Day: November 27, 2002

Thanksblogging

Esta is doing her Thanksgiving blogging a day early, and gives thanks for a long list, including the keiretsu, our Pop-pop, and Parliament, among others.

I’m thankful too, for:

  • My loving and patient wife Lisa;
  • Esta: her encouragement, wit, and blog;
  • My Pop-pop, for his enduring humor, strength, and everything else;
  • My parents and in-laws for their love and support;
  • Our house and the fact that it’s still standing;
  • All my friends from Sloan;
  • Greg and Craig, for wit, insight, and steadfast friendship;
  • Tony Pierce, Doc Searls, and Moxie for good reading;
  • Brent Simmons, for good reading, good software, and net.friendship;
  • Dave Winer, for the above, plus good platforms and for surviving his surgery to blog, blog again;
  • Sonic Youth and Arvo Pärt, for transcendence;
  • the Cascadian Chorale and the E-52s, for the opportunity to perform;
  • My readers, for the feedback, the sympathy, and the flow;
  • This weblog, for helping me keep my sanity.

more…

Type lust

I think I might have to add another category or else transform “Web Design” into just “Design&#8221. As a result of finding typographi.ca, I’m learning about all sorts of type things that I had left behind over the past few years.

I used to fancy myself a typographer, of the digital sort anyway, because unlike my peers in college publications I understood kerning and leading and could identify a few hundred typefaces by sight. (This led to some fun party games with Tyler Magill. One of us would come up with a totally bizarre phrase and the other would have to identify the best way to set it in type. Having an actual computer or type specimen sheet around was cheating…) But somewhere along the way my type lust grew dormant. Not extinct–the fact that I do curly quotes by hand in my HTML should testify to that. Just not active.

Today it’s fully reactivated after looking through the catalog at Fountain. Not only do they have some of the best traditional serifed text faces I’ve seen, including Montrachet, Monteverdi, and Baskerville 1757, but they also have some killer display faces, including the Ketchupa, Mustardo, and Mayo trio. Plus of course free downloads…

my font lust

This is a sample using Fountain’s interactive typesetter. It was set in Montrachet Italic.