Here’s a fun visual essay about a artist Yufeng Zhao’s piece “Alt Text in NYC.” It’s a essentially a visual search engine that searches all the text (words) on the streets of New York City. The dataset comprises of over eight million photos from Google Street View! Matt Daniels, writing for The Pudding:

The result is a search engine of much of what’s written in NYC’s streets. It’s limited to what a Google Street View car can capture, so it excludes text in areas such as alleyways and parks, or any writing too small to be read by a moving vehicle.

The scale of the data is immense: over 8 million Google Street View images (from the past 18 years) and 138 million identified snippets of text.

Just over halfway down the article, there is a list of the top 1,000 words in the data. Most are expected words from traffic signs like “stop.” But number twenty-five is “Fedders,” the logo of an air-conditioner brand popular in the 1950s to the 1990s. They’re all over the exteriors of the city’s buildings.

Best viewed on your computer, IMHO.

In a fascinating thread about designing a typeface in Illustrator versus a font editor, renowned typographer Jonathan Hoefler lets us peek behind the curtains.

But moreover, the reason not to design typefaces in a drawing program is that there, you’re drawing letters in isolation, without regard to their neighbors. Here’s the lowercase G from first corner of the HTF Didot family, its 96pt Light Roman master, which I drew toward the end of 1991. (Be gentle; I was 21.) I remember being delighted by the results, no doubt focussing on that delicate ear, etc. But really, this is only half the picture, because it’s impossible to know if this letter works, unless you give it context. Here it is between lowercase Ns, which establish a typographic ‘control’ for an alphabet’s weight, width, proportions, contrast, fit, and rhythm. Is this still a good G? Should the upper bowl maybe move left a little? How do we feel about its weight, compared to its neighbors? Is the ear too dainty?

There are over 1,800 font families in Google Fonts. While as designers, I’m sure were grateful for the trove of free fonts, good typefaces in the library are hard to spot.

Brand identity darlings Smith & Diction dropped a catalog of “Usable Google Fonts.” In a LinkedIn post, they wrote, “Screw it, here’s all of the google fonts that are actually good categorized by ‘vibe’.”

Huzzah! It’s in the form of a public Figma file. Enjoy.

Kendra Albert, writing in her blog post about Heavyweight, a new tool she built to create “extremely law-firm-looking” letters:

Sometimes, you don’t need a lawyer, you just need to look like you have one.

That’s the idea behind Heavyweight, a project that democratizes the aesthetics of (in lieu of access to) legal representation. Heavyweight is a free, online, and open-source tool that lets you give any complaint you have extremely law-firm-looking formatting and letterhead. Importantly, it does so without ever using any language that would actually claim that the letter was written by a lawyer.

Before there was Jessica Hische, there was Jim Parkinson. You might not know his name, but you’ve seen his work. Most famously, he was known for the mastheads for Rolling Stone magazine and the LA Times. Stephen Coles has this remembrance.

It’s been said that desktop publishing democratized graphic design. For those of you too young to know what the term means, it means the technology that enabled graphic design to go digital. It was an ecosystem, really: the Mac, PostScript, LaserWriter, and PageMaker. But before all that, designers depended on typesetters to set type.

David Langton writing for UX Collective:

A lot was lost when the Macintosh wiped out the traditional typesetting industry. From the art of typography to the craft of typesetting, many essential elements were lost. Typesetters were part of a tradition that stretched back more than 500 years to Gutenberg’s printing press. They understood the basics of type: kerning (spacing between the letters), leading (the space between lines of text), and line breaks (how to avoid widows — those solo words abandoned at the end of a paragraph). They knew about readability (like how to avoid setting type that was too wide to read). There were classic yet limited fonts, with standards for size and leading that assured that everyone working within common ranges maintained a threshold for quality. Yet it was in the craft or business side of typesetting that these services were most under appreciated. Typesetters provided overnight service. They worked overnight, so graphic designers did not have to. We would finish our days specifying the type, and the typesetters would keystroke the manuscripts, proofread, stylize the type, and set up columns following our instructions.

Designers would then pick up the galleys from the typesetters in the morning. The black type was photographically printed on white photo paper. You’d have to cut them up and paste them onto boards, assembling your layout.

Because this was such a physical process, we had to slow down. Langton says:

But since the Macintosh became an in-house tool, the process was reversed. Now, designers design first, then think about it. This shift in process has contributed to a trivialization of the role of graphic designer because anyone can noodle around with the Mac’s sophisticated type tools and make layouts. The design process has been trivialized while the thinking, the evaluation, and the strategic part of the process are often abandoned.

One small thing I’ll point out is that desktop publishing wasn’t popularized until 1985.

• PostScript was released by Adobe in 1984.
• The LaserWriter printer was released by Apple in 1985.
• PageMaker was released by Aldus—later bought by Adobe—in 1985.

John Gruber wrote a hilarious rant about the single-story a in the iOS Notes app:

I absolutely despise the alternate single-story a glyph that Apple Notes uses. I use Notes every single day and this a bothers me every single day. It hurts me. It’s a childish silly look, but Notes, for me, is one of the most serious, most important apps I use.

Since that sparked some conversation online, he followed up with a longer post about typography in early versions of the Mac system software:

…Apple actually shipped System 1.0 with a version of Geneva with a single-story a glyph — but only in the 9-point version of Geneva. At 12 points (and larger), Geneva’s a was double-story.

To me, it does make sense that 9-point Geneva would have a single-story a, since there are less pixels to draw the glyph well and to distinguish better from the lowercase e.

I’ve had Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography website/ebook bookmarked since I discovered it over ten years ago. It’s making the rounds again, and I think it’s a good reminder that we are all “professional writers” as he describes:

When we think of “professional writers” we probably think of novelists, screenwriters, or journalists. But the programmer, the scientist, the lawyer—and you, if your work depends on presenting written ideas—all deserve to be called professional writers.

But as professional writers, we do more than write. We edit, we format, we print, we generate PDFs, we make web pages. More than ever, we’re responsible for delivering the written word to our readers. So we’re not just writers—we’re publishers.

Typography is the visual component of the written word. Thus, being a publisher of the written word necessarily means being a typographer.

He’s right. As much of our work is in producing documents and content, we are publishers. Here are a few of my favorite pages:

• Straight and curly quotes (I have a similar post from 2009)
• One space between sentences
• Em sizing

This book reminds me of a couple of seminal books from the early 1990s: The Mac Is Not a Typewriter by Robin Williams and Stop Stealing Sheep by Erik Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger. The former is how I learned all the basics, back when I was designing my high school’s newspaper. The latter is more comprehensive, going deeper into how type works conceptually. These three are all essential resources for any designer.