typography

A deep dive into Gorton, an unsung font used on keyboards and throughout New York City, exploring its quirks, history, and ubiquity.

An appreciation of typography in Blade Runner's title cards, alongside a personal exploration of fixed-width typefaces for coding in the terminal.

ShieldFont is a typeface and toolkit that protects written content from unauthorized AI training by subtly swapping words with fluent, false decoys that poison scraped datasets, while keeping the real text readable for humans and screen readers.

TypeStax is a type scale generator that wraps a functional design tool in a vintage audio hardware-styled interface, making typography scaling feel tactile and playful.

ReDesign is an agentic framework that recovers editable layer hierarchies from raster images by selecting and composing specialized tools across modalities, introducing graceful verification to prevent error accumulation. It also introduces the FigmaEditReplay Benchmark for evaluating editability at scale, achieving high visual fidelity and superior editability over baselines.

Fonts In Use is a website that helps designers identify and explore where specific fonts are used in real-world designs, such as album art and posters.

A developer investigates why footnote backlink glyphs render as emoji in RSS readers, explores Unicode variation selectors (U+FE0E and U+FE0F) for controlling text vs emoji presentation, and discusses the broader challenges of variation selectors for web content.

Decoy Font is a TTF font that uses spatial frequency tricks to embed a hidden message readable by humans at a distance while showing a decoy up close, making it harder for AI to read what you type.

Article argues against using generative AI in design and typography, emphasizing the millennia-long human evolution behind letterforms and warning that AI tools freeze cultural development by relying on limited training data.

The Proportional Web is a CSS stylesheet and design guide inspired by Robert Bringhurst's classic 'The Elements of Typographic Style', aiming to implement book-like typography and layout for the web. It is an open-source project by Oskar Wickström, released under MIT license.

The Manichaean fleuron Unicode character has a right-to-left directional type that can cause unexpected text reordering in web layouts. The article explains the issue and provides fixes using HTML's <bdi> tag or CSS unicode-bidi property.

Google has open-sourced a monospace font designed specifically for programmers, Google Sans Code, optimized for code editors and terminals, supporting variable weight from 300 to 800, licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

A detailed blog post arguing that no font is truly web-safe, and recommending always including generic families like monospace, serif, or sans-serif in CSS font-family declarations. It criticizes excessive font stacking and advises trusting the system's default font selection.

An article discussing the historical and technical challenges of rendering Arabic typography, focusing on the importance of ligatures for the basmala phrase and the role of Unicode in solving the problem.

A speculative article discussing potential future changes in text processing APIs, including migration to extended grapheme clusters, richer font features enabled by AI, and the need for attribute introspection.

An archive of pictorial typography images from around the world, showcasing pre-ASCII-art typographic designs with filters by location and year.

Introduces a skill that teaches AI Agents to use the grid system in graphic design, aiming to improve the typography quality of AI designs.

Fonty Menu Bar lets you install Google Fonts directly from your Mac menu bar, simplifying font management for designers and developers.

Datatype is an OpenType variable font that renders inline bar, sparkline, and pie charts from simple text expressions, no JavaScript required.

The article discusses how AI companies are adopting serif fonts to appear more human and trustworthy, as serifs connote tradition and authority versus the coldness of sans-serif fonts.