Changelog Interviews – Episode #618
Two tickets for Departure, please
with Helena Zhang & Tobias Fried
Today we’re joined by a dynamic duo, Helena Zhang & Tobias Fried, who team up on all sorts of digital passion projects. This includes the wildly popular Phosphor Icons plus their latest joint, Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe… that both Adam & Jerod are pretty much in love with. We discuss their tastes & inspirations, how they collab, making money on passion projects like these, velvet ropes & so much more.
Featuring
Sponsors
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai.
Wix Studio – Wix Sudio is for devs who build websites, sell apps, go headless, or manage clients. Integrate, extend and write custom scripts in a VS code-based IDE. Leverage zero set up dev, test and production environments. Ship faster with an AI code assistant. And work with Wix headless API’s on any tech stack.
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Notes & Links
Project sites
Fonts mentioned
Other cool stuff
Chapters
| Chapter Number | Chapter Start Time | Chapter Title | Chapter Duration |
| 1 | 00:00 | This week on The Changelog | 01:24 |
| 2 | 01:24 | Sponsor: Fly.io | 02:29 |
| 3 | 03:53 | Start the show! | 01:07 |
| 4 | 05:00 | A perfect website 👀 | 01:12 |
| 5 | 06:12 | Monospace magic | 02:43 |
| 6 | 08:56 | Adam's font journey | 02:20 |
| 7 | 11:16 | Gushing on the site | 00:57 |
| 8 | 12:13 | Website deep cuts | 02:46 |
| 9 | 14:59 | The sincerest form of... | 00:54 |
| 10 | 15:53 | Retrofuturism | 01:52 |
| 11 | 17:45 | Jerod's font journey | 02:13 |
| 12 | 19:57 | Monospace font nerdery | 04:05 |
| 13 | 24:02 | Font regression testing | 02:55 |
| 14 | 26:57 | Iosevka! | 01:16 |
| 15 | 28:13 | GNU Unifont! | 01:25 |
| 16 | 29:38 | Pixel font nerdery | 01:51 |
| 17 | 31:29 | Adam reads the tea leaves | 02:39 |
| 18 | 34:08 | Severance vibes | 01:06 |
| 19 | 35:13 | Movie trailers aside | 01:05 |
| 20 | 36:19 | Severance no mono?! | 00:54 |
| 21 | 37:13 | Public library terminals | 00:34 |
| 22 | 37:47 | More website details | 03:27 |
| 23 | 41:14 | Adam pokes Jerod | 00:50 |
| 24 | 42:04 | Building the flight deck 👀 | 00:45 |
| 25 | 42:49 | Sponsor: Timescale | 02:13 |
| 26 | 45:02 | Sponsor: Wix Studio | 00:53 |
| 27 | 45:56 | Open source? | 00:51 |
| 28 | 46:47 | Donate buttons | 02:25 |
| 29 | 49:11 | Money can ruin passion projects | 01:47 |
| 30 | 50:58 | Font & icon maintenance costs | 03:54 |
| 31 | 54:52 | Gushing on Phosphor's site 👀 | 03:36 |
| 32 | 58:28 | Still using IBM Plex Mono? | 01:33 |
| 33 | 1:00:01 | Making money | 01:58 |
| 34 | 1:01:59 | Font Awesome | 02:16 |
| 35 | 1:04:15 | People still buy/sell fonts? | 01:36 |
| 36 | 1:05:52 | Adam stares down imposter syndrome | 01:16 |
| 37 | 1:07:08 | Freedom in giving | 00:55 |
| 38 | 1:08:04 | Sponsor: WorkOS | 02:50 |
| 39 | 1:10:53 | Intangible benefits | 02:43 |
| 40 | 1:13:36 | Client services | 03:55 |
| 41 | 1:17:30 | Client work challenges | 01:25 |
| 42 | 1:18:56 | No gap in their flow | 03:05 |
| 43 | 1:22:00 | The velvet rope | 01:24 |
| 44 | 1:23:24 | One more idea | 01:52 |
| 45 | 1:25:16 | Toby on open source compensation | 07:17 |
| 46 | 1:32:33 | Patreon vs Buy Me a Coffee | 03:42 |
| 47 | 1:36:14 | Iconography streamers | 04:16 |
| 48 | 1:40:30 | Obligatory AI chapter | 03:25 |
| 49 | 1:43:55 | Support your human creators | 01:19 |
| 50 | 1:45:15 | Closing thoughts and stuff | 02:16 |