 I have kind of some housekeeping to do. The first thing I want to mention is just a disclaimer about this presentation. It will make more sense as I go into the presentation. It gets a little bit meta. But it's all built with HTML, and it's all built using fonts that are in development. The font that's shown here is a font that I've been working on. It's a revival of Stevenson Blake grotesque number five. Also, the font that you saw at the beginning here, it's called Chi from James Edmondson, who's in the audience. It's a variable font. As you can see, it's slowly squishing around. We'll talk more about that later. But because of all these moving parts, and also because we had a last minute technical issue here, and I just switched to Frank's computer at the last minute, thank you, Frank, for that help. If something breaks, maybe give me a little bit of leniency here, because I'm juggling a lot of technical issues. Also, before I start, I'd like to do just kind of a quick survey to get an understanding. I know all the type of Cooper students, and that's mostly who this talk was arranged for. But I'm curious about the other people in the audience in your experience with design. I'd like to see a show of hands of anyone who has designed a website before. OK, that is very encouraging. Now, I'd also like to see a show of hands of anyone who has designed a typeface before. Not as many people, but still a good amount. And finally, I'd be curious to see how many people have used a typeface before that wasn't completely finished, but they used it in a public project. Even fewer people. That's about how I expected it to go. These questions will become a little more apparent why I'm asking them as I move along here. But to get back to the top, get hand. This photo I made at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, as Frank mentioned in his introduction, I've been involved with the Wood Type Museum. And it's kind of a counterbalance to a lot of the web design and more high technology things that I do. I am very much interested in what the most recent current technology is, but I'm also very interested in historical type information, including machines. Actually, this is a good moment to mention the American Typecasting Fellowship Conference, which is going to be in San Francisco in August. I don't even know if they have a web page for this, but this is kind of an example of things that I'm interested in. It's a group of mostly old people who are into old type manufacturing equipment, typecasting equipment. And so this is kind of all of these interests of mine inform each other. And that is what brought me ultimately to this topic and the ideas that I'll be sharing today. So of course, everyone here knows about Gutenberg, his famous 42-line Bible, which was not the first printed thing that ever existed, not even the first from him. And even though many people, this is kind of the one thing most people associate with Gutenberg and with the beginning of printing, the first thing that we know of that was printed and distributed was actually just a single sheet piece of paper. It wasn't a large book. And this is something that occurs throughout type history, is especially as you go further and further back into type history, the things that most people know about are the things that were designed to last. And they were designed like the Bible and like many printed books at the beginning of when printing and typography started to become an actual thing. These things were meant to last a long time. And they did. And that's why we know about them. And that's great. However, there's this whole other side of printing and typography that doesn't get quite as much attention. There are some niche groups that are interested in this concept, but there's this idea of job printing. And actually, I'd be curious how many of you have heard this term job printing before? Even fewer than people who have used new fonts in public projects. That's about also what I expected. So it proves my point a little bit. The idea of job printing is basically odd jobs that had to be printed. Things that mostly were ephemeral, small handbills, posters, wedding announcements, things like that. Here's a great handbill that's advertising job printing. It's a piece of job printing that's advertising the service of job printing, which I like. But the other thing that I like about this is this weird six down here. This isn't necessarily a font that was unfinished or rarely used or anything like that. But it helps to kind of ease into this idea, which I'll be returning to multiple times tonight, that a lot of the weirder things that you see in printing history tend to happen with things that weren't designed to last or to be used for a long time. They were meant to be ephemeral or thrown away after you used them. And a lot of this came about around the time of the Industrial Revolution. There was job printing before the Industrial Revolution. But that really is what kicked it into high gear. The birth of advertising and of commercial design and commercial art really exploded in the 1800s, especially the early 1800s to the mid 1800s, and continued to grow up until 1900 and beyond. And as there was more demand for commercial printing, there were more people that were looking for ways to outdo their competitors. If you're in a landscape like this that is just completely cluttered with a million things yelling at you, you have to do whatever you can to get some attention at your piece of printing. So not surprisingly, you start seeing very heavy typefaces, very ornamental typefaces, typefaces with weird effects and shades. And this is not typically the kind of typography you would see used in a book or in some kind of design work that was meant to last for more than a month or a year or so. If anything, you might see it in the title page of a book. But other than that, most typography was much more subdued. And there's an interesting kind of relationship between typography and entertainment, because especially for things like circuses, like these are showing circus bills, a circus is already a little bit absurd and showy and ostentatious. And when you put it in the environment where there's so much competition for visual attention, things start getting really out of hand. And as you can see here, they did not hold back in using interesting, weird, and different typefaces. And I think of all the kind of things I could even have shown, this is a little bit more on the subdued side. But also, there's some competition at the time in the 1800s with chromolithography. Chromolithography, which I think was patented in 1837, really put the fire under the butts of the people who were printing using premade fonts, because chromolithography allowed you to do things, work on curves, and bend your letters, and colorize things, and shade things in ways that were very hard or impossible to do with a premade font that was cast in metal or cut from wood. And so as the 18th century moved on, you kind of see this interesting relationship as things got more and more showy and more and more examples existed for sign painters to make their signs and their advertising even more crazy and elaborate and colorful. The type founders and the type manufacturers had to keep up with that if they wanted to keep printing and maintain that kind of attention. So this is an example actually of a sign painter's alphabet. It looks like a typeface. It could theoretically be a typeface, but this is pretty typical of something you'd see, especially in France, of either sign painting or chromolithography that takes advantage of multiple colors in a way that was very hard to do with a printed type. But then, of course, came the idea of bringing multiple colors into type. So this is an example, a pretty early example, of chromatic wood type. As you'll probably notice, most of the stuff that I'm showing today gets just more and more bonkers as you go, and that's kind of what I like about it. It's a little bit a theater of the absurd and this competition between typography and lettering and really fueled that absurdity. So this is actually two pages from one of my favorite books or my favorite book. It's specimens of chromatic wood type. It's a very large book, and it's showing it up on a screen, even now projected whatever, eight feet tall, still doesn't do it of the service. If you ever have a chance to have a look at this book, it's really kind of, I think, the pinnacle of this idea of introducing multiple colors and overprinting into typography. By the end of the 1800s, things had just gone completely crazy. Especially in the realm of metal type, many of the foundries had pages that were just filled with stuff like this that was like, I feel like some of these things you had to be on drugs to come up with. And I think by the time things kind of reached that crescendo of just insanity and decoration, that's when modernism started to kind of push back against that. And throughout the 19th century, you see things start to tone down a lot more, at least until the second half of the 19th, or 20th century, sorry. For the sake of time, I skipped over some topics that are also related to the relationship between printing and the demands of the market and the creation of new typefaces. For example, in newspaper printing, many new typefaces were developed specifically for those purposes. But I wanted to kind of skip ahead to phototype setting and the second half of the 20th century, because I feel like there were a lot of things happening that mirrored what happened in the 1800s. Most of what I think really fueled the whole style of the 1960s and 1970s and what people think of as funky design or psychedelic design, at least in terms of printing, maybe not necessarily lettering, is the fact that phototype setting, which had previously been not very practical to do, all of a sudden, around the 60s became very easy to do. If you could develop a strip of film that had your alphabet on it, there were many machines that could be used to typeset words with those letters. And this comes back to the idea of using typefaces that aren't necessarily complete. There were many typefaces that existed that weren't even a full character set. They probably didn't have a whole, maybe not even an uppercase or not a lowercase, but still it was very practical for people to make them and to use them. And there was a, compared to something where if you're casting metal type, you have to, you have this whole industrial process, it's a lot easier to expose a strip of film to use for your type setting. And this resulted in all kinds of crazy things. This is a pretty typical example of stuff that came out of the 70s, which interestingly has a lot in common with things that came out in the 1800s. And this was all very easy to do. If Playgirl wanted to have a custom typeface that wasn't using a photo type setting, it would have cost them a lot more money and maybe it wouldn't have happened. They would have had to use a typeface that existed off the shelf. And so again and again in the 70s you see these kinds of things happening. I've just put this in because I think it's really funny and cool, this is Seymour Klost. And this was published in the Pushpin graphic, which was a publication that his studio released. It wasn't really used in the publication, but just the fact that they could publish and the means of production throughout the 20th century, just continued to get easier and more accessible and more accessible to the point where it's very easy just to publish a kind of one-off magazine and not spend a fortune on it. And a lot of these typefaces that were being created for custom jobs, either for magazines or just for fun projects, there were also a lot of type design competitions. If they caught on and it seemed like people like them, a lot of times they would make it into the catalogs of larger type or lettering companies offerings. So these are a lot of examples that I included this one in particular because it was related I think to the typeface I used on my intro slide. But it's just this kind of stuff I don't think if it required a whole industrial mechanism to do this beyond photographic reproduction, a lot of these styles I don't think would have existed, especially because some of these styles themselves are just photographic manipulations of an existing style. So I think this obese condensed, obese expanded is just obese condensed, but it's been photographically stretched and skewed to look kind of goopier and weirder. And if you ever get a chance to go through a photo lettering catalog, I highly recommend it because it's just, this is only the tip of the craziness iceberg. Skipping ahead a little bit again to another era where the means of production and especially type reduction really became even easier than they were with photo type setting is desktop publishing. And now probably where there's at least some people in the room that remember the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution, but in the 80s when desktop computers became more accessible and people could start laying out their own magazines and things like that, it was very empowering but it also I think spurred a lot of creativity in people who were interested in typography, even if they weren't necessarily professional typographers. And of course the establishment typographers probably held their nose at some of this stuff, but a great example I think is Emigre. I believe Rudy and Susanna are in the room. I did not know they'd be here, so I'm a little embarrassed to be talking about their work while they're sitting here, but Emigre I think is a really great example of a situation where because the means of production are became easier and maybe you can correct me after the talk if I'm interpreting it wrong, it allowed them to do a lot of things that they wouldn't necessarily be able to do as easily if they were relying on a production house or someone else who is doing layouts and mechanicals and things like that. The really cool thing about Emigre was it was a real magazine with real articles, but it also beyond just kind of stylistically pushing what was possible with editorial design, it also pushed new typefaces that were just coming out or were in development and it seems like they fed off each other, that the magazine required new typefaces and when you make new typefaces, of course you wanna use them in a new place and I think it is a really great example of that, whether or not you like the style is a matter of taste, but you can't ignore the fact that it was a means of encouraging new typeface development which I enjoy. Once the web came around, then things started getting a little bit weirder because in some ways things were easier than they had ever been. You could publish an article on the web with the push of a button, but the control you have over the layout and the design is much more limited. It's also limited with desktop publishing and even with photo type setting, but the web is kind of an extreme and especially it was at the inception in the 90s. So for a very long time on the web, most of the type that you would see was just system default fonts, things like times and aerial and things like that. It wasn't possible to reliably use fonts in a website and expect that the person on the other side was gonna see what you intended unless you converted the type into an image or something that was no longer what I would even really consider type. It was an image. And so, yes, this is kind of a classic example that I've seen shown many times before about how Amazon used to look and this is pretty representative of how most of the web looked. If you could only change the size of things and this maybe even have been before you could change colors of things, things look very great. This is no longer the cool layouts of emigrate, it's no longer the funky stuff you see from photo type setting and it definitely is not the really cool, weird, interesting stuff from the 1800s. People started jumping on this idea of making images though and it started to create an interesting kind of disconnect. Anything that was real text like down here that could be translated or copy pasted or searched still was stuck with these default system fonts but then maybe because people were stuck in that mode for normal text, when they had the opportunity to put text into an image, they kind of went all out and put drop shadows and put things on curves and put like big starbursts and things like this and it has the same kind of spirit, I think fundamentally as a lot of the stuff that was happening in the 1800s but at the same time it was not a good thing for the web necessarily. Technically it was limiting and as I'll talk in a few more slides it definitely limited what you can do with the flexibility of text. This is a page from geocities.com. Actually how about a show hands who had a geocities web page here? Wow, that's actually pretty good. So if you're not familiar with geocities, I think of geocities almost as an interesting peak in the overall creativity on the web. It definitely was not a pinnacle of design taste on the web but what it was is it allowed anyone, myself included, to make a web page if they could figure out some of the code and grab some images and put together their content without being forced into some existing template system. They're limited in the code they could use and what was possible with HTML and this probably was even before CSS but people were making their own things and they were starting from scratch and they were copy pasting from other people's code and it was I think a very creative time in the web. So I look back on those times with Faunus. The interesting thing now is that there are very few platforms like this that exist where any user can kind of free form design what they want without getting into having a paid subscription or knowing a little bit more advanced technology. This is MySpace.com probably circa 1998 if I had to guess. I don't actually know if this is legitimately a MySpace. It looks like a MySpace page but MySpace was another interesting kind of platform because much like Facebook now it was a social network and it's where a lot of people met many of their friends and kept in touch with their friends but it was not limiting, definitely not as limiting as things like Facebook are now. Probably there's a good argument that letting people do whatever they want with their Facebook page didn't lead to the best user experience for the people who were trying to read those pages but again it was an example of people once they had a platform and they could kind of manipulate things they started to get very creative even if it wasn't well informed or tasteful by standard definitions. So as all this creativity is starting to well up in the web the standards for what you can do on the web are also adapting and it starts to look like things are gonna be really cool. This idea of responsive design starts to come around and people think about websites not as fixed static things but as things that can adapt to different contexts to different sizes of screens, to different user settings. Also not too long after that around 2008 you started to finally be able to use web fonts on a page reliably that weren't installed on the person who's viewing your website's computer. So this is a very good recipe I think for a lot of creativity to happen and indeed there were many examples in the around 2005 to 2010 that I remember at the time thinking okay now this is not only are we gonna be able to do things that have as much finesse as print but they are more complex so you can do more interactive things more dynamic stylization. This is an example of a page I believe this one was designed by Jason Santa Maria and it's from a series of pages that were called the Lost World Fair and when this first came out looking at this most people thought okay that's just a Photoshop image that they put on a web page but it's actually live text and let's see I'm risking something here by trying this but it stretches around and it does more than just sit statically on the page. Let's go back to full screen mode here or not. This is where my presentation starts to break down. All right sorry I'm gonna have to scroll back to where it was. Right around the same time was a moment where the people who were previously making their web presence on platforms like GeoCities started to move first to Facebook where all the friends were and then to other larger and more centralized places. I don't wanna sound like I don't like that concept. Many of these platforms made it very easy for people to keep in touch in ways they couldn't before to publish content in ways they couldn't before but there were some side effects to that that I don't necessarily think of as being good. So this is Facebook. I'm guessing there's at least a couple people here that work at Facebook or have worked at Facebook. It seems like when you're in the Bay Area that's always the case. There are many things that I really like about Facebook. Keeping in touch with many of my relatives would be almost impossible if it wasn't for Facebook. However it's very much a templated system that's by definition what it is. There are small areas where users can insert their own creativity or upload images but then it starts almost reverting back to the situation before web fonts and things like that where people are just relying on images to get across any text that doesn't fall within the template system of Facebook. So this is actually a page from a group called the Sign Painting Support Group which I mean to be completely honest with you I don't use Facebook that much. A lot of times when I do I read through the Sign Painting Support Group and there's a lot of interesting information there. Sometimes it gets a little heated. There's some drama but there's a lot of good content there and it's all stuck in this container of Facebook. The pro of that is that probably more people are seeing it than they might otherwise but on the other side if you don't use Facebook you can't see it. I don't believe, well I don't know what the settings are now but there are many situations where information has been kind of locked within these systems that you have to participate in to be able to access. You could argue that just using the web is kind of like that but especially more recently the ability to get online has been easier and easier at least in the US. Medium is another great example of something that I think the reading experience on Medium can be very great. There definitely is no shortage of interesting content on Medium but unless you're uploading images you're still restricted to what they will allow you to do unlike GeoCities where you could almost do whatever and I'm not necessarily even saying that I think Medium would be better if it was more like GeoCities but I just wanna point out that it's this pre-existing structure that you're confined to if you're using that as your publication. Sometimes that's worth a trade off. If you don't wanna set up a page it's a lot easier to just sign up for Medium account and start typing and publish something very quickly. So I'm not trying to like talk trash about these things I'm just trying to point out that at this one moment where all of this creativity started swelling up it seemed like it was then funneling into these templated systems. Squarespace is another example maybe there are some Squarespace employees here I don't know. Squarespace again I think a lot of the things they do are great for empowering people to make websites who would have no way of doing that otherwise or would not be able to do it with as much kind of style but again even if you're modifying your own code with Squarespace you're still stuck within kind of the constraints of their system and especially if you're working from an existing template which seems to happen very often then you're inheriting code that maybe you don't even understand what it does but it influences the overall design of the webpage. Some examples of things that I think about when I think of this creativity right around the time when responsive design and web fonts were starting to come out that didn't get funneled into a template system there are much fewer examples I can think of and most of them exist as extensions of a web publication and sometimes they may even be an extension of a template system from that web publication but a lot of times they get more flexibility and kind of more room for having customized design. ProPublica is a great example of an organization where a lot of their content is within their template system I think their template system is well designed but occasionally they will also publish future articles that are completely free of that the typography is free to do whatever it wants and at the risk of again having to break something here I'm gonna try to go to this other screen to show kind of how some of this stuff works. So this isn't a particularly like avant-garde layout but what is interesting about it I think especially is the title treatment when it's just a static thing it looks nicely composed but the fact that it's not just an image that it's a responsive text that can reconfigure itself depending on the size of the screen and the relationship to the illustration I think is this is the kinds of things that I was excited about when responsive designs started coming out this is a very simple example of that but this is the kind of thing that starts changing your mind from type being a fixed static thing that's stamped down to something that can adjust its surroundings as needed. This is another really great example that I like this is from New York Times Magazine and maybe let's try reloading here so we get the full animation. This is a feature they did on skyscrapers in New York City and again the straight text matter is pretty straightforward but they have these interesting animations that are working only because they decided to break out of their typical handling of headlines and again it's like those things only show up a couple times but when they do it's a really interesting kind of design moment and it speaks to this idea of having the editorial content be customized specifically for the or sorry have the design be customized for the editorial content. To full screen you, cross your fingers. All right that worked. So the interesting thing about those examples and most examples I've seen that are interesting art directed feature design pieces that exist at least partially outside of a templated system is that still a lot of times the fonts that they're using are fonts that they're just coming off the shelf. This is partially just due to the way that web fonts work. If you wanna get a web font, a lot of times you're going through some kind of service where they have a catalog and all the fonts have been checked out and they've been verified by that service. This is good for people who don't wanna have to worry about if the font's gonna crash their page or something like that but for people who are doing more experimental things it is a little more limiting. Also just from a design standpoint it means that the fonts that you have access to are only fonts that people have considered worthy of completing. It's very hard to find a font service especially a web font service where you can use a font that isn't completely finished yet or that is in development. Of course you can always work with a type foundry who is making the font for you and have a back and forth relationship and I actually really enjoy when those kinds of things happens. New York Times Magazine did stuff like that but usually to do that you have to first know that you can do that and also have a budget to be able to do that. However more recently I'm happy to say there are more options outside of the realm of fonts that have been kind of blessed to be taken all the way through to completion. This one, I was a little reluctant to mention it because it not much happened with it after it was launched. This was from 2015 when Adobe released its Adobe type concepts program which I really like in theory and it was one of the first kinds of concepts like this to come out especially from a large company. The whole idea is basically that they would release typefaces in an early stage with a limited character set so that people could kind of see whether or not they even are worth completing. Unfortunately as far as I know only two fonts were released under this program. I don't know if they have plans to continue with them or not but they definitely have some design talent that I would be interested to see more kind of one off ideas that aren't even before they've been blessed to have a full production run. 2016, about a year later there was this project by the Pipe Foundry. I don't know if you've heard of this. The idea of the Pipe Foundry was that every week in 2016 they would release a new typeface and these were all or most of them maybe all of them were just one off fonts. They had usually limited character sets many of them were all caps but you can see that they're definitely taking some clues from the 19th century both in the idea of making typefaces that almost look like they're coming from the 19th century. They're definitely inspired by the 19th century but also they're bonkers in the way that a lot of the typefaces from the 19th century are and they're being released. I don't wanna say it's an informal release process but the fact that it's happening every week means that there isn't as much weight over time every single release. If they release something and the font had a bug in it I don't think anyone would expect that a font that's being released every week especially because these were available for free download at the time. It's hard to complain about something like that. And I've seen these in use and it's really refreshing because I think a lot of these might not if they were being released through a major type foundry they wouldn't have made it through. Some people may have said these are too weird to spend a lot of money finishing. 2017, the next year, is the font of the month club starting. This is from David Jonathan Ross. He's a good friend of mine, a collaborator but the font of the month club is cool because he releases a font every month and similar to the pipe foundry there is a bit less of a weight on him to do something that is really ground-shatteringly good or something that you're gonna use for the rest of your life. These are essentially display faces. There are a couple of text faces in here but it's basically his playground to do things that he wants to do without feeling this big weight over each release. And actually I think a lot of the things that he's released through this which he may not have released otherwise have become some of my favorite type faces. Most recently, this year, this year? Yes, future fonts. So the font that you saw on my title slide is a future font and the concept of future fonts, actually this is maybe if you're coming to see Lizzie give a talk later on, this is kind of a good intro or if you haven't heard of it before maybe this won't spare you. Lizzie will be coming to talk about future fonts and the general idea is it's a platform for type designers to release unfinished type faces and you can license those unfinished type faces for not that much money and as the type faces are developed as more features are added, as more glyphs are added you get the benefit if you're an early adopter of getting all those updates for free. It's also really cool because there are just a lot of kind of weird things on there. Let's have a quick look through. I would encourage you also just to look at this site on your own but you can see pretty quickly that this is stuff that is not what I would consider a standard type face. There are definitely some useful text faces in here but a lot of them are display faces that can be hard sometimes to justify going through the process of making a full glyph set. So it's a way for type users to get early access to fonts, especially interesting fonts and for type designers it's great because it allows them to weigh a little bit on how much people actually like a font before they spend a ton of time and energy finishing them. So there are now options I would say if you're a graphic designer and you want to start using weirder or more interesting or more brand new type faces there are now more and more options for that. The other thing that I think most graphic designers and certainly most web designers never even consider is that you can just call a type designer or sometimes they tend to be introverts so email might be better but you can contact a type designer and just say that you're interested in having if you have an interesting idea for a type face and an interesting application for it I think a lot of type designers are willing to have a conversation at least about options for developing a new type face even if it's just a limited character set or has limited features. The thing that really gets the most interesting now is when all of this stuff starts coming out this is great, this font doesn't have any kerning and I can see that on my slide. One of the downsides of using unfinished fonts. Not only are there these new interesting type faces that you can use but there are also new technologies in which to use them or in which they can be created. One very good example of this is this concept of a CSS grid. I'm not, this talk isn't about CSS it isn't even really that much about web design but I just wanted to show this example cause I don't know it has a lot of type and it looks cool but CSS grid is a relatively new web standard that allows you to do gridded layouts in a way that was very hard in a responsive way, in a dynamic way and in a way that you can control much better than you previously would if you were using something like tables which a lot of people did in the 90s or if you were kind of doing weird hacks to get things to do what you want them to do. So this is just one example of many new CSS functionalities that are coming out or have come out recently that make the practice of designing a responsive web page even more exciting. The second one, the second example and maybe kind of most close to me is this concept of variable fonts. How many people here have heard of variable fonts? Okay, almost everyone, that's more than I thought. So variable fonts for the several people in here who haven't heard of them, it's what it sounds like and it's what you saw on the screen. There's a new open type specification, new version of the open type specification that allows you to make fonts that instead of being static fixed shapes have the ability to move along an axis of design or multiple axes of design. This is like color font, which is a whole other thing. Look it up if you're interested. Some of these things are pretty standard design axes that you would see in normal typefaces, but they're more fluid. Some of them are a little more extreme than others and allow for a wider range of stylization. And this isn't a brand new idea. There have been ideas similar to this that starting as early as the late 70s through the 90s, there was the true type GX and multiple master formats which never really caught on. But this format, I think compared to those is much more interesting and much more likely to influence the way typography works for several reasons. The first is the people that are involved, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, a lot of people that make type, a lot of people that make type tools are all involved which is, you couldn't say that about other previous formats that allowed similar functionality that became ultimately obsolete. The other thing that makes this more interesting or a more of a convincing thing that you might wanna do is just the idea of responsive design didn't really exist and for some of the older formats, the web didn't even exist when they came out. And when you're thinking about responsive design and you're thinking about adjusting things fluidly based on context and in a dynamic way based on rules that you set up ahead of time, it allows for the system of a page layout to not stop at the level of the typeface. Previously with a responsive design, the page was very flexible but the typeface itself was just kind of a frozen static thing. Now that flexibility goes all the way down through features of the typeface in ways that they couldn't before. This is a great example of interesting things that you can do when you have a variable typeface that are completely outside the realm of what most typical design axes allow. So this site that I'm showing here is vfonts.com. This is a site that I maintain. It's basically a collection of variable fonts as they come out as I see them. It's kind of a side project of mine but if you're interested in this kind of stuff I would encourage you to go there. There's the added bonus that a lot of the fonts that are on here are available for cheap. Some of them are available for free just for personal testing. Some of them are open source. Some of them are paid commercial typefaces. There's a wide variety of different kinds of licensing options and also just different designs. So if you haven't looked into this technology yet I would encourage you. In the end this is kind of like all this stuff is very, very new. I just did a workshop this weekend for type at Cooper West about making variable fonts with the students there. And I think a couple of days before the workshop started there was some new technology change that I had to adjust for. It's definitely like the, it feels like the Wild West and because of that it kind of leads me now to my conclusion of the thesis of my talk if there is any is the idea that historically when there were situations that you had the opportunity to print something and use a weird typeface or a new typeface it was very easy for people to do that because that was just how things work. Nowadays if you want to make an announcement or publish an article it seems like a lot more work to do it on your own instead of publishing it through an existing template based system. So my call to action for everyone here is that the next time you are going to make a baby announcement or make a flyer for a party or even just announce a party on a social media to think about how you might be able to do it and use it as an excuse to both use new and interesting typefaces and use new and interesting technologies to do it. It doesn't even necessarily need to be a web based technology. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a brand new typeface. There are plenty of old typefaces that are also weird but I just want to encourage you I guess to if you ever have something small to do use it as an excuse to go outside of the comfort zone of the easiest path to doing that thing because I think what you'll find in the process not only will it inform you and your design process but it will probably also just be more cool and more interesting. So that's the end of my talk and thank you for listening to me. Thank you, Nick. We are a bit tired with time so like three questions passed by. Is anybody has a question? Raise your hand. You talked a lot about how these tools and technologies have changed over time. If you could predict what would happen next after variable fonts or like what's the next add-on to that, what would you predict? That's always a tricky thing to do but it's something I like to do and especially as someone who looks back on the history of type and seeing all the changes that happen seeing all the new typecasting machines that were invented or photo type studying see how that changed everything. I like to think, okay like 100 or 200 years from now when they look back on this, what are they gonna say? Like what was the thing that changed it? And I think one possible thing, I'm not gonna put any money on this but one possible thing that could significantly change the concept of typography is the reliance on rectangles. And to kind of explain what I mean is that the Gutenberg system of making type was all about having a glyph that existed inside of a rectangle and that box determined how much space that glyph had and determined how it related to other glyphs. And that concept when we moved to digital type also carried over. If you're a type designer, which I know you are because you're a student in the program, you're still drawing glyphs in a rectangle and that rectangle is still informing how things lay out on a page. For script systems other than Latin, there are sometimes where that rectangle can be very problematic. For Arabic is a great example. We're trying to shoehorn these concepts of calligraphy in hand rendered text into a rectangle. Sometimes it gets more complicated than it seems like it should. So that's one thing that I can imagine if there's some new type format that isn't based on rectangles but based on other shapes. Maybe you can define the shape that your glyph lives in and somehow that informs other things. So that's one guess. When you were going over geosities and how much expression people had in those mediums and how tools like Squarespace and Facebook right now they exist as a way of connecting people and really letting people have websites that aren't technically advanced and stuff like that. Do you have thoughts or ideas on ways to sort of re-enable that for a wider audience? It's an interesting question because I taught a responsive web design class a couple years ago and I've been teaching it now almost every year and when we were first doing it there were many students in the class who had never written a line of code before and I was trying to think of the easiest way for them to get space on a web server so they could publish the things that they were making in the class. And I thought surely there must be something like geosities that exists where you just get some server space and you can put some stuff on. It was surprisingly hard. I was actually shocked even after like asking on Twitter what people knew about it. I thought for sure everyone's gonna give me one very obvious answer and it wasn't for a while that finally someone clued me into this website that was called Neocities which is basically like a revival of the concept of geocities but it seems to be targeted towards children which I think is cool. It's because of that and makes it very friendly for people who aren't familiar with coding and code editing and things like that but it gives you a lot of the same kind of flexibility. Related to that I think the more we get people thinking about code or even if they're not writing code but thinking in kind of logical ways when they're younger as children I think that would definitely help and I can only imagine now that that's already well underway now that people are growing up with computers from birth. The problems I see the most are the shortcuts. Well I wouldn't say they're necessarily problems but there are a lot of shortcuts that exist that make things easier but they also make it so you're relying more on someone else's decisions and the thing that I like about geocities and now Neocities are just writing your own code is that every decision that's put in the page is something that you're thinking about and it's a decision that you're explicitly making. I don't know if that really answers your question but I think getting kids more involved in coding earlier is a way to kind of help push that along. Cool, thanks. Any other question, last question? No, okay, thank you Nick. Thank you.