Years ago when I started selling my typefaces, my goal was to keep prices low. At the time, the prevailing wisdom on MyFonts was to set prices insanely high, then run massive promotions to lower the price to something reasonable. That seemed wrong to me. I just wanted to set the prices low to keep my typefaces affordable. Over the last decade or so, the situation has changed. MyFonts recommends that a single font start at $20. Apparently, if I set my prices too low, MyFonts won’t promote them. Subscription services are further complicating the pricing structure.
Setting prices for any artist is challenging, but I’ve noticed over time that most artists initially set their prices too low. I think I’ve fallen into that trap. I’m working on a new release right now1 and I’ve decided that I need to finally shift my pricing strategy. On August 1, 2025, the prices for all Sketchbook B fonts will increase. Single fonts will be $20. Small families will be $39. Large families will be $79. This increases them significantly from their current prices, but brings pricing more in line with the industry standards.
To provide a transition — and because August 1 is my 50th birthday — I’m going to run a 30% off promotion for the month of August.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
I’ll also have a couple of birthday-related font announcements coming soon. ↩︎
We got some breakfast Hot Pockets and they no longer ship with a paper “crisper” sleeve, instead recommending an air fryer for a crispier crust.
A hot pocket fresh out of the air fryer is indeed crispy, but;
It takes 15 minutes! Not exactly a quick breakfast anymore.
Excited that Cotton Bureau has finally added custom stickers. I added a few sticker designs, including my old film camera stickers.
Me: I really need to wrap up this paper on deprofessionization in the design industry so I can move on to working on my dissertation.
Also me: Digging FOUR papers out from past classes that I never did anything with and revisiting them.
Waking up to big F1 news. Christian Horner out at Red Bull. I guess losing to Nico Hulkenberg at Silverstone was the last straw. Is Max now more likely to leave for Mercedes? Less likely?
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was playing around with some new-to-me features and bricks in Fontstruct. After I finished SbB Roundabout1, I decided those techniques would work really well on a symbol font. So I started playing around with building a couple of little faux emoji. Then decided that I needed to add some color. And before long, I’ve built an adorable set of icons in Fontstruct… SbB Emote.
I don’t know which my favorite is – either the robot or the minifig-inspired smiley. “Happy Frankenstein” is a classic, too. In total, the set has 63 glyphs. The build used over 140 different blocks and 6 colors. It’s probably the most complex Fontstruction I’ve made, since I normally like to keep it really simple.
One cool side effect of using the techniques and blocks from SbB Roundabout is that the two designs work really well together.
I think I’m at a stopping point for the time being. I’ll be honest, I really need to be working on my dissertation and independent study. But I’ve got some ideas for characters I could have drawn… so you never know when I’ll revisit the font. I’m still not sure what to make of color fonts, but I could see how a custom icon font could be useful.
I think you have to be a patron on Fontstruct to download color fonts, so most of you won’t be able to download SbB Emote, but SbB Roundabout is free to download with an account.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
Now a “Top Pick” on Fontstruct. And by the way, I’m going to need a new name for Roundabout. It’s taken. ↩︎
I’ve been playing around with Adobe’s Project Indigo computational camera app recently. I’ve got an old, but completely functional iPhone 12 Pro. Tonight at a minor league baseball game, while we were waiting for the game to end and the post-game fireworks to begin, I decided to try Project Indigo out in some challenging light. First, from our seats on the first base line, I took a shot with the iPhone’s stock camera app:
The shot’s fine, but it’s clear the net was an issue. The iPhone processing made it seem far more prominent than it really was. I then tried to take the exact same composition with Project Indigo:
This looks a lot closer to reality. It handles the sky and the net better. You can’t really tell from this upload, but detail is much cleaner with fewer artifacts. Project Indigo is still slow to process and occasionally overheats your phone, but in the right situation, it’s a great option.
Your mileage may vary, especially if you have a newer, more capable iPhone. But if you are trying to capture an image in some challenging light, give Project Indigo a shot.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
Fireflies baseball. A beautiful night to catch a minor league game.
My dad randomly asked me if I wanted the typewriter my grandparents bought him when he graduated college. He used it in seminary and his first call. Uh, YES! So I now have a Royal Safari manual typewriter. Seems to work well. Just need a new ribbon.
Watched the entire Cubs game today… 8 home runs. This team is fun to watch. Can’t wait to see them in person later this month.
Watching Cubs v. Cardinals on Apple’s Friday Night Baseball, which is actually on Friday afternoon for July 4. PCA with a great diving catch in the first inning. ⚾️
We’ve reached the part of summer break where one of my kids has decided they want to learn how to make bread.
Recently, I started playing around on Fontstruct again. The tool has evolved massively in the 17 years I’ve used it, but I interacted with it largely the same way — placing blocks on grids. I’ve been thinking about how I use design tools lately. I use apps like Photoshop and InDesign the same way I used them a decade ago. In general, this works fine, but I don’t really take full advantage of the advancements in the software. I’ve been trying to explore new features in Photoshop and Glyphs lately, and I decided I wanted to try out some of the features I haven’t used in Fontstruct, too. I just made two designs public: SbB Vertica and SbB Roundabout.
SbB Vertica.A bold all-caps display font consisting of vertical bands. I used the brick size and grid spacing filters to create the banding effect through the letters. To get the angled corners to line up, I needed to use the nudge command to bump bricks up or down.
SbB Roundabout. A thin pseudo-stencil unicase design using rounded corner bricks that I don’t think I’ve ever tried before. This approach also required some nudging, and composite bricks to make everything line up.
Both designs are incomplete and I plan to keep working on them, but I’m happy with how they’ve turned out and wanted to share them. Both would have been impossible or very challenging without these techniques and bricks. It’s a reminder that unused features in my favorite software applications might be just what I need to execute a particular idea or concept.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
Happy Bobby Bonilla Day! Yep, the Mets are still paying him and will be until 2035.
My son wanted to play video games with me, so we pulled out the Sega Genesis Mini. All these years later, it’s funny how much I remember from playing Sonic and Streets of Rage II.
This restaurant doesn’t look crowded, but the number of Door Dash drivers coming in and out is substantial. It’s amazing how much these delivery services have changed the restaurant business.
A brief “review” of Bo-Linda: Bojangles AI-based drive-thru ordering system
Bojangles is a fast food restaurant chain in the Southeastern United States that serves chicken and biscuits. Last year, I drove up to a Bojangles drive-thru in downtown Columbia, South Carolina and was greeted by a computerized voice. There were no signs indicating that they were using a new system, but it was clear that the voice wasn’t a human. I placed my order, the system asked for the drink on my combo, confirmed my order, told me my total and asked me to move forward. Quick and efficient.
A few months later, the Bojangles in Chapin near my daughter’s school switched to the same computerized system. I’d stop there occasionally to grab breakfast after dropping her off. This time, the system informed me that there was a 5-minute wait on my steak biscuit and asked if I wanted to switch to something else. I did not want to wait, so I changed my order. The system handled it, gave me a total, and I was intrigued.
A quick search revealed that this new system had a name: Bo-Linda. Bojangles website describes Bo-Linda as “a dynamic conversational drive-thru AI platform to augment human interaction with digital restaurant systems.” I also discovered that many people hadn’t had positive experiences with the new system when it debuted in Charlotte. I started to pay attention to the system any time I ordered and figured I’d share some observations about the system, and the potential societal impact of AI.
With normal orders, it works fine. I haven’t had any issues with it misunderstanding me, or having a severe lag time. It seems to be about as accurate as a person. The order is shown on the display so you can easily confirm that your order is correct.
My daughter’s order confused it. I was ordering something just for my high schooler who doesn’t eat much meat: two plain biscuits and a large seasoned fry. Bo-Linda heard two sausage biscuits and a large sweet tea. When I tried to correct it, the system just failed, gave me an incorrect total, and told me to pull to the window. I had to tell the employees what I actually ordered.
Loads of promotions. The order process starts with a promotion. “Would you like to try our new Bo-Berry biscuit?” This is no different than ordering with a human following a script, but sometimes, Bo-Linda would add several upgrade suggestions at the end. “Would you like to Bo-Size your order? Would you like to upgrade to our new flavored iced tea?” At one point in Chapin, I counted five upgrade or add-on suggestions. I just had to keep telling it no. It doesn’t happen at every location, but frequently enough to be annoying. I wonder if the number of suggestions can be controlled by a manager or franchisee? Or does the AI decide based on volume or sales metrics? No idea.
Humans are listening and can interrupt it. Once I had a person interrupt the order because I ordered something they were out of. Another time, the system just stopped working and a person took over. So humans are monitoring as a backup and stepping in when needed.
They named it, but that name is never used. Someone on their marketing team came up with Bo-Linda and they trademarked it, but they don’t have signs telling you to use their new Bo-Linda AI Ordering System. Bo-Linda doesn’t “introduce” herself when she takes your order. It just appeared one day. I think it’s highly likely that they didn’t want to deal with AI backlash and just tried to quietly make the switch. And honestly, I think that was probably the right call.
So, Bo-Linda works. It’s mostly fine. From the Bojangles perspective, I understand why they’d want to switch to an AI-based ordering system. Bojangles claims that the system improves accuracy, noting that Bo-Linda can take orders 96% of the time with no human interaction.1 They still need a person processing payments and giving patrons their food, but that employee can more easily handle other tasks like filling drinks if they aren’t also taking orders. I’m not sure how employees would feel about it. Are they hiring fewer staff because they’ve automated one of the jobs? Are some employees getting scheduled for fewer hours? Or are they happy that one annoying task simply has been automated? Taking orders at a fast food drive-thru can’t be an enjoyable experience.
From a broader perspective though, this is what people fear when they say that artificial intelligence will take away jobs. Bojangles isn’t the first to experiment with removing humans from the order experience and it won’t be the last.2 Companies of all sorts will look for jobs and positions that can be eliminated or replaced by an AI-driven system. And as they find those efficiencies, they will need fewer employees. I’m a little bit of a skeptic when it comes to AI completely replacing knowledge jobs, but I do think new AI-powered tools will help us get more done in less time. If employees are more efficient, companies will eventually need less people to get the same amount of work done.
With more efficient workers and potentially fewer jobs, the impacts to our society could be significant, especially for young adults. We need to start having serious conversations about universal basic income as a method of keeping our society stable. If employees can do more in less time, then maybe we need to start considering shorter work weeks. There will inevitably be tension between the traditionalists who want to keep a 40-hour work week and maximize efficiency, and the workers who will be asked to do more for the same amount of money. Right now, it’s hard to call AI ordering at a fast food restaurant revolutionary, but I do believe a technical revolution is coming. And as with all technical revolutions, cultural change will inevitably follow.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
I’ll be honest, that percentage sounds low. That means there’s a failure every 25 orders or so. ↩︎
Just notice how many restaurants use kiosks now for people to order inside instead of having multiple cashiers. I’m looking at you, Panera and Whataburger. ↩︎
