Starting on my text face with Mark van Bronkhorst a couple weeks back I began by drawing a demibold and derived an ultralight from it, keeping the point structures compatible. My ultralight looked great & spaced fine on screen, but after the first test print I was scratching my head. David: "Yeah, the lighter weight looks much too big compared to the heavier weight at the same size. I get that." Pause. "But why... um. Why does it look like something Herb Lubalin drew?"

Mark: "Oh it's looking groovy?" I walk from the printer over to Mark thinking 'Is groovy some kind of precise typographic term I'm unfamiliar with?' Mark after seeing it: "Yeah, it's pretty groovy."

The hole in this b’logue and my truancy from TypeCon since 2009 has clearly left me with some ’splaining to do. I went back to school; this after years of considering myself done with it. There to welcome me back to the design program we had begun together was the graduating class of seniors. With a flush schedule and an abbreviated program I finished up a year behind them. Friends pictured below interspersed: Regan Johnson, Joey Lasko, Miriam Altamira, Colin Pinegar, & Rory Bruggeman.

Spring breaks forth in its silent three-month-long shout for joy.
Here's a project that's been teaching me about the Cyrillic alphabet and drawing in context of a type system. It's called Stralis.

Pictured above is a working prototype that makes reading articles and longer works on the internet more like reading a book. Its content (the entire article, or chapter, or book) is loaded from a database and the front end presents it as pages in a spread.
This started out as an experiment using baseline grids on the web; then on-screen readability. Over the past couple holed-up weeks here at home I dirtied my hands on the emergent technologies of the new internet, specifically HTML5's canvas element, CSS3, javascript libraries such as Mootools and jQuery, and RSS.

I'm having fun getting into script lettering. Does anyone know who's leading the workshop/hands-on talk at TypeCon this year?

I've been giving some thought to our treasury's decision to bail out some large failed banks and all the attention it's getting lately and I've come to these conclusions:
Everyone categorizes our options as being these two: namely bail the suckers out or do nothing and suffer through a recession.
Since I'm from the Austrian school of economics, I see it like this: to bail out is to do nothing. That is to say, it does nothing to address the problem that caused the artificial boom. The reason we're in a 'crisis' at this point is because economic law, as it tends to always do, is now proposing an actual, feasible solution: the liquidation of bad debt.

Available immediately for download here at FontShop (FontStruct account required).

Lesson learned: Don't fight the format.

Setting aside my text face for just a moment—this was fun.
FontStruct is decidedly as easy as it looks.

Thank you FontShop for producing FontStruct.

Not much time to say this: What a great past couple of days! The conference has been excellent, and the best part has been running into people I've heard about and whose work I've seen. Also, I got Nick Shinn's book on modern type. Thanks Nick.

Sidney Poitier? Maybe; that's beside the point. Me! I'm coming.
It will be my first. Any suggestions on what I should bring? Anything you wish you had brought to your first typecon?

I'm learning Fontlab at home. It's no 'hello world' but it's mine. Michael from Richmond will note the way the counters show the reader a little more respect.

I've taken this idea and sketched on it for the last two months, mornings and evenings. Here's a look at some digitized work from today.

I've got an [unusually dark] blue highlighter and a red ballpoint pen here at work. I use the highlighter like a broad-nib pen. The pen I use for making outlines and filling them. The project I keep kicking around in the back of my head is a can label for Sea Meat, a curious fictional aquatic meat food.

Just finished these tonight.
Thanks everyone for your comments the last goes-round.

The first glyph I drew when I was sketching out this idea Thursday was the capital R. I'm trying to demonstrate the idea of pieces of positive and negative space fitting together implying lines.
Now how do I ask this? Am I unwittingly copying someone else's work here? What I mean is—I'm relatively new to type design and I haven't read more than a handful of books on the subject—does this look like a ripoff of someone else's design or concept?

and implied unification; from yesterday's sketches

I called my dad today to talk to him about how monetary policy is the biggest problem we currently face as a country. We talked for a while. Then I decided it was time to get along with this pet project I'd been working on; making a Ron Paul wordmark. Any suggestions for the type below it?

Day's sketches.

Just rummaging through some old files today.
I used to throw killer parties this time each year. I know it's no substitute, but maybe it's better for you than candy. Enjoy.

Turkey packaging got me thinking.

First time I've
· tried to match someone else's style
· made type with vectors that isn't a script

I'm working on a logo and word mark for a rock and roll band. It's the first time I've done custom type commercially. I posted a new forum topic for discussing how to achieve good results with bezier curves. Meanwhile, check out this reversed newspaper idea I was thinking about yesterday.

I started doing this a while back. Wulf Barsch showed up to a class and noticed a case of Staedtler Lumograph pencils. "Did you know that these were created for the purpose of drawing on foil?" No I didn't know that. It was worth a try. It was only after writing in foil though that I began to take seriously the idea of making type from my handwriting—an idea I had kept for a long time. There comes with writing on foil a remarkable feeling of the medium pushing back; have you ever noticed that?