I sorta left Twitter

Sat, 29 Sep 2018

For many years, Twitter felt like an amazing place to share what I was doing, to meet new people, and to help spread positive energy and good ideas. I did all of that, and I loved it. But Twitter gradually became awful.

It came to my attention years ago that on Twitter, harassment goes unchecked. This began with GamerGate, reached its height with our disgraceful president’s continual presence, and by the time #DeactiDay rolled around I was already checked out. I regret actively using the service for as long as I did, because in retrospect it is very clear that Twitter never cared about the people who were being harassed. Along with these principled reasons for spending less time on Twitter, the company also changed its API, which meant that the app I liked best for using it (Tweetbot) lost some good features.

Twitter has severely disappointed me. I haven’t deactivated my accounts, but I don’t use them like I once did. I try to acknowledge people who mention me, and promote friends’ stuff if I see it, but I don’t intend to share my own ideas there for the foreseeable future. I may post occasionally to remind Twitter followers that I am active elsewhere.

I have moved over to Mastodon for now (@timbrown, @typesetting). But Mastodon also has its share of harassment issues, and currently lacks a Tweetbot-quality client. Going forward, I will try any new service that seems promising. I have also begun a Jeremy-Keith-style, hosting-and-syndicating of my own brief thoughts. This again has its drawbacks — I can’t easily post from iOS (my setup runs Jekyll), and I haven’t even tried to get any reply/follow anything going (if that’s even a possibility).

In summary, I’m using social media in a rather messy way these days, and using it a lot less. I miss it, but I’ve had enough of the world’s current offerings. I would pay a good chunk of money, monthly, for a solidly-designed social network built with the right priorities.

Hey Siri, take a memo

Fri, 28 Sep 2018

When I’m preparing a new talk for speaking engagments, it often begins as a messy process. I’ll jot down an outline, then I’ll go over it in my mind while I’m driving or doing chores. In those moments, when I’m doing other stuff, I find voice memos to be super useful.

I’ve been using a program called RecUp (formerly DropVox) that begins recording immediately when I start the app, and saves the resulting file to Dropbox. It’s an incredibly solid app that I have relied on for years. When I’m back at my desk, I listen to the voice memos & transcribe them — that gets my brain going, helps me flesh out the outline.

Today I upgraded to iOS 12, and I saw that the native Voice Memos app now syncs with iCloud. And there’s a new shortcut to ask Siri to begin recording a voice memo (Settings → Voice Memos → Siri & Search → Shortcuts).

It’d be tempting to switch if this worked while the phone is locked, because that’s the only thing I dislike about my RecUp system. I can say, “Hey Siri, open RecUp” and the recording begins ... but only if the phone is unlocked.

Tempo experiments

Thu, 27 Sep 2018

Some Adobe colleagues are prototyping a new tool and taking a fresh look at typographic features, so they asked me and Wenting to help. For this week’s meeting, I made a couple examples showing how several kinds of whitespace can be simultanously adjusted (part of Cyrus Highsmith’s tempo idea from Inside Paragraphs):

• Here’s tempo changing automatically as text block width changes. See how the top paragraph’s tempo gets tighter and looser? The lower paragraph does not change tempo.
• And here’s the same experiment, but with tempo as a manual adjustment. Mess around and see what looks good to you.

This led to all sorts of interesting conversations about exposing the more specific sub-properties at play (letterspacing, word spacing, etc.), and about incorporating variable fonts with a width axis (or traditional fonts with multiple widths).

But the most intriguing issues it raises are about whether and how to provide smarter default settings (as in the automatic example).

For which people, in which situations, do preset values and behaviors make sense? What if the presets could be tailored to a person’s own preferences (for example, someone who generally prefers looser text)? What if a brand’s flexible typesetting presets went wherever that brand’s fonts went?

We already know how to tailor measurements to specific typefaces, and we know where that could lead. The bigger questions are about context — applying presets and recommendations with tact and care.

Revamping gender in old children’s stories

Fri, 10 Aug 2018

One of the side projects I’m working on is editing and republishing children’s stories by Thornton W. Burgess. I often read the stories to my daughters, and they’re delightful. Burgess was a naturalist, so the animal characters are anthropomorphized with personalities that give you an idea of the animals’ different behaviors and habits.

But I noticed something as I read the books: more than 90% of the characters are male, and the few female characters exhibit stereotypical traits (emotional Mrs. Quack, nagging Jenny Wren). So as I’ve been reading the stories and marking them up in HTML as I go, my daughters and I have been dutifully switching a bunch of the characters from male to female or from female to male. We have a 50/50 ratio going.

This is good, but I wonder what other improvements I could be making. Now’s the time to figure that out. It feels terrible to admit this, but I feel completely ignorant when it comes to gender issues.

Should I make some of the characters’ genders ambiguous? Should I use different pronouns? What percentage of the characters should be like this? Are there specific animals that lend themselves best to the right kind of portrayal? — I don’t mean to be insensitive by asking that, but I think about birds, for example, and the tendency for male birds to be more brightly colored.

Anyway, I’m not sure where to begin. If you have any tips, I’d appreciate them.

Flexible Typesetting Acknowledgements

Tue, 24 Jul 2018

Thanks to friends and family who worked with me and supported me as I wrote Flexible Typesetting. These acknowledgements are from the back of the book.

Since A Book Apart opened its doors for business, I have admired these books. It’s an honor and a privilege to have written one. My thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman for setting himself apart — for striking a helpful, caring tone in his writings; for fiercely advocating for openness, collaboration, and community on the web; and for building businesses that cement these values. Thanks to Jason Santa Maria for his humility, his visual work, and writings – which have always inspired me – and for designing this beautiful set of books. Thanks to Mandy Brown for her leadership and her encouragement, and for showing me the power of a great editor.

Thanks to Katel LeDû for her contagious enthusiasm, her patience, and her diligent work running A Book Apart. Thanks to Caren Litherland for editing me. Caren’s kind words kept me going, and her critical eye brought clarity to this text. I could not have accomplished this without her support and guidance. Thanks to Ray Schwartz and Juliette Cezzar for their incredible expertise as technical editors; their empathy for readers improved this book tenfold. Thanks to Tina Lee for shepherding the earliest versions of this book. Thanks to Bram Stein for writing his Webfont Handbook; years ago, he and I strategized about how these two texts could harmonize, and it’s exciting to see our plan in action. Thanks to Jessica Hische for writing my foreword. Jessica is well known for her beautiful lettering, but she’s an equally gifted writer—helpful, straightforward, and kind. Thanks to the production crew at A Book Apart for making this book real. Thanks to Mike Monteiro and David Demaree for their advice about publishing.

Thanks to Greg Veen for our many private discussions about the nature of flexible typesetting, and for his evergreen support. Thanks additionally to the other managers in my career – Matthew Rechs, Bryan Mason, Carolyn Guyer, Megg Brown, and James Roy – for their leadership, and for shielding me from nonsense so the ideas in this book could take root. Thanks to Jeff Veen, Ryan Carver, Andy McMillan, Robert Eerhart, Toby Malina, Marci Eversole, Vitaly Friedman, Gavin Elliott, and Jared Spool for having faith in me and giving me a platform. Thanks to the Typekit and Type teams, and to all of my friends at Adobe, for your profound care toward people who make type and practice typography.

Thanks to George Laws for opening my mind to the abstraction, balance, and systems in graphic design and type, for his mentoring, and for our breakfasts. Thanks to Arthur Hoener for introducing me to typography and giving me work opportunities that catalyzed my career. Thanks to Anne Galperin and Clif Meador for helping me think critically and find confidence. Thanks to Mr. Mahon for making me feel at home in art class. Thanks to the elementary school teachers who shaped and cared for me, including Mr. Weiss, Mr. Cafon, Ms. Oliver, Mr. Schmidt, and Ms. Hart.

Thanks to Ray Schwartz for geeking out with me about web development. Thanks to Chris Silverman for his perpetually fresh eyes and articulate feedback. Thanks to Donny Truong for his openness and hustle. Thanks to Ethan Marcotte for the invaluable discussion and his unparalleled optimism. Thanks to Bram Stein, Scott Kellum, Elliot Jay Stocks, Jake Giltsoff, Wenting Zhang, Weston Thayer, Indra Kupferschmid, Chris Coyier, Dave Rupert, Andrew Johnson, Ivan Bettger, and Tobias Frere-Jones for exchanges and collaborations that bolstered ideas in this book. Thanks to Kevin Davis and Joe Juriga; rest in peace.

Thanks to my friends in the Nice Web Type Slack for continually reminding me how much there is to learn about typography. Thanks to friends who gave me feedback on early drafts of this book: Greg Veen, Ethan Marcotte, Donny Truong, Robin Rendle, Bram Stein, and Frank Griesshammer. Thanks to writers who have inspired me over the years, especially Dan Cederholm and John Gruber.

Thanks to my friends at the St. Remy Volunteer Fire Department for their patience and understanding, and for their service to our community.

Thanks to my family for their love and patience as I concentrated on this book. Thanks Mom, for encouraging and supporting me throughout my life. Thanks Dad, for teaching me to think deeply. Thanks Mom S., for feeding and housing me while I learned to make websites. Thanks Dad S. for repeatedly asking when I would write a book (this is it). Thanks to my brothers, Greg and Ken, for being awesome-o. Shout-out to my sisters- and brothers-in-law, and my nieces and nephews. Love you all.

Thanks to my three beautiful, gifted, funny, kind, powerful, appreciative children, Kate, Julie, and Lori. Daddy and Mommy worked hard on this book, and you can work hard on things too. Make time to listen, speak, read, and write. I love you.

It is an immeasurable privilege to share my life and work with such wonderful people, and I profoundly appreciate each of you.

But my deepest appreciation, my most humble thanks, and all of my love, go to my wife Eileen. She alone truly understands what it meant for me to write this book. For years, she has tolerated burdens that would have exhausted my patience in a week if our roles had been reversed. Her loving support, encouragement, and selflessness deserve a book of their own. I will treasure her example for the rest of my life.