma.gnolia from 2006–2009. Then, in February of 2009, Ma.gnolia experienced severe data loss and ceased to exist.

But along the way I changed my mind about blogging.

I still dislike the term. Typing it makes my fingers feel lethargic, and I try at all costs to avoid saying it out loud. But blogging is just a different kind of sharing, and I thought of a way it can work for me. For now anyway, it can be like glue.

When I find a suitable replacement for Ma.gnolia, Nice Web Type's Notes blog can help you, my reader, stay abreast of migrated bookmarks. Notes will also allow me to bind bookmarks together by comparison, contextualization, or just added emphasis via a blog post (in addition to a bookmark in some service).

I'm still no expert, and I doubt that what I have to say hasn't already been said. But what I can do is take the nuggets I know about and show them to you. Maybe my own brand of learning-in-public can be for you what so many websites have been for me.

Want to see my notes?

Tim Brown, organized

Form and feeling

Daily cultural updates with AI

How I set up daily cultural updates

Pableaux’s Cajun Cleanup

Cooking Up a Turkey Bone Gumbo

Turkey Broth

Turkey Bone Gumbo

Updates

D&D with ChatGPT

Practicing Typography 003

Typography Advisor GPT

Practicing Typography 002

Practicing Typography podcast

Flexible Typesetting is now yours, for free

Journal, 25 May

Journal, 3 May

Smart typography tools

Time with my family

Blogroll update, March 2024

Journal, 25 January

Human existence should be like a river

The place isn’t the thing

Practicing Typography Basics

Budgeting with YNAB

Journal, 29 December

Visionaries

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Drawing comics

Feedback is a gift

Ridiculous, at first

You must shift your focus

Journal, 17 December

Managers should ask

Without that trust

Personal branding as a contribution

CSS forces

Helpful resources on racism & police reform from Jason Kottke

Using variable fonts should be easier and more fun

National Teacher Appreciation Week 2019 deal for educators

Thank you!

My teachers

January deal for educators

Blogroll update

Well, that was excellent

Trying out an iOS publishing setup

Frank Chimero’s ladder

I sorta left Twitter

Hey Siri, take a memo

Tempo experiments

His Dark Materials

Revamping gender in old children’s stories

Flexible Typesetting Acknowledgements

Spotlight for Typographics

2017–2018 quarterly catch-up

Done over the past year

From a while ago

Coming soon: Flexible Typesetting

RSS Club

Blogroll, episode two

Adobe and NASA

Blogroll

Resilient Web Design

Galapagos

The Earthseed Series

My friend’s daughter

Reading and sharing

2017 Q1–Q2 report

Done last quarter

From a while ago

2016 Q4 report

Done last quarter

From a while ago

Quarterly report

Done last quarter

From a while ago

Blueprint For Citizenship

Here’s my plan

Politics

History tells us what will happen next