Splat, Inc.

12/08/2023

Gemini, DeepMind’s new multi-modal AI, can recommend craft projects based on raw materials. It can also respond to customers in a bespoke way for businesses, far outpacing current chatbots in providing a human-like experience.

04/12/2023

In honor of National Pet Day, I present cancer survivor and companion extraordinaire, Phoebe.

02/10/2022

Happily looking forward to sharing tips on Personal Branding in the Professional Services Marketplace with our colleague Barbara Kaplan, on February 17th at noon, EST.

05/28/2021

Knockout, a 1994 colloboration between Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones is a complete system of typefaces. In its design, H&FJ created nine different families of type, based on width. Each family differs slightly in design, giving the entire system variety and diversity.

The unique approach to designing this 'ecosystem of type' was a response to the rigorous characterization of typefaces, which was an achievement of the Modernist Era. By giving each family of widths unique, slightly variant, designs, H&FJ were referencing a pre-modern sensibility about type. Prior to Modernism, the design of families or systems or type was a yet-to-be-introduced notion. Type was a vernacular art, practiced locally. As a result, typefaces were harder to adapt for Industrial Age applications but were also, often, filled with personality and locality. Knockout is an effort to create a system that produces both extensibility, yet preserves personality.

05/27/2021

A Big City Gets the Type Superhero it Deserves

If the 90's was rocking Spiekermann's FF Meta, the 2000s were smitten by Gotham, the geometric sans typeface from Tobias Freire Jones. Gotham, commissioned by GQ magazine, was intended to be based on historic geometric typefaces and offer a "fresh, masculine" look.

At least that's what the client brief was looking for. Freire Jones took this set of expectations and began traipsing around his hometown of New York, looking at historic sans serif typefaces from (mostly) early twentieth century architecture. Writing about the typeface, he admits that he brought a personal agenda to the design of it, namely the preservation of the straightforward, vernacular type which abounds on older New York buildings. But his apprroach also aligned with the client's needs, so everyone was happy.

Gotham is based on the Bauhausey, Werkbundesque typefaces of the early twentieth century, namely Futura. It was an era where "Type, like architecture, like the organization of society itself, was to be reduced to its bare, efficient essentials" says Jones. Jones' sources ultimately produced a sans serif typeface which, unlike other earlier, wildly popular sans serif faces, was distinctly American.

Gotham is known as being plain-spoken and direct. Its lack of ornament and pretense is its principle virtue. It has won the design world over, having been used by none other than Barack Obama's successful presidential campaigns.

P.S.: A good article on Gotham: https://theoutline.com/post/7356/gotham-font-is-everywhere

05/26/2021

By Happy Coincidence, a Font Developed for Print Becomes a Digital Darling

Erik Spiekermann's FF Meta typeface became a dominant serif typeface in the 1990s, leading to the dubious praise that it became the "Helvetica of the 1990s."

But what became one of digital's first big type stars was borne out of a proposal brief for, of all entities, the German Post Office (Deutsche Bundespost.) In 1985, the design firm at which Spiekerman was employed responded to an RFP, issued by the Post Office. As part of a corporate rebranding exercise, the issuing brief was looking to develop a typeface which responded to the constraints of their working environment. Namely, "the brief called for a very legible, neutral, space-saving, and distinguishable (in regards to weight) typeface with special attention to producing unmistakable characters." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FF_Meta

Ultimately, the Bundespost rejected Meta for their use. This ended up being serendipitous, as it allowed Spiekermann to develop and market the typeface in 1991, just as digital was taking off. Besides just being a pleasing typeface to look at, Meta also has many features which make it both legible and distinctive for digital applications. It became an early digital rockstar and the rest is history.

05/24/2021

Georgia: a new "Times Roman" for the web.

In 1996 the Microsoft Corporation attempted to solve a major problem on PCs of the day: font legibility and universality. Traditional fonts of the era had not been designed for computer displays. Pixel-based type in the 1990s was limited by low display resolution and many characteristics of old guard typefaces - great contrast between verticals and low x-heights, for instance - did not translate well to computer displays.


By creating a 'transitional serif' typface, Matthew Carter essentially did what newsprint designers were doing, with the invention of Times New Roman in the 1930's. That is, he updated existing publishing-oriented fonts and created a new typeface to suit changing technology.


Georgia features legibility improvements that make it stand out at even small sizes. Later 'Pro' versions of it have extended its usefulness across both digital and print applications, making it one of the most versatile serif typefaces available.

05/21/2021

Founding Father Ben Franklin might be happy that someone named a famous font after him. And he might be even more pleased to learn that his namesake font was also a 'founding uncle' of sorts - influencing the later development of the King of the 20th Century, Helvetica.

Franklin Gothic is a straightforward typeface developed in the early twentieth century by Morris Fuller Benton of the American Type Foundry. There seems to have been an international dialogue between America and Germany in this era. ATF’s most influential turn-of-the-century typefaces were initially influenced by the German families, known as Akzidenz Grotesk. ATF issued multiple typefaces in this era; Franklin Gothic is probably the most enduring.

Franklin Gothic is one of my favorite fonts and we’ve used it for both print and online work. I like it because it’s plain-spoken, loud, but nevertheless stylish. It’s big, brassy and legible. And I love, especially, some of the characters for which it is known, such as the two-story ‘g,’ with the cute little ear.

05/20/2021

Thick, meet Thin.

Giambattista Bodoni was a thriving typesetter and print shop owner in the late 18th Century. The ownership of books in this era was often a sign of prosperity and the crafting of books was a reflection of the wealth of the region from which they were made. Working under the patronage of the Duke of Parma, Bodoni created his eponymous typeface to showcase both the technology of his shop and the superiority of paper stocks, manufactured in Parma, at the time.

The result of his efforts was Bodoni, generally regarded as one of the most beautiful typefaces ever designed. Bodoni features exaggerated contrasts between thick and thin in its letterforms. Though lovely to look at, this exaggeration makes the font difficult to use in both headlines and body copy, simultaneously. Most settings of this typeface are either lovely at headline size but impossible to read in body copy or they're sloppily displayed at headline size, but legible for body type. This difficulty has been overcome through the use of 'optical sizing,' which accommodates the typeface to different sizes. If Bodoni has seduced you, be sure to choose a setting of it which best matches your usage!

05/19/2021