Suicide is often ignored in the gun control debate. The NY Times has a heart-wrenching story about a woman trying to change perceptions in Montana:
Murder rates and mass shootings make national headlines, defining the discussion over pervasive gun violence. But most gun deaths in America are self-inflicted.
Woke up to the noise of a couple of chatty Barred Owls outside our bedroom window. 🦉
Fireflies are out in force in our backyard.
I’ve never really watched any car racing, but out of nowhere, my 16-year-old became interested in F1. Just watched the Canadian Grand Prix and you know what? I get the hype. That was fun.
Watching F1 with my daughter, who keeps surprising me with her race knowledge.
I took tomorrow off from work to have a “retreat” day. I’ll hole up in a coffee shop. Plan projects and grad school. Write. Maybe work on some typefaces. I try to do this twice a year, but I missed my regular January kickoff at the start of the year. I really need this day to get focused.
While I think most designers overreacted to the change in the Adobe Terms of Service update, I did go ahead and upgrade to the latest version of the Affinity Suite.
Here’s the other one I’m finishing up: SbB Directorate. Inspired by scifi bureaucracy and named after the government in Buck Rogers. Weight, width and slant axes.
I’ve been working on a couple of variable typeface designs lately. This one is SbB Departure Mono, based on a old Fontstruct design of mine. Two axes: Weight and Slant.
Working on a typeface design tonight and I’m really grateful for the comprehensive documentation available for Glyphs 3. Good user manuals are a lost art, and sometimes, you just need a reference guide to look something up.
Enjoyed the first two episodes of The Acolyte. Looking forward to seeing where the show goes…
My wife’s car was totaled in a particularly horrific accident. (She’s fine) I’m still getting text and email updates on the car’s status… battery low, tires flat, etc. and it looks like the only way to stop them is to call OnStar… sigh.
School’s out and I don’t have to take my daughter to high school, so I’m the first person in the office today. Been a while since that’s happened, but I really do love getting into the office when it’s quiet.
I tried to help my wife with an issue on her work-issued PC laptop. I struggled so badly with the built in trackpad, that she pulled a mouse out of her bag for me to use. It was even worse than my kid’s school-issued Chromebooks. I am completely spoiled by Apple’s trackpad designs.
Pretty much the only reason we have an Alexa in our kitchen is for AnyList. It’s a shame that Amazon is going to make it harder to add items to our AnyList shopping list via Alexa.
A neighbor has built a custom motorcycle sidecar for his golden retriever. I’ve never seen a dog that happy.
I have yard work to do… so obviously, I’m reading up on how to customize the Tiny theme with microhooks.
Today, I was surprised to learn that my 16-year-old daughter is a secret F1 fan.
Just a reminder on Memorial Day that using the Stars and Stripes in advertising is a violation of the U.S. Flag Code.
15 years of Fontstruct
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 best integrations is that I can download a file that I can open and refine in Glyphs.2 I recently created a design, moved it to Glyphs and built a variable font out of it.
Balancing work, family, grad school and other obligations, I don’t have a ton of time to spend in Fontstruct. But when they rolled out the Patron level of support for 5 euro a month, I subscribed immediately. I’m happy to support independent tools that are constantly improving.
I pulled together a sample of some of the designs I’ve created over the years on Fontstruct. Feel free to head over to my page and download anything you like. Or better yet, sign up for an account and start experimenting.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina.
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.
Project Repost: Moving select posts from Squarespace to Micro.Blog
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 scanned over the list of articles, there were too many posts that I didn’t want to lose.
As I mentioned in the earlier post, a friend of mine (who also happened to have an old Squarespace site) mentioned that he moved selected posts manually to a new site, and let go of the stuff he no longer focused on. The more I looked at my old writing, the more this seemed like the logical path forward.
I’ve decided that I’m going to slowly move selected posts to bobwertz.com. Several of them were written at a particular time, about specific events so I’ve decided to post them on the new site with the original date. I’ve added a sentence at the top, to explain that the post has been moved. I’ll make minor grammar or spelling corrections, but otherwise I plan to leave the posts as they are now.
As a test, I’ve moved two posts already: B.A.R.E. (Bad Acronyms aRe Everywhere) from 2015 and I made a red velvet cake from 2018. I’ve got about 70 posts that I want to move, and I plan to move a couple of posts each week.
I think it’s worth noting that one of the reasons I feel comfortable moving everything to Micro.Blog is Manton’s commitment to ensuring the content you create can easily be moved, archived or backed up. I’ve turned on Micro.Blog’s Github backup feature, and I know I can export my content in a number of formats if I need to, including the blog archive format that Manton proposed. I wish more services realized the value of allowing easy export of content, and I’m appreciative of Micro.Blog’s commitment to portability and interoperability.
I’m happy with this solution and even though it will take time to move the posts manually, I truly believe it’s the best option for this situation.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
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.