I was thinking this week about how Micro.Blog has become the home base for all of my online activity. I’ve had an account since I backed the Kickstarter in 2017, but recently, I’ve started slowly moving everything from my old Squarespace¹ site:

• Blog Hosting. This blog is hosted on Micro.Blog. I’m in the process of migrating my favorite old posts from Sketchbook B here so everything is in one place. At the $10/month premium subscription level, I can even add a few more blogs if I want to.

• Site Hosting. SbBFonts.com is a static site hosted on Micro.Blog that features my typeface designs. I’ve got other ideas for simple sites I want to build. These “single page sites” are completely underrated feature of Micro.Blog and included with the premium plan. I love the flexibility of adding these kind of sites quickly and easily.

• Social timeline. I use Micro.Blog’s...

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I wrote a post in 2016 asking how I would deal with the inevitable demise of Twitter. And followed up with posts in 2018, 2022 and 2023.¹

In each of the post, one common refrain kept resurfacing. There is no equal for following a live event on Twitter. The last month or so, there have been several events in tech and sports that I would have followed closely on Twitter.

You know what? I didn’t miss Twitter at all.

Instead, I stuck with Micro.Blog and Threads. On Micro.Blog, I follow not only other Micro.Blog users, but I also follow a number of Mastodon users who I previously followed on Twitter. Most of those people are journalists or experts who I do not know personally. On Threads, I follow mostly people that I know personally, many...

I decided a while back that I wanted to separate my typeface designs onto their own site. They’ve always lived alongside my blog and other creative projects, but they needed a home of their own, especially since I plan to expand the offerings in the near future. I’ve been noodling around with options, but today, I’m finally ready to release SbBFonts.com out into the world with a design inspired by two-color printing.

The Inspiration

When I became a designer in the mid-1990s, the web was just becoming a thing, and printed documents were the primary job of a designer. Two-color projects used only two spot ink colors — say green and black — for the entire job. (You also had a “third” color with the paper, which was usually just white.) Four-color printing or full-color printing was reserved...

I realized this morning that I’ve been using Fontstruct for 15 years. Fontstruct is an online tool for building modular typefaces. My first typeface design — Big Thursday — debuted on May 26, 2009. Since then, I’ve publicly released 49 fonts on Fontstruct and 19 have been selected as “Staff Picks.”

The original version didn’t have a lot of flexibility,¹ but over time developer Rob Meek has added new brick types, construction methods, kerning, support for color fonts and other features to Fontstruct to make it more powerful. My work tends to be a little brutalist, but if you want to understand the flexibility of the tool, check out the gallery to see what amazing creations people can craft with this online tool.

I don’t use the most complicated features, but I sometimes use Fontstruct to prototype an idea for a new typeface. One of Fontstruct’s...

I started a blog in early 2008. Over the years, I wrote hundreds of posts and articles. Some of it good. Much of it forgettable. I authored a bunch of InDesign tips that generated search traffic, but over time, I became less interested in writing about Adobe Creative Cloud and design issues. A few years ago, I moved all my writing over to this site. As part of some work I’m doing this summer to clean up my various sites, I wanted to figure out how to save the posts from this old Squarespace site.

I tried to export the entire archive, but had limited success. The Squarespace export uses the Wordpress export format. And the export kinda works, but Squarespace’s software has inserted random code blocks throughout that would have to be removed manually. I thought about just shutting down the whole blog, but changed my mind. As I...

Several years ago, I moved all of my blog posting from my Squarespace-hosted sketchbookb.com to my Micro.Blog-hosted bobwertz.com. I’ve been happy with the move. My plan was to switch my Squarespace blog over to more professional posts, but that never really happened — and I don’t really feel like posting more InDesign and Creative Cloud tips. Last week, I decided that I need to do something with the old site and I’m working through my options.

One of the options was just to bring the site down and redirect sketchbookb.com to a new site. I’ve got over 600 posts, though, and while most of them don’t see any traffic, I’d hate to see them all disappear. I started to go back through the site to see what I’d lose.

My first post is in 2008 and my last post was at the end of 2021. There are many tips and tricks for...

I’m noticing a tension growing between national organizations and their local affiliates. Just three recent examples that have crossed my path:

• I was once an AIGA¹ chapter president and stepped down to go back to graduate school, but I was also disillusioned with the mission and how the national organization treated its chapters. Now AIGA National is struggling with finances and relevance, while member’s loyalty (and all the value of the membership) is tied up at the local level.

• Churches are going through the same thing. When the massive Methodist church near us left the denomination, they didn’t join one of the new organizations. They essentially became a non-denominational church. And pointed out in the news article that they get to keep all of the money they used to send to the churchwide organization.

• The organizers of the local NaNoWriMo² group in our area...

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An incredibly strange accident, but my wife and son are fine.

Two weeks ago, Liz and Ryan were driving to school early in the morning in a midst of a rain storm when a pine tree blew into their path and impaled their 2020 Buick Envision. The tree was about 24 feet tall, passed through the headlight, through the engine, through the firewall, through the dashboard and extended several feet into the passenger cabin, between the front headrests.

By...

I watched a couple of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tonight. The show was once one of my favorites and creator Joss Whedon could do no wrong. I loved Buffy, Firefly, The Avengers and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I even watched Agents of SHIELD. But eventually, it came to light that Joss wasn’t the feminist he claimed to be, repeatedly cheated on his wife, and verbally abused many of the people he worked with, especially Charisma Carpenter.

Chocolate Cake for Breakfast is one of my favorite stand up routines. Bill Cosby’s family-inspired standup — long before the Cosby Show — was hilarious. But later in life, he was credibly accused of drugging and sexually assaulting several women.

Gill Sans is a legendary typeface, created by author, artist and typographer Eric Gill. I’ve worked for several companies for which Gill Sans was a key element of their...

Almost 100 years ago, in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, typographer Eric Gill ¹ wrote “An Essay on Typography” and addressed the tension between art and industrialization:

“But tho’ industrialism has now won an almost complete victory, the handicrafts are not killed, & they cannot be quite killed because they meet an inherent, indestructible, permanent need in human nature.”

I’ve been thinking about this as the internet fills with AI-generated garbage and popular social media sites are monetized by hate.

Inherent. Indestructible. Permanent.

While Eric Gill never imagined the internet, I think his statement applies just as much to our modern world as it did in the Industrial Revolution. Much of the internet might become cheaply-produced, AI-generated, SEO-approved content, but people all over the world who care about creativity and writing will still produce great work and share it.

I’m probably being naive, but I’m still hopeful that the human...