If you start with a high-quality, legible, free typeface and experiment with size, weight, colour, line height, and (subtle) letter spacing, you might find these free options will get you further than you’d think. These are professional fonts crafted and maintained by experts and they can help your content land the way it deserves to.
Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.
This font is a crossover of different font types: it is semi-condensed, semi-rounded, semi-geometric, semi-din, semi-grotesque. It employs minimal stoke thickness variations and a semi-closed aperture.
As part of my content buddying process, I am henceforth going to typeset all drafts in this font. I just tested it with this sentence:
We can leverage the synergy of a rich immersive user paradigm shift.
Sounds like Zach had a great time at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf:
I can’t really express how meaningful this experience was to me. An antithesis to the rat race of social media, IndieWebCamp was a roomful of kindred spirits that care about the web and their own websites and hosting their own content. It felt like the Google Reader days again, when everyone was blogging and writing on their own sites. I dunno if you can tell but I loved it.
He also made a neat little plug-in that renders negative comments in Comic Sans with mixed cased writing:
This isn’t intended to be a hot-take on Comic Sans. Instead it’s meant to change the tone of the negativity to make it sound like a clown is yelling at a kid’s birthday party.
A free and open source neutral sans-serif typeface, released as part of version two of the design system for the US federal government.
Two new typefaces, designed to be deliberately lacking in expression.
The write-up of the making of the typefaces is as open and honest as the finished output. This insight into the design process rings very, very true:
Post rationalisation is an open secret in the design industry. Only when a project is finished can it be written up, the messy process is delineated and everything seems to follow a logical sequence up until the final thing is unveiled, spotless and perfect.
However, I suspect the process is largely irrational for most designers. There is a point where all the input has been processed, all the shit drawings, tenuous concepts and small ideas have been thrown away and you just work towards the finish, too exhausted and distracted to even know if it’s worth anything or not. And, if you’re lucky, someone or something will come along and validate the work.
Here’s one of them new-fangled variable fonts that’re all the rage. And this one’s designed by David Berlow. And it’s free!
A somewhat condescending piece of work about Comic Sans …from a designer who uses the oh-so-passé Museo on his personal site.
Live by the judgemental sword, die by the judgemental sword.
Best. Dialogue box. Ever.