Studio Notes #103

Hello, Autumnal Friends (and friends in the Southern hemisphere as well). Here are this week’s Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday.

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Tiny5 is a retro pixel font that packs a lot of nostalgia into a five pixel tall typeface. What's even more interesting are the variable axes bleed and jitter, which add a ton of imperfect vintage screen imperfectness. I dig the application of modern type tech to old school limitations here.

🎛️

This large photo collection of mid-twentieth century control rooms is both beautiful, and unsettling. Seemingly abandoned, I'd safely call these liminal spaces. There's some real user interface inspiration in here. Discovered via Beth Mathew's neat article on why so many control rooms were seafoam green.

☔️

As you may know, I love single-serving sites. Rainy Arcade is “a simple noise generator to take you back to the rainy days spent in the arcade.” That's it. And that is enough to make me smile, because I remember those days fondly, spent at More Fun in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. We would BMX over the state line from Vermont, hit Papa Gino's for a few slices, and kill the rest of the day dumping tokens into Galaga, Dragon's Lair, Outrun, Tron, Rampage, etc. The perfect day in the 1980s.

🎤

Show Bits are perfectly animated little snippets of isolated song vocals set to a hilarious, unrelated scene. Hard to describe, but well worth watching these for a laugh today.

This Week’s Poll

Last week I asked what kind of watch you wear, and unsurprisingly, Apple Watch was a decisive winner, with 3rd place going to no watch at all.

New in the Shop

I pulled some super limited edition letterpress prints here at HQ. Black ink on “Lemon Drop” cover stock from the French Paper Co., featuring my Paint Factory typeface. Hang it in your workshop, studio, or...barbershop?

Danmade This Week

This week, I made an arguably-dumb decal that I'll get printed up ASAP. I've also been chipping away at a few typefaces, and letterpressing some big red ampersands. Anyone else looking forward to colder weather so that we won't feel as guilty doing creative things inside?

Thanks for reading this little newsletter and giving me some needed weekly structure ;-)

Cheers!