Well, that was excellent

Sat, 29 Dec 2018

Wrote this on September 3rd, then got so busy I forgot to post it:

I just returned to my desk after my first Adobe sabbatical — four weeks' time off for having worked at Adobe for five years. Along with the standard, two-week vacation time and our one-week company shutdown in July, that makes a total of seven weeks' vacation this year. The winter holidays ahead will make it eight.

What an incredible privilege it has been, and is! This amount of paid leave is life-changing. In 2018, Eileen and I took the kids on a vacation and two camping trips, we reorganized 10 years of basement clutter (making our house 50% bigger), and we spent lots of time with extended family. I also read a few books, did some cooking, and generally took my mind off work for a while.

Now that I’m back at work, I feel supercharged. The peace of mind I gained from all my time off has made me feel very focused, and my fresh eyes have made it easier to see all the moving pieces in projects. I feel unstoppable.

Whoever decided that Adobe should offer paid sabbaticals, company shutdown weeks, and other generous time-off opportunities was very smart.

As I publish this, I'm in the middle of that winter break I mentioned. The focused, unstoppable feeling I had back in September never went away. I spent the fall months learning from people all across this giant company, collaborating on strategy, and designing new typographic tools. 2019 is going to be fun.

Until then, though, I’ll continue playing Minecraft with my two older girls and reading books to my youngest — if I must! 🥰

Trying out an iOS publishing setup

Sat, 3 Nov 2018

It isn’t entirely comfortable yet, but I believe I now have a way to easily write and publish this site’s Jekyll-based posts from iOS — without writing code or actually running Jekyll. I can write in Ulysses and use the standard share feature to publish.

The key pieces are a customized version of Ryan Daigle’s iOS shortcut, the iOS app Working Copy (Ryan’s post explains how these two things work together) and Netlify, which automatically deploys my site from a GitHub repo with each commit. That’s one really nice thing about this setup — change management happens automatically.

Updating posts and working on other aspects of my site is possible on iOS too, although it’s even less comfortable: using Working Copy’s WebDAV Server feature as a remote site in Coda, I can edit easily ... but then I have to go through some motions to get the edits committed and pushed. Working Copy is a powerful app, but its Repository view does not inspire confidence. (And now that I’m done editing this post in Coda, let’s see if I can get it updated via Working Copy and live on my site...)

Frank Chimero’s ladder

Tue, 30 Oct 2018

Five minutes ago, to my embarrassment, I realized that the ladder analogy I used in Flexible Typesetting was based on Frank Chimero’s ladder analogy from The Shape of Design. Frank wrote in Chapter 1:

The creative process could be said to resemble a ladder, where the bottom rung is the blank page and the top rung the final piece. In between, the artist climbs the ladder by making a series of choices and executing them.

I wish I had realized this at some point during the three years I worked on my book, becuase I would have loved to cite Frank’s excellent book — a book that deserves an active spot on your shelf (even though it is available to read online for free). I loved The Shape of Design, and as you can see it deeply influenced me.

No doubt Frank’s work and writing will continue to inspire me, and to shape the core of my thinking so much that I will again forget it was he who catalyzed the ideas (or, simply, gave them to me).

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.