I read something today that perfectly captures how I feel about artificial intelligence.

According to reporting from The Verge, Monotype (a company I do not like) is really pushing the idea that AI is ​“coming for our fonts.” Which is a gross way to say that AI is coming for type designers, which is a gross thing to publicly get excited about.

Apart from the fact that we continue to discuss AI taking our jobs and our humanity from us (as though it’s desirable), the other problem here is that this future isn’t real. At least, not now:

AI, the report suggests, will make type accessible through ​“intelligent agents and chatbots” and let anyone generate typography regardless of training or design proficiency. How that will be deployed isn’t certain, possibly as part of proprietarily trained apps. Indeed, how any of this will work remains nebulous.

Why Monotype would want to push any of this is beyond me. The Verge mostly attempts to draw similarities between today’s AI proclamations and the effects of industrialization on typography in the early 20^th century. The metaphor is completely broken, because unlike these AI proclamations, the effects of industrialization were actually real.

And then, the money quote. This is in reference to Zeynep Akay, director at typeface design studio Dalton Maag:

“It’s almost as if we are being gaslighted into believing our lives, or our professions, or our creative skills are ephemeral.”

It is exactly this! In a rush to get investor dollars, every company in the world is trying to tell professionals in every space (but particularly in white collar information work) that their jobs, livelihoods, and skill sets are irrelevant in the coming tide.

The current chatbots are useful tools, but any company claiming they’re ​“replacing” workers with AI is attempting to paint a narrative about layoffs with a different colour. The tool just isn’t there. It’s especially not there for any work that requires creative thought, and because the entire AI chain is more or less word prediction based on prior knowledge, there isn’t much chance AI in its current incarnation could design anything actually new.

To put it bluntly, I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that AI is designing typefaces for us any time soon.

After reading through Chris Krycho’s extremely cool and clever CSS mixin for light and dark variables, I was particularly struck by his conclusion:

The last couple bits I need to knock down to not need SCSS at all are:

• The equivalent of the nice @use directive. I think I might actually be able to use Lightning CSS directly along with its interpretation of native @import for bundling and minification.
• Applying the same approach to the syntax highlighting theme shown above for the syntax highlighting theme, for which I also currently use a @mixin the same way.

This got me thinking about what I use SCSS for these days. SCSS has been a constant part of my toolchain for twelve or thirteen years now; I feel like it’s been a part of my workflow forever. But it frustrates far more than it delights today, at least for me. The announcement of CSS Nesting in December gives me hope that a major reason to use SCSS is becoming part of the standard spec in the future.

Beyond that, here are the last couple things I need to not need SCSS anymore:

1. Like Chris, I need a good @use or @import directive. Today, this is SCSS’s best feature. I hadn’t heard of Lightning CSS before, but now I am going to check it out (although I am wary of replacing a well-known tool with a less well-known tool).
2. I think browser targets are helpful as a compilation feature, and I am unsure of a way to make that part of the default CSS spec.
3. I love using SCSS variables for media queries. @media (min-width:$bp-m) is far easier to use, in my experience, than @media (min-width:700px) or @media (min-width:45em). I understand why we can’t use environment variables, but it really is a shame I just can’t write @media (min-width:var(--bp-m)) and call it a day. I don’t know if I’ll ever get this as part of CSS spec. I’m also aware that best practice is probably to abandon variables in media queries and rely on something more conventional, but old habits…

I think the @use directive is the most important for my needs, and at a certain point, I’d be happy to give up futzing with the developer toolchain around SCSS compilation. Nothing has thrilled me more over my career than watching CSS improve and gain features over the past fifteen years. We’ve gone from floats to grids to crazy math formulas inside variables, and as a result, our layouts have been more less rigid and far easier to work with.

It’s still a great time to be a web designer.

“Repetition is the mother of learning.” This quote is often misattributed to Zig Ziglar. Austin Kleon attributes it as an old Russian proverb. Of course, it’s also an old Latin proverb, but its most frequently-cited source has been misattributed as Aristotle.

It probably doesn’t matter. The path forward is the same: every day, we must create, over and over, and find joy in this process.

It takes a lot of hours to become a good designer, writer, photographer, or filmmaker. Malcolm Gladwell may have been wrong about 10,000 hours being the ​“tipping point” for mastery, but what’s been lost in all the talk of revisionism in the past fifteen years is the fact that 10,000 hours is a helpful barometer. It’s sixty straight weeks of uninterrupted focus. It’s 250 work weeks, or five years, if one worked roughly forty hours of week with absolutely no interruptions. If you’re lucky, and spend four hours a day focused on your craft, it’s ten years to achieve mastery in any given domain. That’s no small chunk of time.

So people who make things, people who want to master their craft, can’t afford to become distracted. We can’t be intimidated by the blank page. To create something new requires confidence that the blank page is just the beginning. The blank page is an invitation, not a wall. It’s a place of triumph, not discomfort.

The blank page, the empty audio file in a DAW, or the painter’s palettes are places where rules don’t exist, where the physics of time and space can be manipulated. They are an open challenge to invent, to create.

Along the way, don’t forget what you learned as a child in math class: the blank page is a place for doodling. Even Leonardo da Vinci drew dicks in his notebooks.

The work is serious, but it must be approached with lightness. Otherwise, the results suffer.

We must find a way to do this, then repeat, over and over, until the great work of our lives is done.

Outside the Strasbourg Cathedral, the gigantic gothic architecture cast a tall shadow even in the mid-afternoon sun. A woman with a white painted face like a clown in a Fellini film extended her hand to shake mine. She appeared seemingly out of nowhere, but in the menagerie of tourists (even on a rainy afternoon like that), it was easy for even a clown to disappear. 

Without thinking, I accepted her hand and shook it. She asked for a photo. We took a selfie. 

The clown spoke to me in French. I do understand the language at this level, but from the way she gestured to the small wallet bulge in my jeans pocket, I knew what she was asking. For what rendered service, I asked. I noticed my wife, much smarter than I am, was long gone, practically halfway to the Petit France district four blocks away. 

The woman gathered that I do not speak much French, and found other ways to demonstrate what she wanted. She rubbed her stomach, and said ​“baby, feed baby,” over and over again, while pointing at my wallet. I doubted she was pregnant; she looked old enough to be my mother, and while my mother is not old, her becoming pregnant now would be cause for a new addition to the Old Testament. But who would dare speak poorly about miracles outside the great Strasbourg Cathedral?

I felt embarrassed for having fallen into this obvious tourist trap. My first reaction was anger for being played a fool, but nobody should be faulted for wanting a selfie with a Fellini-inspired clown. The trap was not worth my anger. I was the victim of only a minor fraud. It was better to pay the fine, remember the lesson, and keep some level of my dignity. 

The Mickey Mouse impersonator I saw only moments later was likely even less trustworthy.

I found myself nodding in agreement while reading Jason Snell’s piece about OpenAI buying Ive’s tech design startup:

So OpenAI and Apple’s legendary design lead are embarking on a journey to build some new AI-enabled hardware. They’re coy about what it will be—probably not a phone, definitely not a watch, maybe not ​“something you wear” — but my gut feeling is that it’ll be something we’ve actually seen before. My true prediction is that it’ll be more like the Humane Ai Pin or that AI Pendant but they’re embarrassed to be associated with those products, so they’re going to wait a little longer to let the stink clear.

I’m skeptical about OpenAI in general, because while I think AI is so powerful that aspects of it will legitimately change the world, I also think it has been overhyped more than just about anything I’ve seen in my three decades of writing about technology. Sam Altman strikes me as being a drinker of his own Kool-Aid, but it’s also his job to make everyone in the world think that AI is inevitable and amazing and that his company is the unassailable leader while it’s bleeding cash.

I think it’s important to clarify that OpenAI isn’t bleeding cash; they’re haemorrhaging it. This is all further reinforced by the fact that OpenAI is purchasing Ive’s company for an astronomical $6.5 billion, and all that money is in privately owned stock funded by equity firms, banks, and desperate venture capital companies.

With all that in mind, I find myself wondering what Ive and Altman’s new product could possibly be. Jony Ive insists that good design ​“elevates humanity,” but because of the current direction of AI in our society, I don’t see how it’s possible any AI-based product could. 

I am not anti-AI. I use it frequently, particularly for summarizing in-depth Google research (my most recent example: ​“what e‑sims should I consider for traveling around France and the Netherlands, and which options have the widest coverage?”). I also use it for rubber ducking, in which I copy and paste error messages from my code into the chatbot and get it to suggest potential solutions. (It never gets it right, but it at least gets me thinking.)

So I am not some sort of anti-AI Luddite or prude. I think AI chat bots have enormous potential for research, data analysis, and even as code assistants. However, it’s not clearly net positive for the world.

On one hand, I see many smart people I know fawning over this technology product that is often merely a very advanced version of Siri. I also see Jony Ive and Sam Altman making googly eyes at each other in a very awkward announcement video. Even Jony Ive, a man who makes product design sound like Aristotelian philosophy, is fawning over Sam Altman. 

It’s also become clear that many unhinged CEOs are sending outrageous emails about their expectations for AI. In summary: ​“AI is coming for your job, so get ten times better at it quickly.” Mostly, it sounds like they expect their employees to do ten times the work for the same pay as before, as a baseline for keeping their job. AI is already being used to exploit the workforce.

For the first time in our collective history, knowledge workers face an extinction-level event, not dissimilar to what happened to blue-collar workers in the face of factory automation and machining. And Sam Altman and Jony Ive think that the best path forward is to continue developing a product they claim will be ​“for everybody,” when all current signs point to AI mostly being a tool for incredibly wealthy CEOs to extract more value and productivity from an increasingly smaller workforce of disenfranchised employees.

How can an AI product ​“elevate humanity” when it’s often used now to oppress and exploit the working class? Jony Ive is a very smart man, but his most recent work includes $3,000 jackets and personal branding for the king of England. Ive has a long history of designing luxury products for wealthy people. It is hard to imagine yet another tech product solving (or even avoiding) the problem its base technology has already created.

Unlike certain technocrats, I am unconcerned about a Terminator-like future. I am far more concerned with a future where technology has created an even larger disparity between the rich and the poor. Unless we can all figure out Universal Basic Income, (and conservative governments the world over are uninterested in that notion), I fear that we are creating a society that values the contributions of workers less than ever before, while the cost of living continues to become more unaffordable.

Sam Altman and Jony Ive spend a lot of time in their self-congratulatory video discussing San Francisco. This is what Sam had to say:

“San Francisco has been, like, a mythical place in American history, and maybe in world history in some sense. It is the city I most associate with the leading edge of culture and technology. … The fact that all of those things happen in the Bay Area and not anywhere else on this gigantic planet we live on, I think, is not an accident.” 

This is true (even if it ignores much of the rest of the Valley and San Jose in particular), but it’s worth noting that this is all happening in the United States. Right now, the US is a country where ​“move fast and break things” is quite literally the political policy of the White House. America leads in technology for many reasons, but the Valley’s attitude of ​“move fast and break things” has become a global problem.

Forgive me, then, for being skeptical that ChatGPT and its competitors will change the world in a net positive way. Forgive me for having a hard time imagining Jony Ive ever again designing anything as revolutionary as the iPhone (which, for all its flaws, globally democratized technology, changed society and global commerce, and has created a ripple effect that will last decades). Forgive me for assuming that all this hype around this partnership is a lot of smoke and mirrors to make OpenAI’s investors feel like there’s still a fish on the line, rather than a hole in the boat.

I am an optimist about humanity, but I am unsure technology is always for humanity’s betterment. I do not see how, to use Sir Jony Ive’s words, AI ​“elevates humanity.” Right now, it looks to me like the only person who’s been elevated in all this is Sam Altman.

I loved this video, where director Ryan Coogler breaks down all the aspect ratios for his new movie, Sinners. I’ve been trying to explain all this to friends for years, and it’s so helpful to have a short video like this to send to people who ask me what tickets they should buy for the movies they plan on seeing.

There are three things that interest me a lot about this discussion:

1. Film projection, in which old-school film prints are actually projected, is truly an amazing way to see a movie. Like Coogler, this is how I saw movies growing up. When I was 13 or so, our local theatre got digital projection. It looks worse, and it was obviously worse at the time too. We got the chance to see Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX when it came out, and while that wasn’t my favourite movie, it was an incredible way to see it. Film has some shortcomings (you can see the flickering of light between frames if you know what to look for), but it’s also got a wider dynamic range than any other projection format, and a level of detail that is far beyond what film projection otherwise achieves.
2. Related to the first: Dolby Cinema is listed as an option in the video. In Canada, we call it AVX. It’s basically digital projection with HDR. It’s a common misconception that film isn’t ​“shot” in HDR. Film has a much wider dynamic range than even digital, so HDR, with its wider dynamic range, gets you closer to the actual experience of seeing a film negative. This is why HDR TVs are great. HDR projection is also great, but it’s still nowhere near as bright as HDR television, and HDR television often isn’t as bright as a real film negative. Dolby Cinema/​AVS is still far better than seeing a film on a normal screen, though.

3. I wish we talked more about the director’s intent in all this. IMAX has some really incredible marketing, but it’s often a bit of a sham. Coogler talks a lot about aspect ratios. He’s shot Sinners in IMAX’s native format, much like Christopher Nolan does when he makes movies. When folks shoot in IMAX’s native aspect ratio of 1.43:1, they usually are composing the shots for those aspect ratios. But it’s practically impossible for an entire film to be shot in IMAX, because the cameras are very loud and expensive. Typically, every shot is framed for a wider aspect ratio that matches the rest of the movie.

   In the case of Christopher Nolan’s films (and probably Coogler’s Sinners), that means you see the most essential elements of the frame even in a wide presentation. If you are fortunate enough to see the IMAX presentation, you get to see the entire frame, and you see it as the director fully envisioned it.

   This isn’t always true for IMAX movies, though. Let’s say you went to see Dune: Part 2 in IMAX. It was filmed digitally, and composed for a wide aspect ratio of 2.39:1. The IMAX presentation was in 1.9:1, not 1.43:1. When a film is presented in that aspect ratio, it usually means that the extra height of IMAX isn’t really IMAX. It wasn’t shot with IMAX cameras on IMAX film. What you’re seeing is really just the extra, un-cropped portion of the 35mm frame. Basically, you’re paying for the equivalent of a book before the printer chops off all the bleed around the margins. It’s unessential, and the filmmaker absolutely wasn’t concerned during shot composition with that portion of the visual. It’s just there so they can earn extra money off your ticket.

   This bothers me tremendously, because I want to unequivocally tell friends and family that the IMAX presentation of a film is the best way to see it, but that’s only true for the rare times that a film is actually shot with IMAX cameras (see Christopher Nolan movies and Coogler’s Sinners as examples).

All of this brings me to my final thought: ironically, I think, the best way to see most films is now on home video. A normal digital presentation in theatres is in 2K with no HDR. Still looks great, sounds good, but it’s lower resolution than what’s available at home and on video.

A Dolby Cinema/​AVX presentation is better, but still not as bright or as colourful as film or most home televisions. The sound will blow your socks off, though, for what it’s worth (Dolby Cinema also uses Dolby Atmos, and their theatres can have 21+ speakers throughout, creating a truly mind-blowing experience if you have the right seats).

IMAX isn’t worth it half the time, but when you can catch an IMAX presentation for a film shot with IMAX cameras, it will look and sound great. If you can catch one of those rare 70mm IMAX film presentations, then that is far and away the best way to see a movie that is available, bar none. It’s life-changing if you’re a lover of film, a truly revelatory experience

There are only ten theatres in the world that allow you to see Sinners in that IMAX film presentation. For the rest of us, we’ll see it in IMAX digitally — still good, but not as bright as your typical HDR television. 

What this means is that, outside of ten theatrical presentations across the world, every other screening is compromised in a way that 4K HDR televisions is not. On top of that, people in theatres today are typically on their phones, kicking your seat, or (in one particularly memorable instance for me) nearly getting into fistfights while they yell at one another.

All that to say it’s not a wonder theatres are starved for moviegoers.

This season of life is particularly busy for me, but I’m fortunate enough to live close-ish to the 70mm IMAX theatre in Toronto, and I might see about driving down to catch Sinners in the next week or two.

Adobe announced last week that many popular typefaces from Monotype are now in Adobe Fonts. This is a huge deal to me. 

In their press release, Adobe calls out Helvetica, Gotham, Avenir, Times New Roman, and Arial (I am not sure who would be excited about Times and Arial, but okay). I thought it would be worth sharing a few of the other standouts:

• Akzidenz-Grotesk Next (one of Monotype’s crown jewels, along with Gotham and Helvetica)
• Benton Modern
• Century Gothic
• Hoefler Text
• Neue Frutiger World, which is Frutiger (more or less) with support for additional script languages
• Neue Haas Unica and Neue Haas Grotesk, which (if I recall correctly) were previously part of Adobe Fonts
• Sentinel (another great Hoefler typeface)
• Univers Next (!!!)

This is a great list of typefaces. I was hoping I’d see Frutiger and Univers, but didn’t honestly expect them in the list.

I wish that Adobe would be clearer about their licensing arrangements, though: how long will these typefaces be a part of Adobe Fonts? Will they perpetually be a part of the service, or does Monotype plan on making changes down the line?

I ask because I am increasingly wary of subscription services offering content via license deals. I am immediately tempted to start using Univers for my studio’s brand — because I am a thirsty designer and my use of Graphik is starting to feel stale — but if Monotype pulls Univers Next from the lineup in two years, that would defeat the purpose. Branding should evolve around the needs of a company, not the whims of a type foundry.

I’ve become more familiar with this issue because of services like Xbox Game Pass. I like Game Pass well enough, but every time a third-party game was licensed for the service, I knew there was a secret timer attached to it. I knew I’d be halfway through Lies of P when it was removed from the service — and indeed I was. I never finished it.

I don’t begrudge third-party offerings for leaving a service. I merely want the terms of use and their expiration date to be clear — especially because we’re talking about typefaces used in corporate settings. 

This conversation is even more true because we’re talking about Monotype, a company owned by flea-ridden dirtbag corporate executives and banker types who believe the fastest way to buy a new Lambo is to become litigious about typefaces. (They’re monopolistic buttholes is what I’m saying.)¹

As summer finally breaks and gives way to fall here in Canada, I’ve spent a lot of time at work. The fall is always a busy season for me. It feels like we’re all bracing to huddle up, buckle down, and close up shop for winter mentally.

In the mornings, I catch up on a little reading. I thought I’d share what stood out to me over the past couple weeks below:

1. Cabel Sasser’s talk at the last XOXO was incredibly inspiring. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested in art and what we leave behind, I implore you to watch it all the way through to the end.
2. Canada has a long heritage of good design. I’m not joking! There is great stuff everywhere. We have cool brand identities dominating our grocery store aisles. But there is almost nothing more Canadian than the CBC logo. Richard Baird’s retrospective on the history of the logo was illuminating and itself well designed. 
3. Dan Mall, one of the most pioneering digital designers working today, goes on a fall photography trip every year and shares his photos. His photos this year are stunning.
4. “I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.” The Bob Spotter is cultural surveillance designed to capture the music that makes us bob our heads, without anyone’s consent, in an effort to graph our taste culturally rather than individually. I love this experiment; it reminds me of the internet of old. As Alex Cranz recently wrote for The Verge, the internet used to be for horny weirdos and college students, and Bob Spotter feels like it’s reminiscent of that time.
5. David Sparks noticed something at the British Museum in London: the ancient craftsmen were uninterested in perfection. They’re making art that is good enough, but even that art we call timeless. (There is hope for us yet.)
6. Stephen Robles, a YouTuber whose content I don’t watch, recently hit one hundred thousand subscribers. He made a video about getting started on making something with a key message: it’s never too late.
7. In what has clearly been a theme for me over the past two weeks, It’s Nice That published a feature about perfectionism and the way it helps and hurts us, seemingly simultaneously.
8. Nintendo has a music app now, in case you want to listen to any of their absolute bangers from a collection of classic games and franchises while you work.
9. On the topic of music, Apple published a press release this week about how it developed the new hearing aid feature for its AirPods Pro. Granted, this is just a press release, but it’s an inspiring story that reminds me some technology, even in our current age of AI consuming and subsuming all of humanity, is still worth being optimistic about.
10. I recently discovered Hyperessays, the home of Michel de Montaigne’s translated essays on the internet. They’re all very good, but so is the website’s design, which achieves the rarified status of feeling like you’re reading a book.
11. Tim Kreider’s 2012 essay ​“The Busy Trap” is a great read about separating ourselves from our work and our incomes. The entire thing is immensely quotable, the sort of thing you might read aloud to your spouse (if they were into that). My favourite quote is this: ​“The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” This essay is as strong an argument for Universal Basic Income as any could be.

Until next time: stay relentless.

Your creative work does not require output to have value. To put it differently, your creativity doesn’t have to result in a product to have personal value for you.

As kids, we’d play with LEGO and action figures without trying to monetize our creations or our stories. I was in a bunch of bands in high school that went nowhere outside of a basement, but it was a lot of fun to play.

To be creative is to play. To play, you have to abandon all notions of production. Otherwise, it’s a job in disguise.

Creativity and productivity are not intrinsically related.

A lot of folks spend their evenings on their side hustles. I don’t have a lot of free evening time anymore. But even if I did, I don’t know if I could make that arrangement work.

My friend and business coach Shawn Blanc has a saying: ​“Work with your head. Rest with your hands.” His idea is that information workers engage mentally with their work. When their day is done and it’s time to rest, they need to turn off their brains and engage in a rejuvenating hobby (Netflix doesn’t count). His suggestion is to find hobbies that are physically engaging, like car maintenance, woodworking, or exercise.

If I sat at my computer all day and designed things, then spent the evening making music in front of the same computer, at the same desk, in the same room, I’d never get a break from my mental work. I wouldn’t even get a break from my physical studio. As much as I love my studio, that’s not good for my mental health.

A creative practice benefits from existing in a separate physical environment from one’s workplace — even if your work is creative, or you work from home. This is one of the big reasons I like having a laptop I plug in to a huge monitor: when it’s time to do something different, you can unplug the laptop and bring it to a different space, but avoid managing multiple machines.

On the other hand, I think there’s a benefit in buying a desktop computer instead of a laptop. When you stop working for the day, walk away from the screen and find something else to do. For me, shifting from a mental task (designing rectangles and programming websites) to a physical task (like playing guitar or exercising) has huge mental health benefits for my day-to-day life.

A couple weeks ago, I made the difficult decision to slow down my work on a YouTube channel I was working on. I recorded backing track videos for guitarists. Each week, I’d write a track, record all the individual parts (using a mix of real guitars and midi instruments for drum parts and the like), put together the video with all the chord changes and scale sheets, and put it in the YouTube machine.

The process took 8 – 12 hours per week. I spent one business day every week recording the audio and making the video. 

It was too much because it was no longer a hobby for me. It had turned into a side hustle.

Here’s what I think the difference is: a creative hobby is something that you do exclusively for you. It won’t make you money. It doesn’t inherently earn you an audience. It’s for fun. To make this as simple as possible, maybe you play an instrument. Maybe you draw.

On the other hand, a side hustle is something you make for other people. It can bring you the same amount of joy as a hobby, but the primary goal is providing a service or product for other people. My backing tracks became a side hustle. I made them for other people and hoped to grow an audience. If you play an instrument and you start releasing music, the minute that stops being about self-satisfaction and becomes something you do for the pursuit of an audience, it’s a side hustle.

The shift from a creative pursuit to a side hustle is a shift in focus.

Side hustles don’t have to make you money. You can do something creative for the benefit of others without earning an income. But if they do make you money, it becomes harder for that project to creatively nourish you. The pressure of the dollar is real. 

I decided to slow down on the YouTube output, though, because the calculus on my time compared to the potential financial reward (many years from now) didn’t make much sense to me. It made more sense to double down on my design business — a creative outlet people are happy to pay me for — than it did for me to focus on my side hustle.

My guitar playing is currently back to being merely a hobby. I loved making backing tracks, and I’m always making music, and it was hard to say goodbye. But one must say no to one thing to say yes to another.