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.

On June 1, 2020, I wrote that I was going to redesign my blog in the open. I kept a redesign tag so folks could follow along with my updates. I had a few intentions going in:

1. I was going to share my design process from beginning to end.
2. I was going to write the entire thing as an SSG in Gatsby, Nuxt, Gridsome, or something like that, and open source it.

Three and a half years after I completely reset the site’s design, the new site is live, and I did not stick to either of those goals.

I mildly regret doing all this in public. I expected I would have more time to work on the project, especially because of the lockdowns during COVID, but in reality my work schedule has been fit to burst for three years now. On top of that, my wife and I bought out first house during COVID — a real fixer-upper — and we had some health issues to navigate, in addition to work. I had no margin to work on this. 

The knockoff effect of this very public delay is that I am a professional designer who has had a terrible-looking website for close to half a decade.

I also veered away from my stated goals:

1. I wanted to share all my decision making publicly, but it takes a lot of effort to share your design process, particularly with the written word. For this site, I also did a lot of the fine-tuning and ​“feel” of the design right in the browser, which sped things up as I approached the finish line. Sharing the minutia behind all those decisions would have been extremely time consuming, and delayed completing the project even further. I made some last-minute changes this morning that would have merited some explanation if I were to document everything. I just wanted to ship it.
2. Between 2020 and now, it’s become clear that Javascript-generated sites aren’t the future so much as they are just an option, and I didn’t think the option was necessary for this site — at least, not right now, when time is short.¹

That being said, there were some goals I stuck to: I wrote in June 2020 that I wanted to share small updates on a platform I owned and controlled, rather than on Twitter (which was oddly prescient of me). I can do that on this site, if I’d like. Here’s an example.

In the same post, I also wrote that I’d like to fetch everything from my Letterboxd profile and display it on my own site.² You can now see all that on the Watching page.³

If you’re interested in following this blog, there are several ways to do that. You can subscribe via email, or to one of three RSS feeds: a feed to read everything, a feed exclusively for writing, and a feed exclusively for movie reviews. (I also signed up for micro.blog to easily distribute and syndicate my writing to other networks, so you can follow and respond there as well.)

There is more to do. I haven’t added any photo sharing features yet (which would decouple me from Instagram), although I don’t take nearly as many photos I used to. I have more I’d like to do with movie reviews on this site.

Despite all that, as the real estate agents always quipped, this place has good bones. It’s now running on Craft CMS, which is wonderful. I’ve added dark mode. It’s got a good, solid 12-column grid structure underlying the whole design. It’s going to be flexible for many years.

For those of you who have read this blog, even (and especially) during its desert years, thank you for reading and for your support. 

Fender has announced the Tone Master Pro — a Fender-made amp and effects modeller that competes with Line 6’s Helix and the Fractal Axe-FX.

This feels like a big deal. Off the top of my head, I think this is the first modeller from an amp manufacturer. (Mesa doesn’t have a modeller. Marshall doesn’t have a modeller. Soldano doesn’t. Etc.) The modeller includes a ton of Fender amps, but it also includes standbys like the Boogie IIC+, the JCM800, the 5150, and more. 

Leon Todd, one of Youtube’s modeller masters, put up a forty-five minute demo of the product. The UX looks pretty good — turning the foot switches into twisty knobs is smart. I think the screens above each switch could be larger, but that’s a small quibble.

The most important thing is how it sounds, and it sounds fine. Comparing it to my Axe-FX seems almost unfair, but when I compare the two, the Tone Master Pro sounds like there’s a weight blanket over it. 

Listen to Leon’s demo of the JCM800. I’m not a huge JCM800 fan, but even I can tell you that’s not how a JCM800 sounds. This is how a JCM800 sounds if you threw a weighted blanket over top of it and mic’d it poorly.

Fender has a promo video you can check out too, and Mary Spender also made a video. I use my Axe-FX 99.9% of the time I play guitar now, and if anything, these demos have made its place in my rig even more permanent.

I somehow missed this week that Gibson announced the return of the Les Paul Supreme. Gibson didn’t put out a press release for this or anything (and they frankly have the worst website of any guitar company), but they did release this Youtube video.

Here are the key specs:

• AAA figured maple top
• One model with two pickups (Burstbucker Pros), and another with three pickups (all Burstbucker Pros). The model with three pickups is exclusively available on Gibson’s website, which seems like a terrible idea, given my aforementioned note about their website.
• Ultra-modern weight relief
• SlimTaper neck with a compound radius
• Ebony fretboard
• Push/​pull controls for coil tap, phase, and pure bypass modes
• Starting at USD $3,999 (or $5,199 in Canada)

These are undeniably handsome instruments, but that is also an undeniably bananas price for a Les Paul. It’s also odd to me that they would make the most attractive model — the 3‑pickup variant — available exclusively through the Gibson website. I wonder how the dealers feel about this.

In regards to the push/​pull pots: these should be push/​push buttons. The black top hat control knobs on this thing have an indent on them already. If those indents were buttons, the controls would be substantially easier to use. Push/​pull pots are fiddly on stage. For $4,000 USD, these are the details I’d expect Gibson to sweat.

I also can’t figure out what differentiates the newly-announced Les Paul Supreme from the Les Paul Modern. Here are the key specs on that, and tell me if this looks familiar:

• Maple top (not AAA, but solid paint in some classic colours, like Faded Pelham Blue, which is the best blue ever painted on a guitar)
• Two Burstbucker Pro pickups
• Ultra-modern weight relief
• SlimTaper neck with a compound radius
• Ebony fretboard
• Push/​pull controls for coil tap, phase, and pure bypass moes
• Starting at USD $2,999 (or $3,999 in Canada)

For about $1,000 less, you get the exact same guitar, minus the AAA maple top. It’s the same pickups, same push/​pull options, same weight relief, same neck, etc. The only difference is the visual aesthetics on that maple top.

I have no problem paying more for a nice finish. I own a Slash Les Paul because I preferred the AAA maple top to the normal Les Paul Standard’s. But the price difference there was just a couple hundred dollars. This is the first time in my memory that a AAA top from Gibson has ever been priced at $1,000.

I just read Darran Charles’ review of Marshall’s JTM45 reissue, the ST20H. It sounds to me like it’s pretty close to an exact clone of the Marshall’s first amp, with a couple minor improvements:

• There’s a real effects loop now, which is a must-have for most players, but doesn’t hurt anybody who prefers not to have one. That’s great.
• Instead of 45 watts of power like the original, the ST20H includes a 5 watt mode and a 20 watt mode.

The 5W and 20W modes had me a little curious, but here’s Darran:

There isn’t a great deal of difference in tone between the 5W and 20W settings, aside from the obvious increased headroom. We have to say though that even the 5W mode is barely usable at home volume levels, especially as we begin to push it into break-up. This amp is loud!

Truthfully, power wattage in a tube guitar amp doesn’t correlate to volume in a linear fashion, so this doesn’t surprise me. I prefer an amp with higher wattage because I find it makes the ramp-up from clean to dirty a little cleaner, so it’s a bit of a pity this doesn’t have a 45W mode.

The JTM45 is my favourite amp that Marshall ever made. I prefer it to Fender’s amps from the same time period too. If I were shopping around for a vintage-style amp today, I’d absolutely buy one of these.

Darran complains about the price of the ST20H in his piece, but I didn’t see it mentioned in the body of the article. In Canada, the ST20H is $1900 at our major retailers. In the US, it’s $1749, which is perhaps too close to our pricing, considering the exchange rate. Despite that, I think that’s a fair price for a boutique amp in 2023, considering how over-inflated prices are across the entire guitar industry.

From today’s issue of Casey Newton’s Platformer:

In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying.

The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

I’ve got a couple use cases for inter-connected notes in my life, but those use cases will not help me think. They are, as Casey writes, about retrieving something in storage. 

My canonical example of this is for Bible study. Every time I learn something new about Genesis 1, for example, I can link my note to the book by writing [[Genesis 1]]. When I revisit Genesis 1, I can quickly see my notes beside it, and see where and when I learned it — key information for long-term study.

That being said, this information is not useful or helpful outside of my study. It is often useless in the realm of work; it would probably be easier for me to retrieve my meeting notes later were they organized hierarchically in directories. 

Even in the case of study or research, I question the value of several disparate notes. Take my example again of Genesis 1. Would it not be more helpful to see my thoughts directly attached to the original document itself? (The digital equivalent of writing in the margins of a book.)

Once again from Casey’s story, this time quoting Andy Matuschak:

“The goal is not to take notes — the goal is to think effectively… Better questions are ​‘what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?’ [and] ​‘how can I shepherd my attention effectively?’”

In a world of artificially intelligent machines, the only path to success for the modern worker is to develop critical reasoning and think more effectively than our dystopian counterparts. I worry we’re collectively losing our ability to do that.

Migration complete Today, I have finally finished migrating all the blog posts from my Wordpress site to my new site.

For some reason, I didn’t have the original files for a lot of my posts anymore, so I copied the text from each of my blog posts to Drafts, which pasted it directly in Markdown. From there, I moved the file to the appropriate folder. I also added the title and publication date of the post as frontmatter at the top of the file, like this:

---
date: 2023-08-23
title: Migration complete
---

If the post had images, I made sure the images were in the same directory as the text file. The text files and their corresponding directories share the same naming conventions: YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post. It’s easy to search for posts on my Mac this way.

Once these files were completed, I simply had to copy and paste the text into the correct place in Craft CMS, my CMS of choice. I use Craft for all my client work, and its flexibility makes it a great choice for me.

This was a simple process, but time consuming. The plus side is that I now have plain text versions of each of my blog posts saved on my main machine.

This also means that the new version of my website is finally out of design and into development. The design isn’t 100% complete, but it’s good enough to get me going.

The design includes space for blog posts, short status updates (microblogging), movie reviews (synced with Letterboxd), and (potentially) images.

Lots to do still, but migrating all this content was the biggest hurdle to doing the work.

August 21^st marks the tenth anniversary of Wildfire Studios — my freelance studio.

I never dreamt I’d be designing UIs, making websites, taking photos, and writing copy for ten years. To be honest, I never dreamt I’d still be in business after ten years! When I started freelancing, one year before I coined the business Wildfire Studios, it was mostly because there weren’t a lot of gigs for English majors in 2012, and I was approaching the end of my university years with no idea what to do with myself.

My first freelance gig was writing television commercials for a local film studio. They had big-name Canadian clients like Broil King, and immediately got me working on commercials for those clients. They invited me to a shoot I was involved in at Blackberry founder Jim Balsillie’s house. 

It was an amazing opportunity for a snot-nosed punk with no reputation, no degree, and no real résumé beyond a handful of writing awards from my high school years. If it wasn’t for this client, I wouldn’t be doing what I do today. I am eternally grateful.

When I started writing scripts for these folks, the owner of the studio — who I had met when I scooped him ice cream at my summer job — asked me if I knew what freelancing was. His blunt explanation has stuck with me since: ​“It’s simple. I give you money for completing the work by the deadline I give you. You work wherever you want, whenever you want. I don’t care if you’re on a drug binge at 3 in the morning in your underwear, so long as you get the work done on time, and you do it well.”

From there, I tripped and fell into writing about iOS for clients like Jim Dalrymple and the MacStorm folks. I wrote hundreds of stories over a one or two year period, while simultaneously exploring wedding photography, graphic and digital design, and print advertising.

Two years in, and only one year into Wildfire Studios, I was creating full-page ads for the Canadian division of multinational clients, who placed those ads in the national trade magazines of their choice. I would do the product photography, ad strategy and copy, and art direction, and send them the finished package when it was done.

All this work eventually funneled into a focus on digital design and front-end web development, which is what I am still focused on today.

I’ve been blessed to make my livelihood on my own terms. I often joke that I’m un-hireable. I’m in my thirties and never held a ​“real” job, which makes office politics completely foreign to me. 

I’ve also been blessed to work with a lot of wonderful clients over the years. Their repeat business, as well as the support of my wife (who I met ten years ago while I was naming the business), has made this job possible for me. Even ten years in, I’m still excited about the things I’m making with my clients today.

Wildfire Studios has always felt like a canvas of infinite possibilities to me. I’ve never felt like it’s limited me to just design. It’s allowed me to do any sort of creative work, whether that’s been photography (wedding, corporate events, and products), print advertising, website development, website and app design, and even a little writing for television.

Since 2020, my work has been focused on huge apps, websites, and design systems for clients and startups located all over the United States (much of which I am currently unable to share in detail). In Canada, I continue to focus largely on nonprofit work (like the new Donations site and evangelism site for EHC, the first two sites in a multi-year, five-part effort for their work.) I’m fortunate enough to be involved at a strategy level, sitting at the same table as executives to discuss pricing models, marketing strategies, and the opportunities for design to make an impact.

If you told me this is the work I would have been doing ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I feel extraordinarily blessed to be a part of all this today. Ten years ago, it would have seemed so unlikely as to be impossible.

Here’s to many more years of infinite possibilities.