Fresh faces

Very proud to be featured in this month’s Fresh Fonts newsletter. As I’ve mentioned before, the typefaces on Shortform—MD Lórien and MD Nichrome—both came from Fresh Fonts; Noemi recommended them as a specific pairing.

I was building Shortform at the time and trying to settle on the typography. I’d tried a couple of different typefaces, and while they were nice, I didn’t feel like they worked. The moment I tested the Mass-Driver ones in the inspector, I knew I was looking at the right combination. Something about it just clicked.

I don’t even know how long I’ve been a member of Fresh Fonts. It’s a great resource—monthly free font, highlights of new releases, and links to free and open-source fonts that I didn’t know about. Highly recommend it.

Nice symbols

Just noticed that #Apple refreshed the alphanumeric symbols in its Unicode character set. I’m seeing the new characters on iOS 17 and macOS 13 (Sonoma). The following examples are from yaytext.com (colored backgrounds removed for legibility):

  • Serif, bold:
    • formerly: Times New Roman
    • now: something new (it’s not New York or Source Serif)
  • Serif, italic: still Times New Roman
  • Serif, bold-italic:
    • formerly: Times New Roman
    • now: something new
  • Sans, all styles:
    • formerly: something I can’t identify
    • now: pretty sure that’s Source Sans
  • Monospace:
    • formerly: CMU Typewriter Text Light
    • now: something new

Looks like they also updated the cursive and blackletter characters as well.

That’s a pretty subtle change. I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere. Apple has a history of paying attention to small refinements, so it wouldn’t be out of character for them to just do this because the new letters look better.

I wonder, though, if Apple was also considering how people commonly use these characters for bold and italic text in situations where text formatting isn’t supported, like social media posts. The earlier alphanumeric symbols often don’t look great when used in sentences—they’re choppy and irregular. Apple’s new symbols look a lot smoother.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. If the earlier Unicode characters looked rough, it’s because they were never meant to be applied to language at all; they’re intended to be mathematical symbols, used mainly in equations. Note in the images, for example, how the kerning is off on the lowercase italic serif f. That’s not really an f—it’s U+1D453: Mathematical Italic Small F, used for functions. (Ab)using these characters to apply styles to regular text is bad for accessibility and you should not do that.

Still, I’m impressed. I particularly love the redesigned #monospace. I wish that was its own typeface. Good classic typewriter faces are hard to find; I’ve tried. Most of the ones I’ve found are either (1) based on grungy scans of actual typewriter lettering—fine for novelty designs and attempts at period-specific documents, not good for longform content—or (2) variations of Courier. Classic #typewriter faces—the ones that use ball terminals and look like they came from an Underwood Number 5, not a Selectric—are pretty rare.

The nice ones I’m aware of:

  • Pitch, by Klim – commercial
  • DSE Typewriter – free
  • TT2020 – free (not to be confused with VT220, another ancient word-processing contraption whose native typeface is close to my heart, albeit for entirely different reasons)

It’s true that the Selectric did offer some classic faces, like Pica and Elite. Most of the Selectric’s typefaces look pretty modern though.

Desert Bunds

Any video that’s about somebody seeing something weird on Google Maps and digging into it fascinates me. Christophe Haubursin’s show Tunnel Vision investigates the purpose behind some odd patterns in the Iranian desert.

Something about the style of the video felt strangely familiar to me, so I looked over the other videos Haubursin—a senior producer for #Vox’s video team—created for Vox. Sure enough, he did What’s inside this crater in Madagascar?, which is also highly worth watching.

I think the satellite and street-view imagery provided by Google Maps is one of the most under-appreciated resources on the internet. Similar to #Wikipedia, most of us probably use it primarily when we need to look up something specific, but you really could—and I do—spend hours just browsing it. It’s a view of the world—the entire planet!—that even just forty years ago would have seemed near-godlike in scope and power.

A Grand Day In

Apple Music has a surprisingly wide selection of Wallace and Gromit theme song covers, and today I’m listening to all of them:

And of course there’s this one-hour version of the original main theme. (Not sure if this is consistent enough to be a rule, but it does appear to be the case that for a lot of popular songs/themes, someone has done a one-hour version of them: see X-Files, Star Trek, etc.)

Wide blue yonder

This is neat. Someone’s building a image-focused app for Bluesky. It’s not intended to be an #Instagram clone, but you can see some resemblances.

Folks on #Mastodon and #Pixelfed might have noticed that Pixelfed has been getting some attention recently. I’ve been on Pixelfed for a little while, but for most of the time I was on there, I didn’t see a lot of adoption. That’s changing, especially as Pixelfed finally released an iOS app. Pixelfed is ActivityPub-based, so it was already possible to use Pixelfed via fediverse apps like Tusker, but a native app is the first thing potential users will look for. I’d been using the beta version on Test Flight; it’s not bad.

I would love to see more diversity in photo-sharing services. I always thought it was a shame that Flickr’s fortunes sunk the way they did.

(Glass is worth considering also.)

The Dock

25 years ago today, Steve Jobs revealed the new face of macOS: Aqua.

I didn’t see that demo, but I remember the moment I first saw Aqua. My dad showed me some screenshots in the New York Times one evening. I couldn’t stop looking at it—I’d never seen anything like it. I’d been fascinated with user interface #design for years at that point, and it hadn’t occurred to me that a computer could look like that. (I was still in high school.)

Former #Apple engineer James Thomson remembers that moment for a different reason: he was responsible for a pretty visible piece of Mac OS X. The Dock was one of the most notable new pieces of UI furniture in Mac OS X, replacing the top-right Finder menu that let you switch between active programs and making it a lot easier to get to your most frequently used apps. If anything melted down when Steve was showing off the Dock, Thomson’s name was on it.

The Aqua screenshots I saw were not from that demo, since I remember the Dock looking like the Dock we know: icons sitting on top of the white pinstriped background, rather than each icon having its own background. (I distinctly remember the magnification effect.) Nevertheless, the pre-Public Beta dock was interesting in its own right. Anyone who’s familiar with NeXTSTEP will recognize the influence.

I always enjoy these little flickers of how things happened behind the curtain, but I’m especially fascinated by the stories behind mundane things—the unglamorous Apple designs you barely think about, the so-fundamental-as-to-be-nearly-invisible elements like the Dock. I hadn’t known who designed the Dock (Bas Ording, who’s made a few other significant contributions to Apple UI design, such as text selection and the now-ubiquitous rubber-band effect), or that the Dock was codenamed Überbar, or that it was prototyped in Macromedia Director. I wish there was something like folklore.org for contemporary Apple products.

Squidpatterns

A collection of colored pixel-art patterns, some abstract and some showing flowers.

Back in the day—in this case, the early ’00s—there was a guy who did these incredibly ornate #pixelart patterns and just gave them away. That was it. That was the site.

I’ve been trying to remember the name of this site for what feels like years. It was called something unusual, and I finally, after some strategically-minded googling, located it: squidfingers.com, by Travis Beckham. Of course it’s different now. But this being the internet, someone archived it, and you can see his remarkable work here.

Something about the whole thing feels very #old-web for some reason. I don’t know. I’m sure designers still do this. I just associate Squidfingers-type projects with the earlier, more experimental web.

File over app

Steph Ango, on Mastodon:

The accounting tool Bench shut down with no warning 3 days before the end of the year. They had raised $110m in venture capital.

The app is no longer accessible. There will be a way to export your data, but it’s not available yet.

File over app is not just for individuals.

File over app is why I use Obsidian, iA Writer, and (sometimes) AnyType. If my data isn’t sitting on my hard drive in a format I can read, it’s not mine. While I have to use cloud-based services for work, like Slack and Google Docs, I don’t entirely trust them.

I think the Web 2.0 era, despite at least one early cautionary tale, made us entirely too comfortable storing our lives on other peoples’ hard drives. I’d like to see that mindset reversed. Tools like Obsidian—and the larger shift towards more open, decentralized social media technology—feels like a step in the right direction.

Your favorite movie is vertical now

A friend recently shared this video from Kendra Gaylord, describing how your favorite movie is vertical now, courtesy of #AI —and what is lost in the process:

In movies, every time something is filmed, it’s memorializing a lot: the actors, the location, the way we talk and write and joke. Even though it’s fiction, it’s still a document, and if you mess with that document too much, it doesn’t represent all of those things anymore.

One of the most perverse revelations here is that the AI-generated version felt more realistic to people simply by virtue of being vertical; the same aspect ratio in which we experience social media videos. Our window to reality is portrait-shaped.

minidisc.pics

A grid of six minidisc cover designs. They are colorful, and have interesting graphics: a white and black geometric pattern, a red pixel-art version of the Mona Lisa, yellow and green polka dots, etc.

Matt Sephton shared something pretty cool: someone named asivery built a site devoted to the MiniDisc, showcasing all the different #MiniDisc packaging designs (and players) from the early ’90s through 2013 or so. Photos taken by Dan Marker-Moore.

When I think of ’90s–00s packaging and industrial design, the first thing that comes to mind is the bright, translucent colors that everyone started using after the #iMac came out in 1998. Reviewing the collection here, it’s interesting to note the presence of a lot of translucent Bondi blue several years before Apple made that color ubiquitous.

I rarely use physical media anymore (does anyone?) so it’s hard to compare, say, a CD case design from 2002 with a contemporary one. Nevertheless, I’ve had a sense that industrial #design has been getting more austere—i.e. less interesting—for a while now: curves, color, and translucency giving way to boxes, grayscale, and shiny surfaces.

minidisc.pics is a cool reminder that there was a time when tech products didn’t just look sleek and powerful, they looked fun.