Bob Wertz

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...

A designer on Threads asked what tool he should use to build a simple portfolio site, and the answers were anything but simple… get-a-good-text-editor-and-build-it-yourself, Wordpress, Squarespace, Adobe Portfolio, a bunch of services I’ve never heard of…

Finally got around to finishing X-Men 97 on Disney+. I read X-Men in the 1990s and watched the cartoon. What a wonderful reboot and a delightful nostalgia trip. Looking forward to the next season.

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...

A former coworker was arrested two years ago on a collection of shocking sexual assault charges, but at the time, there were few details. Now that court filings are beginning, our local paper has details and it’s somehow worse than I thought. Nauseating. It’s a strange feeling to have worked with someone 15 years ago and see them in the papers accused of truly horrific behavior. Were they that monstrous when we worked together? Probably. I’m not going to link to the article because I read it and wished I hadn’t. You don’t want to read it either.

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...

Web pages are disappearing. Links are broken. This Pew study tries to assess how bad link rot is…

But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.

When I was in high school in 1992, an alternative radio station popped up in Augusta, GA. Channel Z 95.1 was amazing, but by 1996, it was gone. I just discovered that someone launched a website for the now defunct station, complete with a “reproduction” of the live broadcast and Spotify playlists.

So I ended up in the Threads test group with TweetDeck-like columns. And you know what? It’s really good.

Jay Kuo dissects the NY Times Battleground Poll:

The New York Times is out with its Battleground States Poll, so time for everyone to panic. But not me! I’m here to make sure everyone takes a deep breath and puts out any fires they may have set to their hair.