Hello again! I’m Mark, and this is the Specimen Digest, a weekly typography newsletter.

You’ve probably heard of the STARR method of explaining work. STARR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result, Reflect. I also like to think of how this might apply to projects and the lifecycle within it. If I apply that thinking to this project, I reckon I’m at the Result/Reflect phase. And, as this newsletter marks number 50, that’s an appropriate arbitrary number to start reflecting on things. So what’s happened in just over a year?

• 50 newsletters. Almost weekly.
• An in-depth research project on the what people need from digital specimens.
• A growing collection of curated digital specimens
• A list of typography links on these newsletters (which I should also publish on the site, really)
• A specimen builder for people to build digital specimens

It’s been good fun!

But with reflection comes the nagging doubts. The ‘I should’ve done better’ thoughts. With a learning mindset I should listen and act on these in a positive way. So, on the immediate horizon…

• Updated specimen builder to include some more functionality in the type tester.
• A redesign of typespecimen.xyz. Given the amount of specimens on there now, it needs a realignment to facilitate easier browsing and searching. Honestly, I’m not looking forward to the categorisation that needs to happen on the meta data.
• I’ll just keep doing this newsletter. That’s all. Might not sound much, but the steady cadence throughout the week of curating the content takes a good chunk of time.

So, dear readers, I hope you’ve enjoyed the first 50, and will join me in the next.

Until next week!

Mark

Specimens this week

SKWAR SKWAR is a very square, monospaced variable font with weight and width axes. The specimen has a very nice feature of mapping the width axis to music for a nifty equaliser.

Inter Samples Inter has been featured here before, but the samples page is something special. A LONG list of typeset examples showing potential usage. This mapping of features of the typeface to real-world examples is really useful in evaluation.

Lelo Mono An efficient specimen of stacked type-testers, opentype features, and glyph table. It could do with some longer form text examples to really evaluate how it looks longer than a single line.

Wavefont A variable font for waveforms? Why not! The specimen is super-simple with examples and sliders for the axes.

Figure Fort describe Figure as a quirkhorse – all the makings of a workhorse whilst still bringing some quirks from a revival. The specimen hits all the right notes: designed examples, stacked type testers, and complete glyph table with previews.

There are more specimens added this last week on the Type Specimen website. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for daily updates, or follow along on Twitter, if that takes your fancy.

A few interesting typography links

A load of links for you this week:

My friend Jon releases a font based on his later father’s hand writing. Jon his written about his experience designing it.

A really great piece on how writing CSS using logical properties (text-align: start, instead of text-align: left) helps with designing fr multi-language web sites and products.

A couple of articles on font stacks. An often forgotten little part of designing for the web…

I studied the fonts of the top 1000 websites. Here’s what I learned

Leveraging System Fonts on the Web

The New System Font Stack?

Canada Modern is a physical and digital archive of Canadian graphic design, with modernism central to its glowing heart.

And, finally, a personal favourite: Sans Bullshit Sans