typography

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.

An article exploring unexpected typographic phenomena and craft, including rolling shutter effects on displays and creative use of font limitations.

Artist Shantell Martin collaborates with type designer Stephen Nixon to create Shantell Sans, an open-source font based on her handwriting, designed to be playful, readable, and accessible, especially for dyslexic readers.

This article deeply traces the true origin of the Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, from Cicero's Latin writings to the 1914 truncated translation, to the 1966 Letraset transfers and the digitization by Aldus PageMaker, revealing a series of accidents and errors in its evolution.

This article highlights several modern pixel fonts including Analog Mono, Coral Pixels, Two Slice, and Geist Pixel, discussing their design quirks and nostalgia for 1990s subpixel rendering.

The article describes the Hershey vector font format, a textual representation of glyphs using a coordinate encoding system where letters map to signed values, and includes examples and links to related resources.

Donald Knuth's classic 1980 paper on the design and mathematics of the letter S in his Metafont system.

A technical deep dive into the historical inconsistency of the typographic point unit, explaining why TeX (72.27 pt/inch) and Inkscape (72 pt/inch) use different definitions, rooted in 19th-century standardization and Donald Knuth's pragmatic adjustment.