West of England Design Forum 🇬🇧
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Elliot Jay Stocks | Everything (blog + newsletter + speaking) feed
Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer and author, usually doing something with typography
Latest posts
Keeping type consistent in changing conditions
At first glance, grade might seem very much like weight. But where weight serves to differentiate, grade’s purpose is to unify, allowing designers to adjust type precisely so that it appears the same across different materials, backgrounds, and lighting conditions. And once you notice the problem grade addresses, it’s hard to not see it everywhere. Continue reading this blog post on my site
The search for a Spotify alternative
About six months ago, I realised I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable paying for our Spotify Premium Family plan. And in those six months, I’ve been trying pretty much every other music streaming service out there. This post is intended to serve as a non-exhaustive list of considerations for anyone else looking for an alternative streaming service. (Views are my own, obviously.) Continue…
Issue 052: Summer fonting
A huge benefit of having the word “sporadic” on the tin, as it were, is that I never have to feel too bad if there’s a long gap between issues. But even so, I must admit there’s a limit to that guilt-free feeling, and not having sent out an issue since [checks notes] the beginning of May has definitely triggered it. So please accept my apologies! The kind of crazy thing about this delay in writing…
The old typography is new again
Optical sizing is a method of setting type that feels appropriate to its context: more readable in long prose and more expressive at scale — a way of getting back qualities that were inherent in the days of metal and wood type. Continue reading this blog post on my site
TypeParis Now26 🇫🇷
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Type&Faces 🇬🇧
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Issue 051: Positive tracking
Hello from the road. Or, more accurately, from the tracks, since this issue was composed mostly on trains as I made my way to and from Düsseldorf for the third stop on the Fine Specimens book tour. You might be pleased to know that I’m largely going to shut up about Fine Specimens for this issue. But I do just want to say two very quick things: firstly, thanks so much to everyone who’s bought a…
beyond tellerrand 🇩🇪
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Waterstones 🇧🇪
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Bookhaus 🇬🇧
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Issue 050: Fine Specimens is out today
Issue #50 of Typographic & Sporadic is a special one not so much because of the number, but because I’m here to tell you about three very specific things: Continue reading this issue on my site
A book! A book tour! A book tour newsletter!
Today’s the day: my new book, Fine Specimens , is out! I’m having the release party at Bookhaus in Bristol tonight, and that’s just the beginning: stop number one on a five-date book tour — which I’ll be documenting via my travel-focused pop-up newsletter, Notes from a different (type)setting . Apparently I love making extra work for myself. Continue reading this blog post on my site
Issue 049: Time-dilating chaos
It’s March already! An earlier draft of this issue started with the declaration, “It’s February already!” and that might tell you something about the time-dilating chaos that’s been going on between then and now. Oh boy. But still, the reason for all the month-exclaiming enthusiasm is so that I can now say this: my new book, Fine Specimens , is coming out next this month! This is exciting and…
2025 in review
The world is an absolute mess right now and it feels like an indulgence to sit back and review the year that’s gone from such a self-centric view. But I also know that these annual reflections are a chance to express gratitude for how lucky I am, living in (and working from) a home that feels safe, surrounded by my family, getting paid to do something I love. So I’m starting this with a thank you…
Issue 048: The festive escape pod
Hello and welcome to the last newsletter I’ll be sending in 2025. If you were here around this time last year, you might remember me promising not one , not two , but three ‘holiday’ issues, which I sent out over the festive period. What was I thinking? This year, I’m going to give myself a bit of a break. However, like those issues I sent at the end of 2024, might I suggest — if I may be so…
Issue 047: Fine Specimens cover reveal
I’d fully intended to send this out to you a couple of weeks ago, but as soon as my own inbox started getting flooded with early Black Friday emails (is it me, or were they even earlier this year?), I decided it’d be sensible to wait and (hopefully) prevent this announcement from getting lost in all the BF/CM sales chaos. And for a good month or so prior to that, I’d been debating whether or not…
Issue 046: How done is done?
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to call a project ‘complete’. A few of you might know that I come from the world of web design, where it’s always possible to continue tinkering, updating, and iterating. There’s no ‘final’ version of a website — only a current state, primed and ready for the next inevitable revision. Being used to this mindset is what probably led, in part,…
Adobe Fonts: once more, with feeling!
I’ve got an announcement to make: I’m very proud to be joining the Adobe Fonts team as Senior Staff Designer, and today is my first day as an employee. In fact, today is the first day I’ve been an employee of anywhere in... checks notes... 18.5 years. Continue reading this blog post on my site
Creative Boom Studio Session
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The Kernference
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Issue 045: 100 pages to fix
Hello from New York, where I’ve been spending the week for some Adobe work, and where there’s been barely a hint of ‘fall’ weather at all, despite me being in full-on hunting-down-pumpkin-beer mode. (The pumpkin beer has indeed been acquired, in case you were wondering.) It most definitely is autumn back home in the UK, though, and despite the torrential rain arriving abruptly and rudely…
Issue 044: Phew (almost)
Is there a word for that limbo-like state when a project is almost done? As in: you’ve used up just about all the fuel in your creative tank, but there’s one last feedback-actioning hurdle to jump? The looming deadline is huge, and oh so daunting, and yet it’s so close you can nearly taste it — if you can manage to limp over the line, of course. If there is a word for that, I’d love to know it,…
Issue 043: I left my fonts in San Francisco
The introduction to this issue has been through so many different drafts, and composed in so many states of mind. Its first incarnation was written in the weird limbo between submitting my Config slides and flying out to the States… but I didn’t manage to finish the issue in time. The second version was written from the mezzanine level of Sight Glass and talked about how the newsletter was coming…
Config 🇺🇸
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