But learning can be hard. Where do I find the time? Do I want to invest the money? Is it worth it?

And teaching is also hard. Lots of planning. How do I start? Who will come? Where is it hosted?

But is it so hard because of the expectations we place on education? Because of the precedent of formality?

I’ve long wondered: can it be easier? What if it were all more informal? What if we all just taught each other a little bit?

So what’s the answer? I can’t say for sure, but I’ve had some version of this floating around in my head for several years now.

Micro workshops. Low stakes. Minimal planning. Focus on small, pointed ideas or skills. No cost. No revenue. Just communal sharing.

Will it be the best learning experience? Definitely not. But that’s not the goal. So much of learning—at least in my experience—is being pointed in the right direction, and learning just enough to clear a few hurdles.

I am largely putting this out there to finally put words to the idea—as incomplete as it is.

Here are somethings I know and would love to share:

• Spreadsheet tips & tricks
• How I organize my music library
• Static site generators (Jekyll)
• Programmatic design with Drawbot
• Various Figma prototyping hacks
• Intro to HTML & CSS

We all have a little something we could share with each other. The question becomes, how do we make our knowledge accessible without the burden of institutionalized education or the weight of being an educator?

During that time, I was playing with code and made a simple one pager to document my training heading into the track season. (This was before I had a Strava or even a GPS watch.)

I only managed to document 8.5 weeks from November to January, but it’s nice to look back on. This is the time period where my buddy Manny (Emanuel) and I started to become best friends, and really lock in on our training together. We pretty much did all of our training together from this point on.

Here is the 2013 running log.

That’s just shy of 11 minutes a day. Nothing wild. More importantly, I’ve stuck with it.

But what changed this year?

I think it all started with this bench—this $500 meditation bench. (No I didn’t buy the bench.) It lived rent free in my head for most of 2024, and led me to discover the seiza meditation posture.

It’s a kneeling position that’s been the traditional way of sitting in Japan for a very long time.

A lot of my struggles with meditation in the past stemmed from my posture. Sitting criss cross applesauce is a non-starter for me, and I’ve tried other meditation positions like sitting upright against a wall or lying down, but I always dozed off.

When I decided to try meditating again, I was reminded of this bench. Rather than buying something for a practice I might not stick with, I decided to try “recreating” it.

Well, recreate an environment that let me comfortably sit in the seiza pose that is.

So I laid out a yoga mat, placed a folded blanket at the front to kneel on, and stacked three of my wife’s yoga bolsters to mimic the height of the bench and take the load off my ankles. (I’m not particularly flexible.)

Now every morning I wake up and meditate. During the week, it’s 12 minutes. On the weekends, it’s 15 minutes. I tell myself its because I have “more time” on the weekends.

I use the app Meditation Time 2.0 to keep track of the time which I split into thirds, so the gong chimes every 4–5 minutes.

In terms of meditation techniques, I don’t really do anything by the book. (If there is one.) Maybe I should. But I’ve just been doing what works for me.

Generally I just let my mind wander for the first third. In the middle I try to bring a bit of stillness to my thoughts—shifting my focus to my breathing. And for the last third, I have a few “methods” I try out.

Most common is this 1, 2, 3, 4 track that I map out in my mind where I align my breathes to the straightaways.

Inhaling on the up. Exhaling on the down.

The other approach is—I’ll admit—a little random.

It follows a similar breathing approach but employs a bit of visualization to make it less abstract.

On the inhale up, I imagine I am pulling a lever of a well upwards.

On the exhale down, I am slowly pressing that lever down and slowly filling up a bucket of water.

A few breath cycles (no set amount), will eventually fill up the bucket of water which I replace with an empty bucket and start over. I find this one a bit more effective if my mind starts wandering during the imaginary track circuit.

While I really think finding this posture and creating a set up for myself helped me the most, I also experimented with tracking a few metrics this year in a spreadsheet—one of which was meditation. Updating that daily kept me honest.

Undecided whether or not I will continue that spreadsheet approach going forward. Ask me in a year?

A — are.na

B — Buttondown

C — Google Calendar

D — Dropout

E — Eric Hu (shout out Eric!)

F — Flickr

G — Github

H — High Tide (where I currently work)

I — Instagram

J — Jetson (past client project)

K — Klim

L — http://localhost:4000

M — Mass-Driver

N — Notion

O — OH no Type Co

P — Practice

Q — QuickGlyphs

R — R-Typography

S — Scott Fraser Collection (basically where I buy all of my clothes)

T — Typo.Social

U — Zoom (which feels weird)

V — Commercial Vault

W — nothing

X — Twitter

Y — Youtube

Z — Zoom (we can’t escape it)

The results aren’t particularly surprising (in other words you could say they are accurate), but the exercise was admittedly less and less thrilling the deeper into I got (which is perhaps the side effect of accuracy). It’d be interesting to do this periodically, but I am also scared it won’t change much. (Zoom claiming two spots is actually criminal though.)

This concept did, however, remind me of some browser self portraits I used to do. I tried tracking them down, but sadly couldn’t locate them. In short, when the mobile version of Safari had tabs vertically stacked atop one another like cards, I would periodically take screenshots to document my often chaotic and hilarious pairings of tabs.

For the past seven years I have been independently maintaining the Type Foundry Directory. What started as a simple link to a spreadsheet that I created in an effort to overhaul my bookmarking system, has since become—what others have told me—an industry essential resource.

Today, things are a bit more complicated. The landscape of font licensing has changed drastically in recent years, and the directory’s original simplicity no longer fit my needs.

Now having read 400+ End User License Agreements, poured over countless FAQs, and even consulted for foundries, the directory has been completely overhauled with 3x more data and a refreshed design.

What’s new?

So much! Everything? Where do I even begin? The two highlights are:

• A refreshed design (of course)
• More data! New columns of information include:
  • Year founded
  • Countries
  • Language support
  • Purchasing Power Parity support
  • Licensing model(s)
  • General metric(s)
  • Web metric(s)
  • App metric(s)
  • Web tracking requirements
  • Designer covered by client license
  • Logo usage included (w/ desktop license)
  • Social media usage included (w/ desktop license)
  • Modifications allowed
  • Trial fonts character set
  • Student discount type
  • Platforms such as Fonts in Use, Future Fonts, RSS, Instagram, Mastodon, and Twitter

There is a roadmap which outlines all of the updates and upcoming plans (both short and long term). I have also published a lengthy methodology page which dives into the directory’s structure, how information is logged, and unpacks its underlying biases.

Sponsored nameplates

From research to development to maintenance, the directory has largely been an independent effort. I am introducing sponsored nameplates to help provide financial backing which allows me to allocate time, effort, and external resources to future developments.

And just like Morning Type, 5% of all income is donated and you can take a peek behind the curtain of the directory’s finances.

If you run a type foundry and are interested in supporting the project while promoting one of your fonts, you can learn more here.

Super top secret new project?

You may notice something in the header of the new site. A… typeface… directory…? Too good to be true? (Probably!) There is nothing to show for this yet, but you can join the waitlist at typeface.directory which admittedly is just this newsletter. So I guess you don’t need to?

Sharing is caring

Whether you are on Mastodon, Twitter, or Instagram, reshares are deeply appreciated. Or just tell a friend 🫶

Thank you for reading! And thank you to everyone that has shown their support for this project over the years. This update has been five years in the making, and I am excited to keep this project going.

I found the solution once, and now I can’t seem to find it again. Everytime I run into this, I search for an hour, and then the solution slowly comes back to mind. So I am documenting it here for my future self and maybe anyone else running into the same issue.

In your _config.yml file, just add the following:

theme:

Yeah, nothing else after it. It seems that sometimes, unless stated otherwise, GitHub pages makes the assumption that you would like to use one of their default Jekyll themes so it injects a new stylesheet.

Feeling inspired by the session with Sean, on June 4th I decided to ride out to check out the Bayswater park which is also out on Rockaway but a bit further way. I was out on an actual bike ride, so I didn’t have my board with me unfortunately.

The next day I went out to St. Mary’s skatepark beneath the subway in Gowanaus/Carroll Gardens area. This was literally my second time on the board in years. It’s funny remembering how good a front board feels. Also skated the mini ramp a bit but didn’t film anything.

And today I turn 28 🥳 so I finally ventured out to the Canarsie park which is pretty close by. It’s a rad park!

This Saturday I am teaching a FREE workshop called “How to Talk to a Computer” with Index.

Let me tell you about it!

This is a workshop about the command line, but let me begin by saying I am not a programmer. And if I am being really honest, I don’t know a whole lot about the command line…

But having conquered my fear of the command line was the single most empowering part of my career as a designer. So maybe I can help you experience the same thing.

Because I am not a programmer, I want to focus on practical examples and share real life scenarios where I use the command line to support my work as a brand designer.

Have you ever wished you didn’t have to open up Photoshop just to resize an image? I’ll show you how!

Did you know you can use the command line to compare the contents of two identical folders? (I used that little trick when backing up hard drives once.)

While I won’t have to cover this in its entirety, I now use the command line to do most of my image tracing. Here’s a video of it in action on Twitter.

Any way, I hope you’ll join me. I cannot stress enough that no experience is needed. I want to make talking to your computer more approachable, and make automation achievable.

Register here: https://index-space.org/products/how-to-talk-to-a-computer

However, I know that with time I will come to appreciate my new neighborhood for what it has to offer. In fact, as I slowly increase the length of my runs, I am getting the opportunity to explore my new surroundings.

The most recent find is the Marine Park Salt Marsh Nature Trail which is a 3/4 mile gravel trail along the Shell Bank Creek. At the moment, it is hilariously overgrown in areas but extremely charming. Seeing bunnies scurry down the trail or guinea fowl dart into the brush feels special. And I was not prepared for how much joy that would bring me.

Louise was the one that inspired the idea for the lettering piece below. As we were talking about my upcoming move, she had made a comment about how the two neighborhoods would make for a great moving announcement.

Admittedly, a moving announcement in this day and age feels a little silly. It’s not going to be printed out. It won’t be mailed to any one. I don’t really need to notify any of my friends. So it would really only live on social media. But you know what? That’s fine! It seemed like a fun idea, and I hadn’t done any lettering in a while, so I threw myself into it.

There isn’t much concept to this piece. I had been wanting to work with this airbrush-deco style for a while, so this seemed like a great excuse. As I worked through some sketches, the circular nature of the dots came fairly naturally and helped switch the direction of the wording.

Quite honestly, I don’t want to talk about the move itself all too much because I’d rather just move on. But for the sake of posterity, the move sucked.

I woke up at 5am in hopes of finishing up some last minute packing, but it wasn’t enough. By the time the movers arrived around 10:30 or so, we still had to pack all of the kitchenware, breakdown our bed frame, and do a bunch of other little things.

The worst part came when halfway through loading up the truck, the elevator in our building stopped working. From there it quickly descended into one of the most stressful days of my life.

It was 100° outside, the hottest day of the year so far, and I just felt so worried for the movers that were helping us. To make things worse, we lived on a one way street. So parking a giant ass moving truck simply isn’t an option. One of the movers would block off the street for a while until they got in trouble, then they would circle the block a few times, and repeat.

Once the truck was loaded up, I had to follow through with my foolish idea of biking over to the new apartment to meet the movers there. It was 4:30pm, blistering hot outside, and the only food I had consumed up to this point was two PB&J sandwiches, both of which I ate before 9am. The bike ride there largely consisted of my repeatedly telling myself “don’t pass out, don’t pass out, don’t pass out…”

My saving grace was the three pizzas Kara had delivered to the new apartment. I don’t think it was until about 8 o’clock that we actually wrapped things up.

The move kicked the absolute shit out of me. But it’s over. It’s over.

We moved successfully. Nothing broke. Nothing went missing. In case you’re curious, we moved with Imperial Movers who were honestly great, and I’m incredibly thankful for their help. If you’re moving and decide to hire them, use my name as a referral (I’ll get some cash kicked back to me if you do).

Since moving in, we have very slowly started to unpack, settle in, and explore the neighborhood. Below are some really incredible hand painted signs we stumbled across.