In her second Netflix special, Kirkman delivers both style and substance. From period to Jesus, meditation to abortion, and fingering to catcalling, she is brutally honest and sarcastically hilarious. An enjoyable watch.

David Jonathan Ross just released his hyper-stylized typeface called Fit, which designed for maximum impact. He shares:

I drew Fit with an expansive range of widths…. Beginning with the impossibly narrow Skyline style, each character grows by 3600% (on average) to reach the gargantuan Ultra Extended. In between these ridiculous extremes, you will find a family rich in panache and expressive potential.

One of the exciting things about Fit is the support for Vietnamese right from the start. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to contribute my input into the Vietnamese diacritics. Because Fit is such a unique typeface, incorporating legible Vietnamese accents while maintaining its proportion was one of the challenges.

Although Fit is not meant to be read, David has done an excellent job of making the Vietnamese accents as clear as possible. One of my favorite accents he drew was the tilde. The first time he showed me it was barely unrecognizable as a tilde. I suggested a solution, but it was not so great. Then he came up with design that is not only legible but also fitting.

It was such a great pleasure collaborating with David on this typeface. He did all the designs. I just provided my advice. When David asked me what would be the use case for Fit and I immediately thought of old Vietnamese vinyl records. As a result, I redesigned old vinyl records using his new typeface. If you design Vietnamese album covers or Vietnamese entertainment marketing materials, make sure to include Fit in your font collection.

Thanks to David for letting me to be part of this stellar typeface. I am looking forward to working with him in the future. I would love to see Turnip and Fern support Vietnamese.

Ở nhà dạo này rất nhiều tiếng la hét. Vợ hét chồng. Chồng hét con. Con lớn hét con nhỏ. Con nhỏ hét lại con lớn. Cha mẹ hét nhau. Nói không ai thèm nghe cả nên phải hét. Đánh thì tội nên hét. Hôm Chủ Nhật vợ nói mình không nên hét nhau nữa nhưng rồi cũng không làm được. Hai thằng lớn nói nhỏ nhẹ không bao giờ nghe. Mấy tháng nay công việc quá căng thẳng nên về nhà tôi cũng dễ nóng giận. Nhiều lần tự đè nén lại nhưng cũng không được. Sẽ cố gắng.

Hôm Chủ Nhật tôi muốn đưa ba đứa đi mall chơi nhưng hai thằng lớn không đi. Thế thì tôi chỉ đi với thằng Xuân. Thấy nó chơi ở playground rồi ngồi trên xe lửa hớn hở làm tôi nhớ lại kỷ niệm của hai thằng anh lớn. Mới đây mà chúng nó đã không còn chơi như ngày xưa nữa chỉ lúc nào cũng muốn iPad. Những ngày cuối tuần mở mắt ra câu đầu tiên là iPad. Nói nó để từ từ đánh răng ăn sáng xong rồi chơi làm chúng bắt đầu la hét. Khi được chơi bảo tắt thì cũng nổi điên. Tôi muốn dẹp hết cho xong thế mà mẹ nó lại chơi thêm một cái iPad mới.

Thằng Xuân thì chưa biết chơi iPad nên cũng đỡ. Bây giờ hai cha con đi chơi với nhau cũng vui là gì nó dễ ăn. Cái gì nó cũng ăn được không kén chọn. Nó cho tôi lại những cảm giác lúc hai đứa kia còn nhỏ. Bây giờ còn nhỏ thì hơi cực nhưng mai mốt lớn mới mệt.

Giờ nghe những chuyện con cái ở tuổi thanh thiếu niên khiến tôi thật lo âu. Tương lai không biết chúng nó ra sao. Tôi không mong mỏi điều gì cả. Miễn không lầm đường lạc bước là tôi vui rồi. Cũng không cần giàu sang, không cần nổi tiếng, không cần ông này ông nọ. Chỉ cần tụi nó có được một cuộc sống bình thường là tôi mãn nguyện rồi.

Last night I spent two hours editing and redesigning my résumé. I wanted to detach it from the ON Designs look and feel. I wanted my résumé to stand alone rather than being part of my portfolio.

In addition, I wanted to move away from creating two separate print and web versions. They are a bit of a pain to update. I eliminated the Illustrator version by generating a PDF from the webpage.

I wanted my résumé to be clean, simple, legible, and readable. I went back to a two-column design with a 960-grid layout. The types are set in Mr and Mrs Eaves, designed by Zuzana Licko. Take a look.

Meryl Streep:

[T]here was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.

Another reason to love this talented actress.

Robin Rendle on the nature of the web:

[T]he web will always be a wild and finicky canvas for us to work with; we’ll have to be creative in the ways that we help older browsers that don’t support these features. So although I don’t believe that the web hates beautiful typography, there certainly is a tension between the web and the old typography, where control over every element on the page was relatively easy and absolute.

Rendle on accessibility:

What about accessibility and the preservation of the text? Making sure that everyone can simply read the text in every browser is more important than just about any typographic flourish that we can implement. And so with that in mind, whenever we stumble over a new feature for the web we have to question whether it will truly improve the reading experience.

He concludes:

There are infinite futures of typography, and the opportunities only expand when new browsers, new features, new devices become available to us. All that’s required is a little patience and a healthy dose of curiosity.

Simon Loxley, Type is Beautiful, (p.2):

Typefaces communicate moods and feelings: some are considered elegant or refined, while others seem bold, radical or whimsical. Typefaces can reflect the fashions or the zeitgeist of an era, often to a surprising degree. Some typefaces were created for a specific purpose. Some are easy to read and draw little attention to themselves; others are meant to grab your attention, but only for the purpose of a few words. Which font is chosen for any given communication matters a great deal, since it conveys a whole world of meaning, both blatant and subliminal, and much time, thought and money continue to be spent to try to get it right.

Simon Loxley, Type is Beautiful, (p.23):

Without the italic, typography would be visually the poorer, and in practical terms, in its primary aim of communication, severely compromised.

The story behind the fifty selected typefaces, including Baskerville, Comic Sans, Futura, Garamond, and Helvetica, in this book has been told many times before. Loxley doesn’t add anything new, but his writing is brief and approachable. If you know your type history, skip it. If you don’t, read it, design students in particular.

Are you designing a new typeface or subsetting your existing fonts to support Vietnamese? I would love to help. I am offering advising Vietnamese typography as a service. For a small, one-time fee, I will review your Vietnamese characters to make sure they are properly positioned, legible, and readable. I will also provide suggestions on how to make your typeface feels natural to Vietnamese readers. Learn more.