Typewriter love in the digital age
Draftwerk dot com is up and running in a “v2” iteration that I’m super proud of (even as I’m already anticipating how I’ll make changes to the content). Evan did the dev/design work over a few weeks, with the final push happening right after we got back from our camping trip.
I never thought I’d become the kind of person who writes about the fonts on her own website, but… I really want to say more about the fonts. In fact there are two last-minute mostly-whimsical decisions that we made for the site development that, in my opinion, pushed it over the edge into something special.
Evan, conscious of the need to keep the site loading time down, suggested I remove any unnecessary weights from my kit on Adobe Fonts. The only style not in use was the italic version of the font used in the header, IBM Plex Mono. “Make sure you don’t want it anywhere,” Evan cautioned; I hedged, and on a whim he changed the header to use italics.
Mono italics have a way of taking you by surprise, and the shift in personality was far more than we’d expected. Almost immediately, I knew I wanted to keep it.
I never even knew mono italics existed until pretty recently, maybe a year or so ago while writing about fonts at Adobe. IBM Plex isn’t the only type family with monospace italics out there, but I liked that it had multiple style options that combined well together; I used Plex Sans for nearly all the text on the site.
IBM put together a whole website for Plex to describe the work that went into its design, and I learned that the italic monospace was largely inspired by the type used in Selectric typewriters. It will surprise no one to learn that I love typewriters, and I’m removed enough generationally from the technology itself that I didn’t realize some of them were capable of italic type.
I love it. I knew I’d picked Plex for a reason and maybe that was secretly part of it. Earlier this year I was playing Sarah Hyndman’s “What’s Your Type?” card game with some Adobe colleagues, and I remember getting “typed” as American Typewriter. Clearly, a typewriter aesthetic is meant to be somewhere in my personal brand identity, and Plex Mono carries that idea forward.
Another thing I never expected to geek out about is this whole dark mode thing, but two co-whims of mine and Evan’s converged to get me to this point. Initially the color scheme for the site involved an odd, unresolved shade of coralish pink for the background. I knew I didn’t love it, and Evan steered me towards a “more calming” green that instantly felt better. He also toyed around with a darker color scheme, and when he showed it to me I had an idea: what if the site had a dark mode?
I expected Evan to tell me this would be a lot of work, especially for a pro bono client, but to my surprise he looked into it and got it working. In my opinion it’s win-win because I didn’t have to make a decision about which color scheme to use in the end, and it’s kinda cool tech to boot.
I actually see the dark mode by default, because for reasons I still can’t explain I turned on dark mode for my laptop when I bought it about a year ago. In dark mode, the header reminds me a little of neon lettering 💛⚡️
One more thing I did not expect: that I’d link back to my old employer’s website no less than four times in my third blog post as a freelancer. Upon telling the team I was leaving, one of my colleagues told me that I’ll always be a “font person” from here on out. At the time I thought it was just a sweet sentiment, but now I’m seeing the truth in it. American type writer indeed.
