Wrapped up a really long middle school lacrosse season. Ryan had a great season in goal and he’s continuing to learn the craft, but I am incredibly glad that we’re done for a little while.
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Luxury experience
5/16/25 • 2 min read
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 prices increased dramatically. We moved on to other places that we loved, too.2 While it was disappointing to get priced out of one of our favorite places, honestly, the experience was so great, I’m just glad we had a number of years to enjoy it.
This week, they were selected as the best hotel in America by TripAdvisor and #8 internationally. If you are looking to stay in Charleston and it’s in your budget, stay at the French Quarter Inn. It’s a wonderful experience and worth every penny.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
Color fonts and signal flags
5/13/25 • 2 min read
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 built a font on Fontstruct in 2009 with black and white flags, so with the new color font tools, I colorized the signal flags and updated the design. I called it SbB Foxtrot Sierra Charlie1 and I’m really happy with how it turned out.2 Fontstruct now allows you to download a COLR v1 color webfont and it’s free to download if you are a Fontstruct Patron.
I’m going to keep playing around with it, but I think color fonts will be a custom, niche tool with limited applications.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
Happy Mother’s Day, Liz. Grabbed this shot at the lacrosse field the other day waiting for practice to end. The kiddos are lucky to have you, and I’m so happy we get to do this parenting thing together.
Prom pictures for my Jilly.
Clean Slate
4/25/25 • 2 min read
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:
- 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 green version above using their online configuration app.)
- Hand crank windows.
- No screen. No speakers. But you can add both if you want them. I’m fine using my phone as the entertainment system and adding speakers.
- It starts as a pickup, but it can be converted into an SUV. Or a Fastback. Or a Jeep-style open air vehicle.
- “Slate University” teaches you how to take care of your own vehicle and customize it.
I love the base pickup, but the fastback looks great too. 150-mile range is plenty for my commute. I’m sick of boring car colors, and as a designer, I’d love to customize the wrap. The base safety tech checks all the boxes. It’s a completely different direction than every other car manufacturer is taking, and I can’t wait to see how it all comes together.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
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That’s if the current administration doesn’t destroy the EV market. ↩︎
Return to Fontstruct
4/20/25 • 3 min read
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 some drawings in my sketchbook of a unicase design that I like a lot, but haven’t gotten around to building. I wanted to see how the letterforms would work together so I built a quick pixel-font prototype.
SbB Astrometric. I took the basic letterform structure of Powercore and tried different approach. I thought this would look vaguely sci-fi when I started to build it, but as I built out the character set, it had a somewhat older feel. Not sure why. I’m really happy with it and this is one of those fonts that I’ll likely rebuild and polish in Glyphs. I think the design would work well as a variable font design.
SbB Theorem. I built this a few years ago, and forgot about it. So I dusted it off and added a few additional characters that I skipped over earlier.
SbB Greenlight. All the cool kids are building color fonts on Fontstruct. It’s a feature that’s available for Patrons. I’d played with it once before to add some color to my Dingbots and Monsters design, but I hadn’t tried to build a color typeface. I built SbB Greenlight to experiment with the process of building a color design. I’m still not 100% sure why we need color fonts, but it’s a fun process and a pretty accessible tool for anyone that’s worked with design software like Illustrator or Photoshop that use layers to organize art.
You can download and use any of these1 if you set up a free Fontstruct account. I don’t know if I’ll keep up the pace, but I’m really enjoying building typefaces right now and I’m inspired by the other designers in the Fontstruct community.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
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Except for the color font. That’s a Patron exclusive. ↩︎
Happy Easter from Team Wertz!
I’m back to playing around on Fontstruct. Just published SbB Powercore, a unicase, pixel-inspired design. I’m digging this combination of unicase characters. Still a work in progress.
Google’s AI Overview has already declared that South Carolina defeated UCLA on Sunday for the National Championship.
Spring is finally coming to campus.
Jill vs. the science fair
Took the modular numerals from the 2025 McLaren F1 livery and built a font on Fontstruct.
The start of another season. Ryan had some really nice saves today. 🥍
Shots from last night at Craft and Draft in Irmo. Lizzy was very entertained by, well, everything.
Proud of Jilly. Honorable mention in the district science fair.
I love Iconfactory’s Tapestry – a unified timeline for my iPhone
2/4/25 • 4 min read
New app lets iOS users weave together sources
When the Iconfactory announced their Tapestry Kickstarter, I backed it immediately. I’ve been a fan of the Iconfactory’s work for decades, and was a loyal user of Twitteriffic before Musk cut off the API. I’ve had beta access for months as a Kickstarter perk and I’ve been using it daily.1 Now that Tapestry is released to everyone, I wanted to write a little review with some thoughts about how it’s working for me.
One app for pretty much everything. Tapestry is a unified feed reader. You build a feed from a variety of sources and “connectors.” I’ve used connectors to bring in my Micro.Blog, Mastodon and Bluesky social timelines. I still use Feedbin as a traditional feed reader so I’ve also some of my favorite RSS feeds and some YouTube channels. I even have a podcast feed in there and, while I wouldn’t listen to a long podcast in Tapestry, it does works for short audio files. All of it pulled together into a single timeline.
You said “pretty much everything?” Correct. To be added to Tapestry, the sources need to connect to the open web. That means no Meta apps. So if you want to connect to Instagram, Facebook or Threads, there isn’t an API to allow for a connection. This isn’t a problem with Tapestry, it’s a problem with Meta. But don’t get me started on the importance of open APIs.
Algorithm free. Tapestry doesn’t add any annoying algorithms to your content feed. You decide who you want to follow, and you see their posts in the order in which they were shared. No engagement manipulation.
Interaction. You can’t like or comment directly from the Tapestry interface, but it’s easy to swipe and access a Safari web view. For example, if I see a Bluesky post I want to like, I swipe and Bluesky opens. I like the post, click done at the top left, and I’m back to my feed. It’s a smart solution to a complex problem. I’m not someone who likes or comments a bunch so this little bit of friction is completely acceptable to me. I understand if this isn’t enough for you, but it works for me. You can “Mark” items for follow up later, and I find that helpful for keeping track of good links and stories.
Muffle and Mute. You can build rules to muffle (collapse) or mute (hide) posts that contain keywords. I find this to be incredibly powerful. There’s a person I know — who I want to follow — who shares his Wordle every day. So I muffled “Wordle” in my feed. You can build those rules to hide whatever you don’t want to see. I loved it in Twitteriffic and will absolutely use this in Tapestry.2
Opportunities and rough edges. This is a 1.0 version. There are rough edges, but also clear opportunities for them to improve the app. The Iconfactory is committed to improving Tapestry and offering a Mac version eventually. I’m excited about where this is going.
I’ve really enjoyed Tapestry because I can just dip into the most recent information. And since Micro.Blog and Bluesky are currently my most used services, this integrates perfectly. It’s tough to explain, but it brings a social media style timeline together for a wider variety of sources. It’s not for everyone, but it is absolutely what I want.
Tapestry is now available on the App Store for iOS free with ads. Or if you want no ads and premium features, it’s just $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
It’s almost time for the college baseball season to start. Beautiful day at Founders Park.
It’s dark. And my son is still in the backyard getting ready for tryouts next week. Trying to make the high school JV lacrosse team as a 7th grade goalie.
Had to take a few more pictures of the snow before it melts… the park behind our house is beautiful when blanketed in snow.
A little snow in Columbia, South Carolina is a big deal.
Proud of this kiddo. 9 am Saturday practice with the high school team. 27 degrees. And he’s excited to go to practice. (As a 7th grader, he’s pretty much the youngest kid out there.)
Every year, I make Team Wertz pose on the stairs before we open presents. Finally got around to posting the image from this morning. Hope y’all had a Merry Christmas.
Every year, I make Team Wertz pose on the stairs before we open presents. Finally got around to posting the image from this morning. Hope y’all had a Merry Christmas.
My favorite eight pictures from 2024.
Happy birthday, Lizzy. Hope you have a great day!
Post Thanksgiving date night at Craft and Draft Irmo.
Ryan was born on Thanksgiving day, so no matter when his birthday falls, we celebrate with a cake on Thanksgiving. This year, a red velvet turkey cake.
