Colophon

Typographical

This website uses a few different fonts:

One is Filosofia, designed in 1996 by Zuzana Licko and published by Emigre. I’m a huge fan of Licko’s designs; they feel to me like avatars of an age. I also love the fact that Emigre funded its iconic magazine with the sale of digital fonts: one of the all-time great cross-subsidies.

Another is Trade Gothic Next, a 2008 revision by Akira Kobayashi and Tom Grace of Jackson Burke’s 1947 design. I love fonts of this style, called “grotesque”. It was years ago that I learned the Star Wars opening crawl is set in, of all things, News Gothic; that’s what cracked them open for me.

For headlines, I use Stephen Nixon’s wild Kyrios: “a curious, slightly psyche­delic black­letter family”!

Fiction is, when appropriate, presented in my Perfect Edition template, which uses Vollkorn, the “free and healthy typeface for bread and butter use” designed by Friedrich Althausen and provided as a profound public good.

Technical

This website is managed using Middleman, a static site generator that’s simple and flexible and, most importantly, written in Ruby, which is the program­ming language I know best. My instal­la­tion of Middleman is hot-rodded with all sorts of conve­niences and customizations, including many typo­graph­ical tune-ups.

I send emails using Mailchimp, which I operate through its API, chore­o­graphing messages with a Ruby script that I run on my laptop.

Style guide

I’m noting a few sitewide pref­er­ences here, mostly for myself:

And finally, I’ll repeat a useful maxim:

Ping Pong the Animation, Episode 4
Ping Pong the Animation, Episode 4

October 2024, Oakland