☀️ August 9th . Hot and sunny. Yesterday’s hard rain all steamed away. Nearly got caught in a downpour at the county fair after Eileen’s team won the fleece-to-shawl competition, but we left just in time. Carted out Eileen’s spinning wheel out on a metal dolly I bought years ago for reasons I can no longer remember. Why would I have needed such a thing? What was I trying to move? But I’m glad I…
Christopher Alexander, The Process of Creating Life : You know the feeling which the thing will have. But you do not yet know the form . In fact, you keep having to change the form, because as the work unfolds, you find out many, many details which have the wrong feeling, which do not function, in response to the whole, as you thought they would. Because you keep the feeling constant, you have to…
My pal Matt Colyer recently explained how to use ChatGPT’s 4o model to craft a sophisticated, information-dense prompt to then pass to the o1 model — which can in turn provide rich responses. I’ve used this technique a few times already, to wonderful effect. One example is a daily cultural update . Each morning, while I’m AeroPressing my coffee, ChatGPT reads aloud several pieces of news. So far:…
Today I learned that Pableaux Johnson has passed away , so in his memory I’m sharing with you a recipe he gave me — you’ll love it, even if you never cook this dish. May he rest in peace. I met Pableaux in New Orleans in 2011, as Bryan Mason and I got ready for TypeCon. Pableaux, laughing, told me I looked like a cop and guided us to breakfast at a friend’s new restaurant. The food was delicious,…
Growing up, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) had always intrigued me. A neighbor with whom I was friendly but not very close had all these mysterious books and beautiful dice, and he tried to explain things to me … but we didn’t have much time to get into it. Then a few years ago, I picked up a starter set to try playing with my older girls. I acted as the Dungeon Master (DM) and read the story to them,…
🎙️ Notes from Practicing Typography 003 : Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable : All devices need to interact. If a thing does not interact, it will be considered broken. Over the past few years I’ve been collecting stories of what it is like to grow up in the digital age. As an example, one of my friends had a young daughter under five years old. Like many other families these days, they didn’t have a…
Introducing Typography Advisor . As an experiment, I made this custom version of ChatGPT to help when I’m designing with text and working on layouts. Like regular ChatGPT, I find it most useful when getting started or when I feel stuck — it can inform decisions, suggest next steps, and aid in exploration. Intelligence technologies can accelerate our natural design habits. We already act as our own…
🎙️ Notes from Practicing Typography 002 : Laura Kalbag, Accessibility for Everyone : Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of others. It’s what makes us good at creating products for other people as we can better understand their problems and create solutions that fit their needs. It’s always easier to create products for people who have the same needs as us, since we understand our own…
Hey, I started a podcast. 10m long, super casual, may not keep it up. But close friends said kind things, so I’m gonna publish and see what happens. RSS , Spotify , Apple , Overcast . 🎙️ Notes from Practicing Typography 001 : Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS by Jen Simmons and Elika Etemad, with Brandon Stewart. Note that my audio credits only Jen by mistake. Feedback needed:…
Originally published in 2018, Flexible Typesetting has sold thousands of copies and given a new generation of designers fresh mental models to craft meaningful, multidimensional typography. It is required reading in elite design programs and has encouraged the rethinking of core curricula. Few things in my career have been as rewarding as writing and sharing this book. I’m so excited to give it to…
🪕 May 25th . It’s a warm, lazy Saturday and I’m sipping 1Q84 which I don’t love, but which like other Murakami novels puts me in a mood to appreciate music — that, I do love. Then I happened to check my friend Donny’s blog and learn about Remembrance . Thanks to the magic of my favorite streaming service and some nice little speakers, lively, soulful banjo and piano now float through my living…
🌷 May 3rd . Bright and breezy. Bears and bees have woken up, with warm sun over the past few days. Sparrows, woodpeckers making their morning noise. New growth abounds.
As I mentioned in a recent interview, inventing typographic intelligence technologies is what I do at work . So I thought I’d elaborate: Imagine spell check for design, with advice about choosing fonts, setting line spacing, rearranging text, and more. I’m guiding a small team as we decide what to check for, how to make changes, and how manual/automatic the controls should be. The hard part is,…
Now in my mid-forties, I increasingly appreciate time spent with my spouse, children, siblings, and parents. Nothing nourishes and uplifts me more, comforts me more in uncertainty, or provides me with more clarity and energy to focus on projects in life and work than spending time with my family. It is a great privilege and a blessing that these relationships are positive. Dedicated…
Adding a couple more sites to the blogroll : Ethan Marcotte coined the term Responsive Web Design and, more importantly, continues to teach people that it’s more than a technique — it’s an ethos . I enjoy following Ethan’s personal site because his industry awareness is off the charts, he’s deeply thoughtful about both practical and generational challenges, and he is above all encouraging . Tyler…
🌲 January 25th . Rain and warm temperatures melted the blanket of snow from our yard. Some of my stress has melted away too, after a solid workout this morning, breakfast with Eileen and our 6yo (who flipped a pancake piece to the dog), and lunch with my friend and colleague Ivan Bettger. Work-wise, we’re nearing the end of a six-week scope of effort. Achieving our goals was at risk because a key…
Bertrand Russell, How to Grow Old : An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.…
Rick Rubin interviewing Daniel Kaluuya : DK: The junction nature of London is London. The kind of people coming in and out… RR: That’s what makes London London, that cycle. DK: Yeah yeah, it’s the Somalis, it’s the Kosovans, there’s a new wave. Come in, leave, come in. That whole thing about “things are always supposed to stay the same” ... holding onto that is hurting yourself … the place isn’t…
I recently recorded a short video series that Adobe is now releasing on YouTube as part of the Foundations of Graphic Design series. In these videos, I cover making body text easy to read, catching attention with display text, guiding readers through information, and learning how typography feels. Many good “typography basics” videos already explain the worldly importance of typography and…
For many years I’ve been a happy You Need A Budget customer, and as we head into 2024 it continues to be an important part of my financial strategy. Saving up for emergencies and big expenses, hedging fluctuating categories, checking digital envelopes before making a purchase, and tracking all bank transactions in one place are habits that give me peace of mind and help reduce stress in stressful…
🎄 December 29th . Rainy and warm. Very grateful for holiday vacation time. As Eileen and I drove to pick up the kids from a sleepover we discussed definitions of done for our quarterly goals, then I time-blocked the calendar when I got back to my iPad. Listened to Rick Rubin on Huberman . Revisited Rick’s book The Creative Act and highlighted many sections. Read a stack of books with my 6yo,…
Rick Rubin, interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger : RR: When you list the great directors that you worked with, if you think of each of them, would you say there are any qualities that they all shared? What made those people so great, from your perspective? AS: All of them had vision. When they tell you the movie that they want to do, they will look out into emptiness and tell you of what the movie…
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami . Entertaining dual stories, linked psychologically. I didn’t understand all the connections. “Inklings” seemed unnecessary, but maybe that was the point? Was the real world also psychological? In any case it had the Murakami effect of making me want to grocery shop, listen to music, and drink whiskey. (Via Talin Wadsworth .)
Thanks to Veronica Lewis for tips on alt text for comics .
I’m fortunate to work with an excellent manager. She gives me freedom, encourages me, and helps me grow. With her guidance, I spent 2023 regularly interviewing customers and managing the prototyping of two concepts that became high priorities for our team (one of them our top priority). It was a wonderful learning experience, feeling out new processes and facing the pressure of strong interest in…
Jane McGonigal, Imaginable : This is how you become a pioneer. And it’s something I’ve seen again and again: it’s so much easier to come up with new innovations, to imagine new products and services and businesses and art forms, when you play with ridiculous, at first , ideas — because far fewer people are thinking about and getting ready for these “unthinkable” futures. You get to the ideas…
Jody Rosen, The Genius of Lionel Messi Just Walking Around : If you ask any astute observer – an experienced coach or player or tactically tuned-in analyst – how to understand the game, they will advise you to take your eyes off the ball. There may well be an analogous precept, with a German name, in philosophy or art history or mechanical physics. The idea is this: to apprehend the main thrust of…
🍂 December 17th . Humid and warmer than usual, rain in the forecast. Standing in the morning air, typing this in one hand while Zeke pulls on his leash. Zeke is my six-year-old shepherd mix, he had ACL surgery back in August and is almost back to normal now. The neighborhood is quiet, but the woods are lively. Merlin Bird ID picks up Junco, Chickadee, Nuthatch, Woodpecker, Robin, Goldfinch.…
Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution : Instead of asking what their company does best today, managers should ask, “What do we need to master today, and what will we need to master in the future, in order to excel on the trajectory of improvement that customers will define as important?”
Robin Rendle, The Next Wild Thing : Making something as good as this requires an especially rare quality from a multi-billion dollar company though: you have to trust your employees to go find that thing. Without that trust you can’t build anything good, let alone great.
Brad Frost recently highlighted his old gold about personal branding : Jobs, technologies and trends come and go, but you as an individual remain. (...) My personal website is my home base ... the glue that ties everything together. (...) It becomes the canonical link for you as a person. Having a canonical link about oneself is handy, and as Brad says it can lead to new opportunities and new…
Flexibility causes pressure that makes layouts look bad. We can relieve that pressure in isolated ways thanks to CSS calculations, interpolation, and container awareness, but we lack a means of interconnection that would help maintain balance in compositions. CSS forces are values that travel from a high-pressure area to other, low-pressure areas to help layouts reach a comfortable equilibrium.…
The reason that black people are in the streets has to do with the lives they’re forced to lead in this country. And they’re forced to lead these lives by the indifference and the apathy and a certain kind of ignorance — a very willful ignorance — on the part of their co-citizens. That's James Baldwin, excerpted by Jason, who prefaces it by saying: Hi. I wanted to take today to compile a sampling…
Recently I asked these questions on Twitter : Are you designing with variable fonts? Do you feel like you understand them? People’s answers vary quite a bit. I shared my own answers , too. Then, after my friend Erik made an analogy to understanding Unicode , I extended this analogy to emoji UI: Using variable fonts today is like looking up smiley faces in Unicode code charts. You can do fine if…
This week, educators can get a free ebook version of Flexible Typesetting , plus an invitation to the private Slack group where readers and I share ideas about lesson plans. Send me an email describing your teaching work in two sentences, and I’ll send you a code to download the ebook at no charge. Published in July, Flexible Typesetting is already required reading in elite design programs and has…
Teachers on my new book, Flexible Typesetting : An outstanding text if you want to learn how to set harmonious text both on the web *and* print. 10/10 — Thomas Jockin Students, designers, developers, and even the most seasoned typographers will gain insights into how to set type for the web and beyond. — Amy Papaelias Having read Tim Brown’s Flexible Typesetting ... I’m convinced I have to…
Adding a couple more sites to the blogroll : Chen Hui Jing has a finger on the pulse of web design, consistently sharing interesting news and resources — with a recent focus on East Asian typography and layout. I follow HJ’s blog and Twitter feed . Looks like there’s also a bunch of good stuff on Notist . Andy Bell is an independent web developer with a blog and all the right priorities. Andy's…
Wrote this on September 3rd, then got so busy I forgot to post it: I just returned to my desk after my first Adobe sabbatical — four weeks' time off for having worked at Adobe for five years. Along with the standard, two-week vacation time and our one-week company shutdown in July, that makes a total of seven weeks' vacation this year. The winter holidays ahead will make it eight. What an…
It isn’t entirely comfortable yet, but I believe I now have a way to easily write and publish this site’s Jekyll-based posts from iOS — without writing code or actually running Jekyll. I can write in Ulysses and use the standard share feature to publish. The key pieces are a customized version of Ryan Daigle’s iOS shortcut , the iOS app Working Copy (Ryan’s post explains how these two things work…
Five minutes ago, to my embarrassment, I realized that the ladder analogy I used in Flexible Typesetting was based on Frank Chimero’s ladder analogy from The Shape of Design . Frank wrote in Chapter 1 : The creative process could be said to resemble a ladder, where the bottom rung is the blank page and the top rung the final piece. In between, the artist climbs the ladder by making a series of…
For many years, Twitter felt like an amazing place to share what I was doing, to meet new people, and to help spread positive energy and good ideas. I did all of that, and I loved it. But Twitter gradually became awful. It came to my attention years ago that on Twitter, harassment goes unchecked. This began with GamerGate , reached its height with our disgraceful president’s continual presence,…
When I’m preparing a new talk for speaking engagments, it often begins as a messy process. I’ll jot down an outline, then I’ll go over it in my mind while I’m driving or doing chores. In those moments, when I’m doing other stuff, I find voice memos to be super useful. I’ve been using a program called RecUp (formerly DropVox) that begins recording immediately when I start the app, and saves the…
Some Adobe colleagues are prototyping a new tool and taking a fresh look at typographic features, so they asked me and Wenting to help. For this week’s meeting, I made a couple examples showing how several kinds of whitespace can be simultanously adjusted (part of Cyrus Highsmith’s tempo idea from Inside Paragraphs ): Here’s tempo changing automatically as text block width changes. See how the top…
His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman . Fun to read, but a little weak. The knife and the bear are cool, but on the other hand some parts of books 2 & 3 felt too sappy. The mixing of the worlds, and reasoning behind the whole business, are what felt weak to me. But then again I saw this on my daughter’s 4th-grade recommended-reading list, so “a little weak” is totally appropriate strength…
One of the side projects I’m working on is editing and republishing children’s stories by Thornton W. Burgess. I often read the stories to my daughters, and they’re delightful. Burgess was a naturalist, so the animal characters are anthropomorphized with personalities that give you an idea of the animals’ different behaviors and habits. But I noticed something as I read the books: more than 90% of…
Thanks to friends and family who worked with me and supported me as I wrote Flexible Typesetting . These acknowledgements are from the back of the book. Since A Book Apart opened its doors for business, I have admired these books. It’s an honor and a privilege to have written one. My thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman for setting himself apart — for striking a helpful, caring tone in his writings; for…
I was on standby to do a “spotlight” at Typographics — a quick word at the microphone in between the main conference speakers. They didn’t need me after all, but here’s what I would have said: Hi everyone, my name is Tim Brown. I started my career as a web designer, and now I’m Head of Typography at Adobe. If you want to know me better, check out Typekit Practice or read an article I wrote, Paying…
A special quadruple quarterly report (lol). I got way behind on this sort of planning. Turns out having a baby while writing a book and working full-time makes you sorta busy. Here are some things I did in the past year, as well as older accomplishments less recent (that I am retiring from the home page). Done over the past year Finished writing a book about flexible typesetting for A Book Apart.…
It is a beautiful book, well-conceived, painstakingly executed with a fine attention to detail. I can't believe that you want to do web design: what a horrible place to do fine typography, a refined practice for which you obviously have an eye. That’s a note from one of my favorite teachers, Clifton Meador, about my final project one semester (a typeset, bound book). I learned so much from Clif,…
Oh, I like this RSS Club idea very much. What a bunch of nerds we are. Thanks to Dave for the fun idea! I don't have much to say right now, but I wanted to get this set up properly. Got an iPad a week or two ago, and sorta bummed about my site setup. I use Jekyll and GitHub, but I don't have any kind of deployment in place — I just FTP up the compiled Jekyll. But I can't compile Jekyll on the…