Notes

Jason Santa Maria touches on something I have been mildly irritated by and all “Actually…” about on several occasions–the use of em dashes being associated with (bad) AI-generated text. I stand with Jason in not giving this one to the machines. Em dashes are a perfectly valid character to (thoughtfully) use in your writing. My hunch is that a lot of people online suddenly started noticing them in AI-generated text because a lot of people don’t use them. After all, it’s just easier to press the hyphen instead of option + shift + hyphen.

But don’t fret, help is within reach, literally. Go and look at “Quotes & Accents (& Dashes)” courtesy of Jessica Hische and bookmark it for reference if you wish, and flavour your writing with some character! There’s also “Smart Quotes for Smart People” by Jason himself; bookmark that one as well.

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Jason also recently released a new typeface called Citywide.

Citywide is a sans serif family inspired by mid-1900s bus and train destination roll signs. The letterforms draw from a bus roll sign I found at a flea market years ago. I’ve probably lost myself staring at that sign everyday since, thinking about how the type system works while trying to puzzle out some of the unusual choices. Why are letters like P and R so high-waisted in their wide forms, but pretty normal when narrow? Were these boxy curves drawn by hand or mechanically produced? Why does the middle stroke of the G change so much across widths?
Citywide is an interpretation of these letterforms, drawing inspiration from both my sign and others like it.

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I linked to Atkinson Hyperlegible recently, and here’s another typeface designed with accessibility in mind – Inclusive Sans from Olivia King.

via Pixel Envy

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I have been slow to link to this but it is absolutely worth the time it takes to go through – let Marcin Wichary take you on an adventure in typography, chasing a mysterious typeface that appears to hide everywhere in New York in “The hardest working font in Manhattan”.

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Its Nice That talks to the founder of Kyiv Type Foundry who have been (re)creating typefaces from various station signage of the Kyiv subway. Check it out for some niche type from the subway that, until recently, held the title of the deepest station.

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve compiled one of these, here goes.

First things first – pour one out for Skype, we’ll miss you.

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Some interesting points here about design tokens, and how the wcag/figma/salesforce/design community thinks of them – "Avoiding tokens"

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Sir Ive has been in the news lately, here’s a different kind of interview with him on BBC-s “Desert Island Disks” podcast. Some nuggets that stuck out to me:

• People need time to understand and react to new things, if the rate of change is too fast, it creates problems.
• Products need to be right for the time and market – products can be great, but not right.
• Adding a handle to the iMac made an unfamiliar thing instantly more approachable.

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Linear always publishes thoughtful pieces on their blog, this time about the relationship between AI and UI:

One way I visualize this relationship between the form of traditional UI and the function of AI is through the metaphor of a ‘workbench’. Just as a carpenter's workbench is familiar and purpose-built, providing an organized environment for tools and materials, a well-designed interface can create productive context for AI interactions.
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AI doesn’t replace the workbench, it's a powerful new tool to place on top of it.

“Design for the AI age” by Karri Saarinen

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Also on the topic of UI-s, Sebastiaan de With from Lux (makers of the excellent Halide camera app) imagines what direction the rumoured redesign of Apple's OS interfaces might go.

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Glad to see that Jason Santa Maria is back writing on his blog – welcome back! Instantly added to the blogroll.

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A list of individual dogs on Wikipedia.
via Frank Chimero on Bluesky

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A typeface I’ve been keeping an eye on to possibly use on a project – Atkinson Hyperlegible – has recently been updated.

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For browsing visuals that don’t try to sell you something, here’s public.work from Cosmos
via Sidebar

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I’m not maybe a fan of the roof construction itself, but I do like the idea – a set of buildings under one roof.

A fat stack of snapshots of New York City in 1979 by flickr user Petershagen.

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

I enjoyed reading Jeffrey Zeldman ruminate on two beautiful things that grew from the seminal A List Apart web publication – An Event Apart and A Book Apart, both now, sadly, shuttered.
I learned a tremendous amount about web design and development, as well as adjacent topics from A List Apart. Not only was it wonderfully designed, it published a wide range of topics and shaped how I approach design for the web and also design in general. I’m very grateful for that. I was never able to attend An Event Apart, unfortunately, but I was able to acquire books put out by A Book Apart and have a number of them on my bookshelf.

But! All is not lost! Au contraire, A Book Apart gave the publishing rights back to the authors and the books have been slowly republished in various formats and one of those is Pricing Design, by Dan Mall, resurrected as a beautifully designed website.

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With my to-do list(s) approaching bankruptcy territory, this has been following me around for some days now – “What would it mean to be done for the day?”.
via Austin Kleon

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Some mandatory “here’s a number of things” lists – “77 Facts that Blew Our Minds” from The Atlantic, “52 Things I Learned in 2024” from Kent Hendricks, “52 Things I Learned in 2024” from Tom Whitwell.
via kottke.org

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One thing I learned was what the “Send in the Clowns” means. From Wikipedia:
“but it's not supposed to be a circus [...] [I]t's a theatre reference meaning “if the show isn't going well, let's send in the clowns"; in other words, "let's do the jokes.””

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(Re)watching Flaked, this house in Venice, CA, home of photographer Philip Dixon, caught my eye. I love it.

Collected bits and pieces I’ve noticed this month.

Some podcasts I’ve found interesting lately – firstly, AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky on the Decoder podcast talking about how he runs the company and what founder mode is; and photographer Tyler Stalman on The Talk Show, discussing iPhone photography with some cool tips and thoughts around the colour science and photography, from old film stocks to todays digital camera systems. Check also Tyler’s iPhone 16 camera review (Youtube) and also these by from Austin Mann, and Vjeran Pavic (Youtube).

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From Petapixel – the reason why old sports photos often have a rather pleasing blue background haze.

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A two-part series from Linear on how they approached a recent redesign of their app. It’s always interesting to read and think along with how Liner work.

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iA describe, in length, how they designed and redesigned their app icons.

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Mozilla had their brand redesigned.
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Using Letterboxd? This little tool let’s you find your Letterboxd besties based on what your favourite films are.
via Kottke

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Friend is a new AI gadget, positioned as a, well, friend, who’s always there with positive vibes. I kind of like this application of AI and don’t think a made up friend is a bad thing per se.
via ATP

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In sad news, Sidebar is indefinitely paused.
With “content moving to medium and substack” are we designers enshittificating (enshitdefecating?) our online world too?

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Om Malik on “content”:

“You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do.”

I 1000% agree.
Also check out this piece by Nick Heer on AI “content” and iA’s well-reasoned approach to writing with AI, or “Why should someone bother to read what you didn’t bother to write?”