Posts about Design

I really enjoyed Nick Heer’s review of iOS and macOS 26. I wish I wrote something as thoughtful; after my summer spent fighting Safari’s new design, I had a lot to say, but I never wrote it down.

The whole thing is worth reading, but I’ll highlight one section I particularly enjoyed. Nick writes about macOS here, but there are many apps in iOS and iPadOS where this same critique could be levied, including Safari. (The emphasis below is mine.)

The way toolbars and their buttons are displayed on MacOS is, at best, something to get used to, though I have tried and failed. Where there was once a solid area for tools has, in many apps, become a gradient with floating buttons. The gradient is both a fill and a progressive blur, which I think is unattractive.

This area is not very tall, which means a significant amount of the document encroaches into its lower half. In light mode, the background of a toolbar is white. The backgrounds of toolbar buttons are also white. Buttons are differentiated by nothing more than a diffuse shadow… the sum of this design language is the continued reduction of contrast in user interface elements to, I think, its detriment.

Apple justifies these decisions by saying its redesigned interfaces are ​“bringing greater focus to content”. I do not accept that explanation. Instead of placing tools in a distinct and separated area, they bleed into your document, thus gaining a similar level of importance as the document itself. … in my experience, the more the interface blends with what I am looking at, the less capable I am of ignoring it. Clarity and structure are sacrificed for the illusion of simplicity offered by a monochromatic haze of an interface.

Even if I bought that argument, I do not understand why it makes sense to make an application’s tools visually recede. While I am sometimes merely viewing a document, I am very often trying to do something to it. I want the most common actions I can take to be immediately obvious.

The passage I emphasized is the very same problem I have with the design, particularly as a designer. When the tools of the OS bleed into my document, particularly when designing a website, my design has to accommodate Apple’s UI, and that deeply frustrates me. 

But Nick also writes about something else vexing. Tools are now hidden in junk drawers, and often more difficult to find. Apple’s software is great graphic design, but it is becoming frustrating interface design. These are different practices, with different goals. Graphic design is intended to draw attention, often for the sake of branding or advertising. Interface design is not unlike designing a hammer: it is the practice of making a tool useful and usable. For Apple’s software to be a great piece of graphic design, but not a great interface design, is a dramatic failure of purpose.

Nick also asks why Apple feels the need to do this now:

Why is this the first time all of the operating systems are marketed with the same version number? And why did Apple decide this was the right time to make a dedicated ​“operating system” section on its website to show how it delivers a ​“more consistent experience” between devices? I have no evidence Apple would want to unify under some kind of ​“Apple OS” branding, but if Apple did want to make such a change, this feels like a very Apple‑y way to soft-launch it. After all, your devices already run specific versions of Safari and Siri without them needing to be called ​“Mac Safari” and ​“Watch Siri”. Just throwing that thought into the wind.

Stop giving them ideas, Nick.

Apple has worked to unify their designs for years, despite the cries from the design community that this is a fruitless idea. Large, multi-window operating systems like the Mac (and now the iPad) naturally demand different interfaces than a modal OS running in a device you hold in your hand. I don’t know why they did this now. I like Craig Hockenberry’s thoughts on this, where he posits that this all might be in preparation for a foldable phone, but I question anybody who thinks Apple plans that far ahead. I think Apple looks 12 – 24 months out at a time, like most organizations I’ve worked with. 

What I’ve pieced together from years of rumours is that Apple started this redesign process shortly after Ive departed. There was a rumour years ago that Apple was working on a design that embraced ​“neumorphism,” which is a word I never hoped to have to spell. 

What Apple ended up with isn’t exactly — look, don’t ask me to spell it again. But it’s not far off. Listen to the criticism of neumorphism, directly quoted from the Wikipedia page:

Neumorphism has received criticism from UI designers, notably for its lack of accessibility, difficulty in implementation, low contrast, and incompatibility with certain brands.

That sounds about like where we’re at to me. From Wikipedia’s Liquid Glass entry:

However, other users noted that certain elements were too transparent, making text difficult to read in low-contrast environments, such as direct sunlight. Designers interviewed by Wired felt that the visual effects distracted from app content. One designer said developers with smaller teams might struggle to meet the high visual standards set by the new interface.

Neumorphism and Liquid Glass are by no means identical, but one could argue they share the same etymology. Based on when neumorphism was trending (2022 and 2023), I’d wager they’ve been working on Liquid Glass for two years. I’d also wager they might have waited another year to ship this redesign, if it weren’t for the disaster that Apple Intelligence was for the company last year. They needed a win.

If Apple was working on this for at least two years, and it involved redesigning everything (including macOS), I’m not convinced it was for a foldable phone. I’m also unconvinced their plan is to make one unified operating system. If I worked at Apple, the major selling point of a cohesive design is a manageable component library. Every large platform I’ve worked on is obsessed with minimizing components across all their apps. Apple makes a lot of operating systems and need to avoid both design and engineering complexity. It is easiest to share parts where they can. 

I don’t think they have a plan. While a unified design library makes sense to me as a design practitioner, I am not certain it works in practice (particularly on macOS). As far as asthetics, I think Apple thinks design is partially fashion, and that they need to be a forward-thinking fashion house. They are not wrong. But is OS 26 forward-thinking or merely a façade? I suspect the latter, but only time will tell.

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.

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.

The Verge reports that Adobe and Figma no longer plan to merge, largely thanks to legal pressure from the EU.

First off, this is great news. Adobe acquiring Figma was obviously bad for the industry, at least from the perspective of the designers who work in it. Adobe has a history of buying and subsequently squashing beloved industry tools.

Figma is also the only player keeping Adobe from a total market stranglehold. Bohemian Code’s Sketch would be a player if they offered a Windows app, but they’ve chosen not to pursue that market (and I think missed a big opportunity in the past decade as a result).

For the most part, life now goes on: Figma gets to do their own thing, Adobe does their thing, and all the smaller players (of whom Sketch is probably the biggest) keep doing their things too.

That being said, it’s not all sunshine and roses here. Adobe sunsetted XD, their design tool competitor, shortly after announcing the Figma acquisition. That tool has been dead in the water for a year, with little to no updates in that time. 

I have colleagues who use and like XD who will now have to migrate elsewhere. And let’s not forget the XD team: the folks Adobe had working on XD over the years were all top notch and had great ideas (Khoi Vinh is one of my heroes). I don’t know if those folks are still at Adobe. While life goes on for most of us, this sideshow has caused some actual destruction for a few.

In classic Adobe tradition, nothing meaningful has been accomplished, and a lot of people got hurt along the way.

Dan Mall’s recent post struck a chord with me when I read it. The whole post is worth reading, but in an effort to avoid quoting the entire thing, I’ll simply share his opening statement:

This past week, I finished making a small website for a family member’s business. I had an idea I liked for a subtle header animation. As I sat down to do it, I couldn’t justify how that animation would make the site any better at its job — attracting potential clients — than the static, non-animated version would.

It got me thinking: could I justify an animation for any website’s header? Can anyone justify an animation for a website’s header? A quick glance at the latest Awwwards Site of the Day nominees shows that lots of modern sites have animations in the header. But it is worth the effort to make?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks. Dan acknowledges in his post that, of course, web design has changed a lot. These days, as he says, ​“we live in a world where a Kardashian or a Youtuber can launch a product or even an industry with a tweet or an Instagram post, a role previously dominated by The Website.”

I think there’s another change that happened: websites got a whole heckuva lot easier to make. If a designer’s primary job was to live at the intersection of art and commerce, that job has been eradicated at the low end by shrinking budgets and easy-to-use website builders like Wix and Squarespace.

The remaining websites are either vanity projects for large organizations (designed to attract attention and brand cachet), or they are designed as business tools for whom conversion is their primary purpose. If conversion is the primary purpose, there is less space for design. As Conversion Rate Experts says:

Some people ask why they shouldn’t optimize for function and aesthetics. Even if their visitors are perfectly happy with the current appearance of the website, what’s the harm in being beautiful regardless?

It’s like asking ​“What’s the harm in giving Usain Bolt an egg and spoon to carry while he runs?” They don’t realize that beauty, like an egg and spoon, tends to slow progress to a crawl.

If I’m being very cynical about my own work, I think Amazon has proved that web design is more important than ever, but beauty is less important than it’s ever been.

That doesn’t mean making something beautiful is irrelevant. I’m working on a highly-polished website for a non-profit right now. Their design has a lot of attention-catching elements (several are mentioned on this list), and even relies on a motif. That being said, the non-profit sector is a space where cohesive design goes a long way to generating goodwill from potential donors.

I don’t entirely know where I’m going with this, but I do know that web design is still a young field. I think the jury is out on whether or not good design can have a negative impact on conversion, which is really what people pay for. (If you spend a bunch of money on a site, but get no return on that investment, you are probably not getting what you pay for.)

That all being said, I think the days of being in this for the art — like a modern-day Andy Warhol — are mostly behind us. All that matters is the conversion rate. Usually, we aren’t hired to make art. I too hunt for those jobs, but I increasingly feel like a hungry lion in the jungle craving a penguin.

I am in love with Name Sans, ArrowType’s metro-inspired typeface. Not only is the typeface really good, but the web page is nice too. A lot of type foundries have websites that are borderline unusable, but this is simple and demonstrates what makes the face unique, all without making me feel like I’m entered a funhouse.

When I lived in Toronto, I was fascinated by the typography in the subway system. A lot of the type was rendered in Helvetica or Univers, but some of the walls used ​“Toronto Subway,” a bespoke typeface originally designed in the 1950s, but redesigned in 2004 by David Verschagin because the original design was missing characters, and nobody knew who the original designer was.

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia’s article on the topic:

The font was recreated by David Vereschagin in 2004. Because the original designer of the font is unknown, and no documentation of the font had been kept, Vereschagin digitized the font by visiting stations and making rubbings of the letters on the original Vitrolite glass tiles as well as taking photographs. This is now used by the TTC as their font for station names. Vereschagin designed a matching lowercase, inspired by Futura and other similar designs. As one of the few typeface designs to have originated in Canada, it was used in a number of zines as a mark of local pride.

You can purchase Toronto Subway from Fontspring.

Joe Clark has also written a great paper on the topic (in fact, it might be one of my favourite research papers I’ve ever read on the internet). According to him, Toronto’s subway typography involves the aforementioned typeface of unknown origin, subways lined with washroom tiles, a billion-dollar New York subway design system clone, a new design system from a wayfinding expert that was installed, tested, and ignored, and ​“a billion-dollar corporation that uses as its main font a Helvetica clone that came free with Corel- Draw.” 

The most wild thing about Joe’s well-researched story is how all the half-finished design systems lurk across the city after decades. I lived there from 2015 – 2021, and I can confirm all these systems were never replaced or updated. It is not cohesive, and it makes the subway very confusing for people who are new to the city. In fact, people who are new to the city often can’t explain why they’re so confused by the subway system, the same way most of us can’t explain why inconsistent branding throws us off. But the inconsistent designs have left Torontonians confused for decades.

This one story is a perfect metaphor for Canadian politics: indecisiveness, a lack of vision, a lack of clarity, and occasional deceptive appearances of forward progress and momentum.

Ever since learning all this, I’ve paid a lot of attention to subway type. Name Sans is one of the better ones I’ve come across. It’s playful enough that you could use it for branding, but I think it’d make for good signage too.

I really loved Dan Mall’s latest post about answers to common design questions. Exactly the sort of thing I wish I came up with.

I’ve always found the work of design to be difficult. 

When I started working as a designer, it was difficult because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was tripping and stumbling in the dark, messing around in Photoshop and InDesign, trying to lay out magazine ads and technical manuals proficiently. I don’t think the work was particularly good; I may have had good taste, but I lacked the required skills to get there. 

Now that I’ve been working as a designer for over nine years — ten in October! — the primary challenges are different. As I get older, the blank page becomes more daunting, probably because I don’t want to repeat myself. I’d rather be like George Carlin and come up with new material for every project. But even once we get passed the blank page (try pen and paper first), the middle — the process — is hard. Design is not a straight line.

Good design resources about the process are scarce. I assume every designer struggles with this (especially post-COVID, when so many work alone from home with less immediate feedback), but none of us share the struggle in the messy middle. We just share the beautiful end results in our portfolio. 

In that respect, design is an odd creative field. Authors love to write books about their writing process. Filmmakers make documentaries exploring their craft. Musicians release demos as bonus tracks. But designers don’t share the process. We hide it like it’s some trade secret. Even Dribbble, ostensibly a platform where we can share ​“what we’re working on,” is mostly used to share work we’ve finished.

The process is ignored.

My favourite video on the internet is Aaron Draplin taking on a logo challenge from Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning). I watch the video every time I get stuck, so I’ve seen it a few times: Draplin makes jokes, draws freely, zips around Adobe Illustrator and, most importantly, talks about all the cool stuff he has lying around his workspace.

The first several times I watched the video, I was amazed by the amount of junk Draplin collects (and worried that a key part of success as a great designer would involve becoming a pack rat). But I eventually realized that Draplin isn’t collecting these knickknacks; he’s noticing them. That act of noticing – of focused observation – is his process.

I think we as an industry could do a better job sharing how we work. A few years ago, I audibly groaned when a friend who was new to the design industry asked if I preferred Sketch or Figma. (I was kind of a jerk, I know. Dear friend, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.) That question isn’t particularly interesting to me, although I think the evolution of our tools and the impact they have on us is worth watching and considering.

The questions that I think are most important: how do we do the work? How do we create focus? Where do we get our inspiration from? How do we survive the middle?

For years now, we’ve heard new conventional wisdom from all the creative gurus: ​“the tools don’t matter. You have everything you need to make what you want to make.”

It probably won’t be surprising to long-time readers of this site that I feel the opposite is true. The tools reveal the process, or at least imply our process. There is no right or wrong tool, so much as there are right or wrong tools for us.

No tool makes you better at your job, but the good ones make your job better. If you do high-end work with computers, a fast computer will always be a good tool. The right kitchen tools make cooking easier, or at least more fun. A good desk chair literally saves your body. Any tool that motivates you to do more of the thing you love has value.

George R.R. Martin does all his writing (very slowly) with a DOS word processor. Specifically, he uses WordStar 4. That looks something like this. One could make an argument it’s not the best tool for the job. But it’s his process. The tool merely reveals his priorities.

On the other hand, tools that get in the way have no value at all. I recently auditioned Sketch for the first time in years. Since 2019, I’ve used Figma with all my clients. In 2019, these apps were quite similar, but since then, Figma has completely leapfrogged Sketch. Things that used to take me ten minutes to do in Sketch take ten seconds in Figma. This audition was incredibly revealing of how the tools have changed, how my process has changed, and how my work has changed.

But it got me thinking: does the tool change me? Does it change my output? Are all my designs just huge Auto Layout demos?

Constraints breed creativity. What do the tools breed in us?

Copywriters have something they call a swipe file — a place they store bits of marketing and writing material they want to refer to later for inspiration. Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist Journal includes its own swipe file.

Commonplace books have a similar idea: it’s a place to store your favourite stuff other people make. H.P. Lovecraft kept one. Ryan Holiday called his ​“a project for a lifetime.”

You have to make your own wells of inspiration.

For many years, when I saw designs I liked and wanted to save for later reference, I would use Pinterest to save it, or simply take a screenshot and stick a copy of it in my Mac’s hard drive somewhere. (The latter is a much better solution than the former.)

Of course, a screenshot isn’t really enough. A good swipe file tells you where your inspiration comes from. It should include notes. Maybe even a full taxonomy. At that point, your basic file browser ain’t going to cut it. There’s no way to serendipitously discover things in the Finder.

These days, I like using Eagle, a macOS app that does a great job organizing all the visual media it saves. With support for everything from pictures to videos to full webpages, I think the app is a godsend. I was suspicious of it at first, mostly because it seemed to good be true, but it has survived three computers and a silicon transition without losing a single image, so I’m pretty confident in it these days.

It’s unfortunately Mac only, but it’s a darn good Mac app (if you like Mac-assed Mac apps). If you’re a Windows person or love your iPad for this sort of thing, I can’t help you. But I’d love to hear what you use.

When in doubt, the answer is simple: reduce, reduce, reduce.

Didn’t Dieter say the best design is as little design as possible?

Probably still true. Probably true of words too.

(Edited for brevity.)

I was saddened to hear about layoffs at Sketch. No company deserves to suffer layoffs, and certainly not a company that has done so much for its industry as Sketch. If you’re hiring, it sounds like the 80 people they’re letting go would be great for your team.

After Adobe bought Figma, I suggested to a couple different teams I freelance with that we could try Sketch again for our workflows. I’ve been impressed with their marketing efforts since the Figma acquisition (sadly it sounds like the marketing team is who they’re letting go of), and I miss using a Mac-native design app. 

Sadly, I think this ship has sailed. None of these developers are in love with Figma, and all of them hate Adobe, but Sketch being Mac-first immediately ruled them out for the teams I’m on. I wish Sketch took the Affinity route: build an amazing Mac app, and then build out native Windows and iPad versions. That could have made Sketch an unbeatable proposition in an increasingly tool-agnostic world.

It’s Figma’s world now. And in Figma’s world, it’s hard to beat ubiquity.

Two of my favourite designers on the web are writing about the redesign process of their websites, as they’re designing them. The first to do this was Johnnie Hallman, who introduced the concept here. His posts have been enlightening, as always (he’s got me interested in Contentful, which is saying something).¹

The second designer to take this on is Frank Chimero. I’ve been reading Frank’s writing religiously since 2013, when he was interviewed in The Great Discontent. It was obvious right away that he had a unique perspective on design, writing, and web development. I’ve read his blog multiple times over, studied every iteration of his website, and read his book several times. Needless to say, I’m a huge fan.

With all that being said, it’s been a delight to read through his thought process as he redesigns his blog. Many of his concerns regard typography, which is something I’m also obsessive about. Frank is sharing images of his process as he designs his website in the browser, and sharing how he approaches his work ​“from the outside in,” as he often says.

Some of my favourite posts from Frank so far:

• Perfect Trifecta: an examination of the moods and aesthetic Frank considers for his website.
• Looking at Letters: in which Frank blows up typeface sizes and dissects, at great length, the way he compares the differences between similar typefaces (like Source Sans and National 2, or Scto and Untitled Sans). If you’re into type, or you’re a designer, this is the sort of writing from which we all benefit.
• Scales and Hierarchy: Frank demonstrates the way he sets font sizes and line heights, and then talks about creating hierarchy with spacing, weight, colour, size, differing typefaces, and design accents.

Frank and Johnnie’s posts have illustrated what’s been missing in contemporary design writing, at least for me: none of us are writing about how we do the work. We’re sharing finished products and listicles. There is a dearth of education design writing that exists to do something other than market ourselves. 

I’m not redesigning my blog (yet), and I just launched a new version of my portfolio, but I’d like to start writing material like this myself.

I’m super late to the party on this, but I’m a huge fan of Klim’s new(-ish) typeface, Söhne, as well as their amazing new website. Really, really clever website, and the face looks gorgeous.