A number of years ago, Liz and I celebrated our anniversary in Charleston and stayed at an up and coming hotel — The French Quarter Inn. We loved our stay, the location is perfect, right in the middle of the downtown area. At the time, it was a little expensive, but reasonable for a luxury experience. Liz and I stayed there a few more times for anniversaries and birthdays and each time, we loved our experience. I found a shot I took from our balcony in 2013 with a iPhone:¹

We weren’t the only one who loved the hotel. The French Quarter Inn was honored as one of the best in America by Travel and Leisure. After they were honored, it was tough to get a reservation and the...

I’ve been thinking about color fonts lately. Experimenting with the color fonts features in Fontstruct and Glyphs. Trying to better understand how to create color fonts. And while I’m starting to understand how they are made, I’m left with one major question… why?

Why do we need color fonts?

If you don’t know, fonts are typically monochromatic. Black and white only. Color is applied in software like Adobe Illustrator or Microsoft Office. The ability to customize is limitless.

Often, the case for color fonts is made for the web. A complex typeface design with color features that can be encapsulated as a vector font and customized via CSS would be appealing. But color web fonts support is inconsistent across browsers. I also think web-based design apps like Canva and Adobe Express that cater to more novice designers might have a use for some pre-colored fonts.

I did think of one application — nautical flags....

I’m tired. It was a long semester — working full time and taking two classes is always challenging. But one of my classes was much more work than I expected. My son’s lacrosse experience was chaotic, poorly scheduled and quite frankly, not fun at all. I’ve failed at my goal to get healthy by my 50th birthday. Things haven’t gone great professionally. The world seems to be burning down around us. I’m tired. Exhausted. I feel it in every bone of my body.

I’ve always thought that the cure for tiredness was rest — and I will get some vacation time in this summer — but I think it’s more than just taking days off and ignoring work emails. I think the “cure” for this type of tiredness is hope. Hope that things will improve. Believing that I’m headed in the right direction. When things seem bleak, it’s easy to feel...

Slate Auto announced their new electric pickup truck this week, and I’m intrigued. If you haven’t heard about it, the Slate is a barebones electric truck — intended to be customized — all for under $20,000 with current Federal EV incentives.¹

Some of these ideas have been tried before. Jeeps have always promoted modularity and customization. The Slate uses plastic body panels like Saturn did. Toyota tried to target youth with Scion, which was intended to be heavily customizable. But Slate takes these concepts further. Much further:

1. The Slate comes in one color – gray – because they intend for you to customize it with a vinyl wrap. Wraps are apparently cheaper than paint and with a wrap, you can get any design or color you can imagine. (I built the...
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About 16 years ago, I started playing around with Fontstruct, an online tool for crafting modular typefaces. I’ve released 48 designs on Fontstruct and some of those have served as prototypes for designs that I finish in Glyphs, my favorite type design app. I tend to work in Fontstruct intensively for a while, and then disappear for a year or more. But I love the tool and contribute as a “Patron.”

Lately, I’ve been on quite the streak.

SbB Papaya. I was watching F1 and McLaren uses some modular numerals on their cars. Based on those numbers, I built an entire design. I wasn’t sure if the look was going to extend through the whole character set, but the design actually works pretty well. And as a bonus, the Fontstruct team selected it as a top pick.

SbB Powercore. I’ve had...

Dave Winer writing about the “the Writer’s Web”:

The web was initially designed for writers. Styling, links, paragraphs, titles (at all levels). The ability to edit. No character limits. That’s what we had to work with when we started blogging in the mid-late 90s.

What happened to the writer-centric web I loved in the late 1990s? Building a regular readership is challenging. In the earliest days, sites linked to other sites. Bloggers shared work from other bloggers. RSS provided the ability to subscribe to sites, but after Google killed Reader, the focus turned exclusively to search engines and social media. The competition to be at the top of the search results reshaped writing on the web. The ever-changing social media algorithm provided an audience for writers, but maintaining that audience changed the nature of writing on the web.

Blogs became about ad revenue. Search engine traffic and optimization. Building a “side gig.”...

Our clothes dryer died on Thursday when my wife Liz was home sick trying to get some rest. She searched the web and diagnosed the problem right away — a broken belt. After finding a YouTube video showing how to fix it, she decided that we could fix it on our own.

This dryer is old by modern standards — 14 years old. We bought it before our youngest child was born. The store we purchased it from, H.H. Gregg, has long since closed.¹ The washing machine that we bought to go with it died years ago. I wondered if it was even worth repairing, but I watched the video and agreed that it looked pretty straightforward. Our local Lowe’s had a compatible belt in stock and it was only $16.99. I figured if we couldn’t make it work, we’d invested less than $20 in the repair.

This...

Back in 2016, I had a blog about retail developments in the Columbia, South Carolina area. And one of the most popular topics was why there wasn’t an Apple Store in Columbia.

Yesterday I was at Columbiana Mall and realized that the large Forever 21 is closing.¹ I’m always interested in Apple Store-sized vacancies in Columbia and I thought back to an analysis that I did almost 10 years ago² and wanted to see if anything has changed. Is it odd that Columbia doesn’t have an Apple Store?

Comparing MSAs

I needed to look at some population data and decided to start by looking at Metropolitan Statistic Area (MSA). An MSA is a way of classifying an urban core and its surrounding population. It’s better than using city population because it includes suburbs and outlying areas that are closely connected to the urban core.

For...

We’ve been visiting a new Lutheran Church since Christmas. Today during the children’s sermon, Pastor Emily was discussing the changing of the paraments to purple for the Lenten season. She then mentioned that the cross on the altar had changed, too. I noticed the paraments, but hadn’t noticed the different cross. It was black and very slightly warped on the right side. Turns out that the church had burned down in the 1940s, and this altar cross survived. During Lent, the blackened, slightly melted cross replaces the shiny cross that’s on the altar the rest of the year.

I love this. I love that they didn’t throw it out, or try to “fix” it. The cross was changed, and they found a new, appropriate use for it. I love how our worship space changes with the liturgical season, but this felt especially poignant.

We’ve been through a lot over the last decade...

I mentioned earlier this week that the Edward Tufte workshop in Atlanta eight years ago was a driving factor in returning to graduate school, but that’s actually a partial truth. There were actually five lectures that sparked an interest in design research and grad school. All of them held in vast hotel meeting rooms with hundreds of attendees, but each of them connecting with me on a deeper level.

Jonah Lehrer, AIGA Gain Conference, October 2008, New York City

Gain was AIGA’s “Business of Design” conference¹ and there was a roster of big wig, influential speakers. Jonah Lehrer was there to talk about his best-selling book, Proust was a Neuroscientist. Lehrer connected creativity with neuroscience advancements, arguing that artists often figured out how the brain worked before scientists did. This concept that neuroscience and creativity could be linked was fascinating to me. A few years after...