Drop #328 (2023-09-05): Typography Tuesday

If You're 👀 This It's Day 100; Bad 🍎; The 👁️ing Game

The Typography Tuesdays will continue until morale improves, and then it will continue on!

TL;DR

This is an AI-generated summary of today's Drop. (See Drop #327 — if I link to it, Substack will put a giant preview in here and nobody wants that) if this is your first TL;DR)

• 100 Days of Fonts: Designer Do-Hee Kim created a showcase of Google font pairings for 100 consecutive days, offering both design and pairing inspiration. Check out her work at 100 Days of Fonts.

• Bad Apple and Harfbuzz: Valdemar Erk embedded an animation into a font using the experimental WASM shaper in Harfbuzz, a text shaping library. Read about the process and see the result in the BadAppleFont.

• The Eyeballing Game: Webflow's Eyeballing Game is an addictive challenge involving matching font characteristics and other CSS styling elements, perfect for typography enthusiasts.

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If You're 👀 This It's Day 100

There are plenty of “100 Days Of…” blogs out there. It's an idiom where someone undertakes a personal challenge to do and chronicle something for 100 days, straight. As someone who does try to do that sort of thing (health permitting) on-the-regular, I can attest to just how cool and challenging said effort can be.

A bit ago, spiffy designer Do-Hee Kim, jumped on the “100 Days” bandwagon to embark on a journey to design and code a creative showcase of a Google font pairing a day.

In 100 Days of Fonts, 도희 combed through the extensive library of Google Fonts to find fun, novel, and interesting pairings that we all get to go through and use in our own creations.

When you hit the page, scroll down — not just for pairing inspiration — but, also for design inspiration. Do-Hee's use of color, position, angle, and alignment is a master class, itself, in design. And, the texts she uses are far from “Lorem Ipsum” and carry some cool meanings all their own.

Which, of the 100, are your favs?

#66 (the section header) sums up my sentiments for all folks reading this tome quite well.

Bad 🍎

(ripped from Wikipedia) “Bad Apple!!” is the sixth track in the soundtrack of the 1998 bullet [hades] shoot 'em up video game Lotus Land Story, the fourth entry in the Touhou Project series created by Team Shanghai Alice (sole member being the independent developer Jun'ya “ZUN” Ōta).

The song got a later remix in 2007 by Masayoshi Minoshima and singer Nomico and, following the remix, a subsequent accompanying black-and-white shadow puppet-video – commonly called Shadow-art - was released by a collaborative group led by Anira on the Japanese Nico Nico video-sharing platform.

So, now you're thinking…"WAT."

We needed that intro, since Bad Apple features prominently in Valdemar Erk's mini-treatise on embedding an animation into a font using the new experimental WASM shaper in Harfbuzz. (HarfBuzz is a software development library for text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode text to glyph indices and positions. It primarily supports OpenType, but also Apple Advanced Typography. It's everywhere.)

In the piece, Valdemar explains the history of fonts, including ligatures, and how Harfbuzz is used to handle text shaping. They then go on to explain how they created the BadAppleFont (see the video in the section header) by getting every frame as an SVG and putting it into a font using Private Use Areas. After that, Erk modified the code to replace the first run of “.” in a text snippet with the given Bad Apple frame. Finally, they used Gimp to create a video of the font in action.

This is one of those “see it first, read the Rust code later” situations and I would diminish Valdemar's super genius efforts if I attempted to opine further.

While it may be the worst timeline, ever, some moment (like this one) are pretty darned cool.

The 👁️ing Game

What? You expected me to give away the solution?!

Longtime readers of the Drop are no strangers to games. I've tossed more than a few your way, and many have had to deal with typography.

I usually have no positive word to say about Webflow (we're desperately working on moving from it at $WORK), but their Eyeballing Game is very addictive if you're into matching font characteristics (and, other styling elements found in CSS).

Not every challenge involves fonts, but many do, and this could be a great way for U.S. folks to ease back into the week after a long weekend.

FIN

It's feels super great to be back in the game, and I hope at least one of today's fontastic resources was either fun, informative, or both! ☮