Studio Notes #80

Good Morning, Good People. Here are this week’s Studio Notes™—quick bits delivered to you each Friday.

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I've had a very on/off relationship with chess. Learned it young, never great at it, but always had an interest in it. Both of my kids had short stints getting into it, which helped. And apparently my late parents played chess by mail when apart during their college years. I remember this amazing Kasparov Chess Computer I had in the late 80's. You'd press the magnetic pieces into an electronic board telling the primitive computer which move you made. And little LED lights would show you the computer's moves. It was fascinating to me at the time.

Anyhow, chess has had a pretty successful run in movies and shows that turn out to be way more engaging then you would think they'd be (e.g. The Queen's Gambit, Searching for Bobby Fischer, etc.).

I have rooks and knights on my mind this morning after watching Queen of Chess this week. It's a new documentary about the amazing Judit Polgár, who broke all sorts of records (e.g. youngest person ever to become a Grandmaster) and a trailblazer for women in the chess world. It's a damn shame I hadn't heard of her before and glad this film was made to tell her story. The matches against Kasparov were gripping.

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National Eraser Day was April 15th (who knew), and so here are 33 erasers that have inspiring type on them.

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An internet × humanity story that gives hope: Aadam Jacobs secretly recorded over 10,000 local music shows in Chicago going back to 1989. Volunteers from the Internet Archive digitized and enhanced the cassettes and put them up to listen to online—for free! It's a massive collection of live indie rock. I was digging into mid-90s Archers of Loaf, Pavement, Versus stuff today and these raw snapshots are a gift.

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Wakamai Fondue has become a critical tool for each typeface I release. It instantly shows all the information contained in a font: all its glyphs, OpenType features, etc. Congrats to its creator, Roel Nieskens, for launching the official 1.0 version this week! So grateful you've made this invaluable thing. Also, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to get the inside joke with the name ;-)

This Week's Poll

What are you working on?

Okay, a final teasing of Beeswacks, our next typeface, which I'm planning on releasing next week! I posted this image to various social media accounts and asked, "Does it really matter anymore?". In other words, human-made things that could also be directed by computers?

I really hope it does matter, of course.

And I say directed because, a lot of what we do today is ultimately made by computers—but with a human director. And perhaps that's what really matters. I'm going to keep directing. And I hope you will, too.

Also! Today at 1pm ET I'm doing another Secret Livestream for members (watch the Slack for a link). I'll continue with the "making a font in Glyphs from scratch" project we started last month.

Have a wonderful weekend, folks. And thanks for reading!

Cheers,