Studio Notes #91

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

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Felt pennant flags have always been cool and Roman Boujo traced their origin from Middle Ages wars through early 20th century college football. There truly is something about cut-out felt sewn onto more felt. Timeless design vehicles. Related, you can get some great quality felt flags of your own made by Oxford Pennant in Buffalo, New York and Slightly Choppy in Newport Beach, California.

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Lots of clever and smart folks are making fonts that handle other tasks aside from letters and numbers. Case in point, TabFont, which will render guitar tab chord shapes as you type them. For example, type Cmaj7 and the font's OpenType wizardry will render the correct guitar chord's finger placements with strings and frets, etc. Pretty neat. (hat tip to Dan Bostonweeks in the Secret Club)

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I use Glyphs for all my typeface-making tasks. It's a wonderful app, and it changed the trajectory of my daily work. They've been working on Glyphs 4 and have a public preview available for download (top left of the screen). I'm extremely excited about the hints of handling logos and icons natively, as I think Glyphs vector tools are the best.

🎙️

While playing a mix based on the epic Getz/Gilberto album from 1964 (Girl from Ipanema and all that) I discovered the Softly by Wanda de Sah album from 1965. Fans of Astrud Gilberto's Bossa Nova voice will dig this immensely. It has an amazing orchestral production. Start with The Dreamer and Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars. Put it on when you have busy work to do. Soothing stuff for the summer heat.

This Week’s Poll

Last week, I asked the incredibly important question of who makes the best fried chicken, and gave you only a handful of options. Of those, you all said your favorite wasn't listed, followed closely by Popeye's.

Danmade This Week

Earlier this week, I shared a free pre-release of Kyroh (my latest typeface) with Secret Club members. This one ended up being three weights with a handful of fun Egyptian icons mixed in. Based off an old luggage tag from the National Hotel in Cairo. I'll be releasing it officially over the next week or so.

In other news, I finally re-published all my old blog posts going back to 2000–2013. They've been offline for years, stuck in a busted WordPress install on an old dusty server. Claude to the rescue. I was able to make an intentionally-basic, static HTML archive of all that old stuff to preserve for posterity.

Admittedly, a lot of that old content is profoundly cringe-inducing. So, I'm a bit reluctant to point to it. But it was a time and a place that's mostly long gone, and it's nice to have it exist again in some form. Oh, also there are very likely many broken images and links. I tried to clean up as best I could ;)

Have a great weekend, and stay cool 😅

Cheers!