Spotlight for Typographics

Sat, 16 Jun 2018

I was on standby to do a “spotlight” at Typographics — a quick word at the microphone in between the main conference speakers. They didn’t need me after all, but here’s what I would have said:

Hi everyone, my name is Tim Brown. I started my career as a web designer, and now I’m Head of Typography at Adobe. If you want to know me better, check out Typekit Practice or read an article I wrote, Paying for Type.

I wanted to thank all of you for your patience with Adobe, and your faith in our Type team. Thank you for the opportunity to affect the business of type design and the practice of typography. This is a very special moment in history for both.

And I need your help. I wrote a book called Flexible Typesetting, for A Book Apart, because the web has changed typography. I need you to read this book so that we can talk.

Right now, we don't have words to describe the work we're doing when we set type in multidimensional, relative ways. And we don't have the right tools for doing that work. Join me in understanding what has changed and figuring out what we need.

This is my first time at Typographics, and it has been excellent. Thank you for your time, and thanks to the folks at Cooper for putting on an incredible event.

And it really was incredible. Beautiful summer days in the heart of New York City, in historic buildings of The Cooper Union.

I especially enjoyed TypeLab – the chill, alternative track of the conference – with its informal presentations, demos, discussion, and live lettering. Whiteboards & chalkboards everywhere. Saw friends I hadn’t seen in years, and met some great new ones. Definitely going to attend again.

2017–2018 quarterly catch-up

Sun, 27 May 2018

A special quadruple quarterly report (lol). I got way behind on this sort of planning. Turns out having a baby while writing a book and working full-time makes you sorta busy. Here are some things I did in the past year, as well as older accomplishments less recent (that I am retiring from the home page).

Done over the past year

• Finished writing a book about flexible typesetting for A Book Apart.   May 2018
• Launched Font Packs.   May 2018
• Helped release Minion 3 by Robert Slimbach (check out the preview page).   Apr 2018
• Renovated our front porch.   Oct 2017
• Welcomed my third daughter into the world!   Jun 2017

From a while ago

Retiring this stuff from Recently:

• Led several teams of people to design new typography tools.   May 2017
• Reorganized & painted bedrooms.   May 2017
• Built basement shelves like this.   Apr 2017
• Read Zita the Spacegirl books (Legends/Return) with my kids.   Mar 2017
• Gave a virtual seminar at UIE’s UX Symposium.   Mar 2017
• Got through a bout of Lyme disease.   Feb 2017
• Set a variety of projects in motion.   Jan 2017
• Bought new smoke detectors. (Replace yours every 10 years.)   Dec 2016
• Built a workbench.   Dec 2016
• Voted, then spent time processing the election results.   Nov 2016
• Helped launch Typekit Marketplace and Typekit Platform at Adobe MAX.   Nov 2016
• Talked about variable fonts with Jeff Veen on his podcast, Presentable.   Oct 2016

Coming soon: Flexible Typesetting

Fri, 25 May 2018

It is a beautiful book, well-conceived, painstakingly executed with a fine attention to detail. I can't believe that you want to do web design: what a horrible place to do fine typography, a refined practice for which you obviously have an eye.

That’s a note from one of my favorite teachers, Clifton Meador, about my final project one semester (a typeset, bound book). I learned so much from Clif, and I can understand why he felt that way about web design. But 15 years ago, when I received that note, I felt there was something special about typography on the web.

Now, after building dozens of websites, learning a lot, and helping many people use fonts as Head of Typography at Adobe, I know why typography on the web is so special. So, I wrote a book to explain it.

My new book is called Flexible Typesetting, and it will be published by A Book Apart this summer. I absolutely cannot wait for you to read it, because we have so much to talk about. That’s all I’ll say for now. Follow @typesetting and @abookapart on Twitter. And for a sneak preview of the book, listen to Shop Talk Show episode #314.

Update: A Book Apart #27, Flexible Typesetting.

RSS Club

Mon, 12 Feb 2018

Oh, I like this RSS Club idea very much. What a bunch of nerds we are. Thanks to Dave for the fun idea! I don't have much to say right now, but I wanted to get this set up properly.

Got an iPad a week or two ago, and sorta bummed about my site setup. I use Jekyll and GitHub, but I don't have any kind of deployment in place — I just FTP up the compiled Jekyll. But I can't compile Jekyll on the iPad. I've considered setting up deployment from GitHub, like Pages with a custom domain, but then I'd either have to commit all the squirrelly, weird, hidden stuff on my site, or break all the links. That stuff is clearly important.

Blogroll, episode two

Sun, 11 Feb 2018

Adding a couple more sites to the blogroll:

Mandy Brown's A Working Library. Mandy and I used to work together at Typekit. She is incredibly smart, grounded in good values, and she works hard to dismantle systematic disadvantages in society. Her writing introduced me to Octavia Butler's Earthseed books, which I thought were excellent. I admire Mandy's leadership and determination, and I love reading her blog.

Chris Coyier is the mastermind of several beloved web development institutions that I visit daily: CodePen, CSS-Tricks, Shop Talk Show. He writes this personal site as well. Chris is a kind and thoughtful person, hustling to make working on the web easier for other people. It's fun to hear about what he's up to.

Adobe and NASA

Sat, 7 Oct 2017

My colleague Sairus Patel recently attended an internal Adobe conference for principal scientists, and I loved this anecdote he returned with:

If you want to change the world by influencing people’s creativity, you join Adobe. Just like in the 60’s if you wanted to put a man on the moon, you joined NASA.