Typefaces Worth a Second Look
Heydon Pickering’s SKWAR is a monospaced variable font with a deliberately hard-edged look. Its axes cover both width and weight, giving it flexibility within a single download.
Dan Cederholm, known for designs like Captain Edward and Ship Whistle, has collected what he learned making fonts into a book called Twenty Bits I Learned About Making Fonts.
Building Better Font Stacks
Daniel Aleksandersen takes a close look at which typefaces are pre-installed across operating systems to assemble reliable cross-platform font stacks. Some nuances worth noting: Mac and iOS ship with Helvetica Neue, which improves on some of Helvetica’s legibility shortcomings, and Windows can include Arial Nova, a more modern rendition that makes similar legibility tradeoffs.
The Case for Restraint in Font Pairing
Oliver Schöndorfer frames font pairing as an artistic judgment call and encourages experimentation. His stronger recommendation, though, is to ask whether you need a second typeface at all. If you do, there should be a reason for it. Schöndorfer advises repetition over variety: Repeat your font choices as often as you can, and only when something does not work in a given situation, add a new style.
Optical Sizing Comes to a Sans Serif
Riley Cran explains the thinking behind Really Sans in a recent Twitter thread. The typeface includes two optical sizes: a small one intended for body text and a large one that revives the tone of 1970s headlines. Cran’s pricing model is worth noting too, with licensing based on employee count rather than pageviews.
Variable Fonts Go Mainstream
Helvetica Now Variable is now available from Monotype. The significance here is that Helvetica underpins so many brand identities; making a variable edition of a font that widely used could push broader adoption of the format.
Fonts That Refuse Categories
John Boardley highlights unconventional typefaces in Fonts in the Twilight Zone. He describes the appeal of designs that straddle genres: Among my favorite kinds of typefaces are those that don’t fit neatly into predefined or existing categories; those that dip their toes into more than one genre, or take their cues from disparate historical periods.
Making Code Fun to Read
Doug Wilson makes the case for coding typefaces with personality in Coding with Character. His point is straightforward: If you spend all day looking at code, letters, and characters—why not make it fun?
