Fonts Monthly Ep.03
I hope January has been treating you all well so far in 2024. Thanks for excusing my brief pause over the holiday season, I’m back in full force with the newsletter and have a lot of excitement for the year ahead for type. I don’t know about you but I always feel so much better after the holiday break. Recharging the batteries and not thinking about work etc always turns my creativity up to 100 and I end up thinking even more about fonts 😂 (It’s almost like taking breaks is a good thing that we need to do more‽)
Looking back
2023 saw the start of Make Type Work. My aim was to start things small and build up a repository of helpful content to help boost peoples creative confidence working with type. I’m extremely lucky that I get to think about fonts all day long for work, and I want to play my part in sharing some of that knowledge around. To start I wasn’t to focused on the numbers so I didn’t include any analytics on the website, but after a couple of months I was curious enough to add in Google Analytics–mostly because it’s really helpful to see what kind of posts are landing better with people so I can focus my efforts.
Swiftonomics
Perhaps unsurprisingly my post on the fonts Taylor Swift has used has by far (and I mean like 20×) had the most views and is driving a large portion of search traffic. I’m glad combining two of my favorite topics ended up being popular and reaching likely a much broader audience than I typically might. Funnily enough I stumbled upon an old blog post from the Typekit blog on which I had previously shared some love for Taylor’s website back in 2015.
Needless to say it’s gotten me thinking about what other content could help with SEO / current trending topics and I’ll be experimenting some more with this. As always I’m glad to take suggestions too if you have them!
Looking forward
This year I’m stoked on digging back into the world of web typography, which is really where I started my career. I’ve shied away from it somewhat over the past 5 years as things were feeling a bit more stagnant, and I lost touch with the web design community from lack of conferences/design twitter (RIP).
Over the holidays I noticed some new CSS additions which sparked my curiosity to take a look, and after dusting off the cobwebs of my front-end brain I figured out how to set text on the web to a baseline grid in pure CSS. This was one of my previous side projects (Sassline) which before was way way more complex, but it turns out 10 years of CSS improvements has wildly changed the possibilities of web typography. I’m now overflowing with ideas I’m itching to try out, and have had some great conversations with folks already.
Thanks to ideas from Simon Coudeville and Chris Armstrong I’ve already had another breakthrough using x-height to automate the baseline size and relative line-height units to manage relative font-sizing and spacing units independently. You can see the updated demo here. If this is all new to you, it may sound wildly complex, but I think this could be the way to go for wrangling web typography. Next step is to push this further to see how well it handles different approaches to responsive design.
I’m also cooking up an idea from this about cataloguing those different approaches you can take to responsive typography and how to implement them across all scales of systems. This may become a new long form post, or perhaps a conference talk. I need to get my head back into the web design conference world to see if this is something folks would want.
Up next
I’ll sneak some posts I’ve got coming up soon: (why yes this is mostly accountability so I actually finish them 😭) Considerations for Accessible Typography, The Vintage meets Modern trend, and a follow up to one of my original posts Fonts for UI.
Happy fonting ✌️
Love,
Jake