Giles Hoover

Photography and design for print production

Category: Art

All art forms — too many to list — that don’t include photography, although there is often overlap.

  • Beautifully Briefed 26.6: New is Good. Old is Good.

    Beautifully Briefed 26.6: New is Good. Old is Good.

    “Welcome to the new,” he said, pointing to the old, now dressed in a new suit. You’re reading this because the words and ideas resonated — and it’s why only the style is newly tailored.

    Sometimes, though, a new look can be enormously satisfying. Enjoy.

    This month’s Spine
    Beacon Press.

    “Paperwork. Nice,” I said, while potentially allowing a smidgen of political speak through the door. (Not sorry.) Read the column here.

    Design and type
    Matt Dorfman’s many hats

    Matt Dorfman’s book covers are a regular item here on Foreword, including several of my Favorite Book Covers of the Year posts. So it was a delight to see a new interview with It’s Nice That.

    [B]usy days and late nights begin with, as Matt puts it, “churning out a generous amount of trash”. Much to his frustration he will be “working through what often feels like a landfill-sized hill of boring ideas”. Despite taking up quite a bit of time, it’s a necessity, as among this trash will be a shred of an idea worth expanding upon. “Usually it’s a minor detail from an earlier comp made in haste and far afield from anything that book is actually about,” he says, “but it typically has a quality of brokenness or something unfinished that just looks interesting.”

    — Harry Bennett, It’s Nice That

    “Do anything except what’s right in front of you,” he tells them, while mentioning that he often favors collage. “Collage has become one of my shorthands for pairing themes and ideas together that aren’t so readily represented in nature or culture.” As in:

    VQR. Book design by Matt Dorfman. Image via It’s Nice That.

    Did I mention that he’s also the art director The New York Times Book Review? Yeah:

    One of Matt Dorfman’s covers for the NYT Book Review. Image via It’s Nice That.

    And a quick preview of next year’s Favorites list, with this gem:

    Cover design by Matt Dorfman.

    If it looks familiar, that’s because…:

    Cover design by Matt Dorfman.
    Cover design by Matt Dorfman.

    Both previous Favorites here on Foreword. Awesome.

    Read the whole interview at It’s Nice That.

    “It’s All Greeked to Me”

    Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors, points us at a YouTube documentary on the history of Lorem Ipsum:

    A screenshot of the YouTube video.

    “I found it riveting and hilarious, and exactly the kind of Rabbit Hole (her channel name) that I fall down with printing and type history myself,” he writes. “[H]er dogged research has largely filled in the missing pieces of the story of where the run of seemingly Latin text used by designers to act as placeholder (or ‘Greeked’) text in mock-ups since the late 1960s came from.”

    I agree: it’s well put-together and, more importantly, answers a question you might not have actually had — but now can’t resist. Enjoy.

    Side note: Privacy where possible: I’ve switched to screenshots of YouTube videos rather than embedding them. That way folks who choose not follow the link aren’t stuck with the trackers embedding foists upon all.

    Special bonus #1: Glenn is one of those people who wears many hats — 2019’s awesome Tiny Type Museum project is his, for instance — but it’s the comics connection that might be most appreciated. He’s got a book out about it, now in its second edition, which has just been nominated for Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards — the Eisners. Read more.

    2026 logo trends
    The Logo Lounge has posted its 2026 Report.

    The quality of the Logo Trend Report has slipped over the past couple of years — there are suggestions that parts of it are generated rather of written — but I think the zoom-out is still useful for those of us in design.

    If, for no other reason, to make sure our work is ahead of the curve.

    Via Brand New, one of the only subscription sites I’ll link to. (Because it gives me an excuse to encourage you to subscribe, too: at $20/year, it’s sensibly priced and very much earns its keep.)

    Best new fonts: a one-off

    This month’s CreativeBoom post on new fonts was shorter than some — it’s summer! — with only one I’d like to highlight:

    Sahlia, by Arcane Type Foundry.

    But what a one it is. How often are we given an excuse get excited about stencil-style?

    Close-up details (and more butterflies).

    Sahlia is available from Arcane Type Foundry.

    Font previews: not simple

    Marcin Wichary, whose brilliant Unsung continues to impress, has a neat item that we’ve all seen at this point: font menus that preview the font name in the style of the typeface, sometimes poorly.

    Turns out, that’s not at all easy.

    Oopsie. Screenshot courtesy of Unsung.

    “Font previews are fascinating because they are the perfect showcase of how tricky fonts can be at scale,” he writes. The question is: why?

    It’s actually impossible to left align or center text. Ever. Not just because each font does whatever it wants – font size is a number that doesn’t really give you anything to hang a hat on, and the font can place itself in its box however it desires, too – and not just because fonts often lie (via bad metrics) about what they store inside, but also because aligning and centering are really in the eye of the license holder, and have more than one definition.

    So, every time you align text to anything, in whatever way, it’s only an approximation. Most of the time that’s good enough. Here it is not.

    — Marcin Wichary, Unsung
    It takes a surprising amount of work to get this right. Screenshot courtesy of Unsung.

    “There are icon fonts, color fonts, and non-Western fonts so rich in variety and tradition that this category itself is basically a fractal,” he says. “There’s a craft to getting it right.”

    Read the rest.

    Special bonus #2: Wichary also built something called Fontificator. “I thought it’d be fun to share this internal tool I made over a decade ago to aid with exploring options for Medium’s typographical redesign,” he says.

    Fontificator. Screenshot courtesy of Unsung.

    “The motivation for building Fontificator came from two observations:

    • font previews on type foundry sites were generally too limited to get a real sense of how a certain typeface feels, and it was best to see a font in situ,
    • often an extremely tiny nuance — like adding some letter spacing, or messing with line height — was what separated something that was promising from something that seemed very far from working.”

    It’s both brilliant and fun. Check it out.

    Adobe does AI

    I know, I know, more Abode stuff. I’ll keep it quick(ish).

    PetaPixel reminds us that, “the vast majority of working photographers are using AI to help save them time, handling tedious tasks that aren’t necessarily all that creative.” Adobe’s latest updates address that:

    AI removal tools now have flavors, including on-device if needed.
    • Lightroom’s AI Sharpen tool can now use Topaz Labs’ Noise-Aware Sharpen model directly in the app. This promises to recover fine details more effectively, per Adobe. (More on Topaz below.) 👍
    • Lightroom’s Assisted Culling automatically stacks similar images into groups and automatically suggests the “strongest one.” 👎
    • Lightroom has a new Photo to Video feature that uses Firefly and Google Veo to turn a still photo into “polished b-roll or reels with AI-generated motion.” 👎
    • Photoshop’s reflection removals are now isolated on a separate layer, “giving users control over opacity for more natural-looking results,” according to PetaPixel. 👍
    • Photoshop’s Remove Tool, which uses generative AI to erase a selected object and replace it with realistic-looking pixels, can now be used offline using an on-device AI model. 👍

    Get the full story at PetaPixel.

    The agentic AI “assistant” might — or might not — be good. (Subscribers pay $$ for it, so….)

    Meanwhile, Adobe’s promised “creative agent” — ’cause agentic AI — has “fully arrived” in Creative Cloud, PetaPixel writes. “Inside Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, users can tell Adobe’s Firefly-powered AI Assistant how to edit photos, videos, and other graphics.” It runs in a panel, like having Chat GPT or Claude right in the app.

    “As a creative, you remain in control, choosing what to hand off, what to refine and how to apply your taste, expertise and judgment to shape every editable outcome. These tools are built for how you’ve told us you actually work,” Adobe explains.

    I’m going to have to try this one. Maybe. Someday.

    Several days after the above items were debuted, Adobe purchased Topaz outright. It’ll “fully integrate Topaz’s [AI scaling] models across apps like Photoshop, Lightroom, and its AI image generator Firefly” — which should be a good thing.

    Special bonus #3: In case AI-all-the-things is getting to you, there’s this:

    “A ‘centaur’ describes a human augmented with a technology, like machine learning, or even just driving a car or using autocomplete,” ArsTechnica writes as part of an interview with Doctorow. “A reverse centaur ‘is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.’”

    “Being a centaur is generally viewed as a positive thing; few people relish being a reverse centaur. And yet the AI industry….” Read the rest.

    People
    Jason Snell

    Amongst the tech names I’ve know for what seems forever, Jason Snell’s is up there. He was first at MacUser, then Macworld, then hung out his own banner at Six Colors.

    From Macworld: Jason Snell (highlighted) at the introduction of the iPod, 2001.

    My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.

    Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates — Bill Gates, of all people! — to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.

    The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business.

    —Jason Snell

    Ah, the good old days. (I jest.) Hard to believe, but that was almost 30 years ago. Sheesh.

    So long, in fact, that another milestone has passed: Jason’s left Macworld. Read the column. I’m glad he’ll be continuing with Six Colors, and am looking forward to his new podcast on Apple’s history, Designed in California.

    David Hockney

    I was familiar more than a fan, but it’s undeniable that the world has lost a character — something very ably underscored by the tribute illustrations posted at CreativeBoom:

    Illustration by Nia Gould.

    “From Bradford to Beverly Hills, Hockney’s bold colours and irrepressible joy for living inspired a generation. Here’s what they created in response to his passing,” they write. See the rest.

    Om Malik

    Early this month, Om released an essay for the times — and the ages:

    Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.

    The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.

    — Om Malik, om.co (Via Daring FIreball.)

    Okay, sure, it was social commentary cleverly disguised as an essay about a pen. This Mont Blanc, in fact:

    The point is, it was as insightful as ever. (See also the previously-cited “Velocity is the New Authority.”) It was immediately deposited in the to-be-posted folder. Before I could could get to that, however, heart disease snatched him away. He was 59.

    I first heard via Pixel Envy, which linked to Om’s excellent photographs posted to Glass (social media),1Forgive the repetition, but just in case: I don’t participate in social media. While I’d heard of Glass, I didn’t know of Om’s posts there — and wouldn’t have followed in any case. Perusing those photos, and posting that link, are a one-off celebrating Om’s talent. and, later, appreciated John Gruber’s thoughtful piece at Daring Fireball.

    Both reminded me of Om’s love of Leica and preference for black-and-white:

    “Sleepy in Seattle.” Photograph by Om Malik.
    “Does This Qualify as Flora?” Photograph by Om Malik.

    Or almost-black-and-white:

    Untitled. Photograph by Om Malik.

    See a few more, called “Selects,” at Om’s personal photography site.

    Special bonus #4: The day after Om’s Pinocchio essay, above, Daring Fireball posted on Jason Zweig’ on’s three ways to get paid. I won’t spoil it — just go read.

    Photography
    2026 Beaker Street Science Photography finalists

    “This is the 10th anniversary of the Australian Beaker Street Festival. Each year, the competition celebrates fantastic photos of rare and unusual scientific phenomena, endangered species, conservation missions, and much more,” PetaPixel writes.

    Some of these are awesome:

    “Southern Ocean Energy.” Photograph by Nick Green.
    “Just Another Bioluminescent Tantrum.” Photograph by Deni Cupit.

    26 finalists in all. See the rest (and, if you’d like, vote at the link).

    2026 Australian Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year shortlist

    This contest takes entries from the majestic Australasian Realm, including the ANZANG bioregion consisting of Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, and New Guinea, and to quote PetaPixel, “there are some real bangers on there.”

    “Bin Turkey.” Photograph by Emma Perry.
    “Penguin Poe.” Photograph by Matt Bell.

    Nature in all its marvelously diverse glory. See the rest.

    Burton’s America

    I’m surprised I haven’t linked to Brendon Burton’s work before, ’cause it’s right up my alley:

    Traces #10. Photograph by Brendon Burton.
    Traces #6. Photograph by Brendon Burton.

    His second book, Epitaph, “is a series that attempts to unravel the knot of mystery that exists within the dark corners of North America, shedding light on unseen histories and buried past lives.”

    See more. (Via This is Colossal.)

    Landscapes three-fer

    • Travel and nature photographer Jake Guzman has spent the past two years creating Otherworldly America, his new 256-page photography book:

    “Picture Lake Washington.” Photograph by Jake Guzman.
    “Richardson Highway, Alaska.” Photograph by Jake Guzman.

    • Arpan Das has fallen in love with the Kishtwar Himalaya in the Jammu and Kashmir region, part of the Indian Himalayas:

    “Barnaj Rainbow.” Photograph by Arpan Das.

    •  Michael Shainblum photographs the volatile, weather-driven landscapes of New Zealand with “a body of work shaped less by fixed composition and more by responsiveness to constant change”:

    “New Zealand #19.” Photograph by Michael Shainblum.
    “New Zealand #40.” Photograph by Michael Shainblum.

    All three are via PetaPixel: Jake Guzman, Apran Das, and a longer feature on Michael Shainblum.

    Finally: soothing surf
    “Venice Beach: Dreamy #3.” Photograph by Craig Hubbard.

    Hubbard’s photos are ethereal and cinematic, with surfers and wave crests illuminated by the early morning sun or backdropped by the marine layer. Sometimes the intense spray, curl, shoulder, or lip become the sole subjects of the portraits. “The water is the muse and artist,” Hubbard recently told an interviewer. “I’m just a biased translator and documentarian. Lastly, my ego relaxes in the ocean; the need to peacock recedes. This is where my best work comes from — or favorite, I should say.”

    — Kate Mothes, This is Colossal
    “Venice Beach: Dreamy #9.” Photograph by Craig Hubbard.

    See more at This is Colossal.

    That’s it for this month. As always, thanks for visiting.

    For folks in the US, have a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend as America turns 250. Let’s hope that we can make it a better place.

    Also: Please don’t forget to let me know of any problems or concerns with the new site. I’ve got a list of items — going to work on them now — but always welcome feedback. Thanks.

    • 1
      Forgive the repetition, but just in case: I don’t participate in social media. While I’d heard of Glass, I didn’t know of Om’s posts there — and wouldn’t have followed in any case. Perusing those photos, and posting that link, are a one-off celebrating Om’s talent.
  • Beautifully Briefed 26.5: May All Things Be Grand

    Beautifully Briefed 26.5: May All Things Be Grand

    Design is grand; illustration and type are grand, too; the new BMW Alpina is a grand tourer extraordinaire; and space photography is grand indeed. Only Adobe, unfortunately, is the outlier, but on balance, a grand sendoff to Spring.

    This month’s Spine
    University of Chicago Press.
    University of Chicago Press.

    I inked as many jokes as I could — penishment, one could say — but the University Presses column is still worth a read when you have a moment.

    Painting book covers

    Hyperallergic comments, “In a market flooded with design templates and AI-generated imagery, the painted cover stands out as distinctly human.” Which, they suppose, is why when you “[w]alk into any bookstore in the United States lately, […] the shelves and new-release tables resemble group exhibitions.”

    Cover design by Rodrigo Corral Studio. (A 2025 Favorite Book Cover here on Foreword, too.)

    The recent shift from color fields and geometric abstraction to gestural figuration on book covers may reflect a broader craving for embodiment and physical presence — proof, in other words, of the artist’s hand and subjectivity in the era of the internet. Just as painting implies time, so does the novel, demanding sustained attention to both write and to read. It’s a tension that undermines the forces driving creation and consumption in the service of ever-increasing profit margins, both in the art market and the publishing industry.

    — Tara Anne Dalbow, Hyperallergic

    Cover design by Jaya Miceli.

    Regular readers will know this isn’t a new thing, but I think the post — whose author is much more likely to be familiar with social media and bigger-picture trends than I am — is correct in the notion that, “the painted cover seemingly aligns the book with an art-historical lineage rather than the curation of an algorithmic feed.”

    Aside from misspelling Jaya Miceli’s name, there’s lots of good stuff in the article. Take a look.

    Note: I somehow hadn’t seen I Am You before, and am disappointed to have missed this great cover … that would absolutely have been in running for the 2025 Favorite Book Covers. Apologies.

    Speaking of great book design: Jenny Volvovski

    In 2012, Jenny Volvovski “really wanted to design book covers but didn’t have any book cover work. So I hired myself to redesign my personal library.” An interesting approach, to be sure:

    A small selection of items from Volvovski’s unsolicited covers collection.

    That, as it turns out, has worked very well for her — she’s now amongst the elite:

    Cover design by Jenny Volvovski. Was a finalist — but not selected — for my 2025 Favorite Book Covers.

    “Yeah,” I hear you say, “but that’s only a runner-up.” Okay:

    Cover design by Jenny Volvovski. One of my 2025 Favorite Book Covers.

    In addition to the above, Beethoven, The Novel and the Blank, and The Master of Contradictions are among several that fall into the outstanding category; see many more in the “published” section of her website.

    Enjoy! (Prompted by Kottke.)

    Fantastic early 20th-century movie posters (and more)

    Eric Rohman wasn’t a name I was familiar with — he’s Swedish, so I suppose there’s an excuse — but the great design transcends not only the language barrier but the years, as well:

    Poster design by Eric Rohman, 1918.

    “Eric Rohman (1891–1949) was born in Nyköping and grew up in Helsingborg. He was one of the very few people in Sweden who could make a living by only producing posters. He produced about 7,000 works, according to his own estimate. 

    “Rohman’s brother was the manager of one of the big cinema chains and the need for posters was great. Rohman usually worked with few colors and did not spend much time on details, he had a great ability to quickly pick out the essentials.”

    Poster design by Eric Rohman, 1917.

    From Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin to Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo, this online archive is both inspirational and sure to bring a smile to your face.

    When you’re done, the site, Artvee, has countless more from artists worldwide, in hi-res where possible, all in the public domain. A fantastic resource.

    (Another via Kottke.)

    Special bonus #1: Quentin Blake, at 93, continues to advocate “for a discipline that’s lacked attention and prestige for far too long,” CreativeBoom writes. 

    Photograph courtesy of CreativeBoom.

    The master illustrator of Roald Dahl’s Matilda, The BFG, and around 500 more instantly-recognizable titles has been working on a singular goal for more than three decades; the fruit of his labor, The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, “the world’s largest permanent public space dedicated to illustration,” opens its doors in Clerkenwell, London, this summer.

    One of the famous cockatoos gifted to the world by Quentin Blake.

    Update, 6 June 2026: Dezeen has a great article on both the Center and its facility: “The site, known as New River Head, was once the end of an artificial river created in the early 1600s to channel drinking water into London,” they write. 

    Facility by Tim Ronalds Architects. Photograph courtesy of Dezeen.

    “Many of the structures on the site were created as part of the endeavour to pump this water to people’s houses. The oldest of these was the base of a windmill dating back to 1707, which stands at the entrance to the museum’s site and has been converted into a gallery space for temporary exhibitions.” Check it out.

    This month’s new fonts

    CreativeBoom‘s monthly feature has twelve choices, a couple of which I’d love to have the opportunity to use.

    Ardent, by Typofounderie
    Ardent, by Typofonderie.

    “Jean François Porchez began designing Ardent in January 2021, starting from his earlier Le Monde Journal and asking what that typeface would need to become to serve modern screen reading. The answer involved drawing wider letterforms and more open counterforms, following the research of Ladislas Mandel and Matthew Carter on legibility and apparent size. Serifs in the italics (an unusual, but actually sensible choice) serve readability on screen, rather than print conventions. […]

    Ardent’s ”angular counters,” as they call them, do stand out.

    “More broadly, the font draws on a rich historical lineage: Elzevirs, Albertus, Vendôme, Meridien, even Verdana. Angular and triangular shapes sit alongside round terminals and both bracketed and unbracketed serifs, creating what Jean describes as a typeface that reveals subtle contrasts invisible at small sizes but gives graphic projects a distinct identity at large ones.”

    Have to emphasize: unlike my usual selections, this is aimed at screens, not the printed page. Still, good stuff.

    Tareco, by Dalton Maag
    Tareco, by Dalton Maag.

    “Deiverson Ribeiro’s pulled off something a bit special here. Developed at Dalton Maag, Tareco takes the beloved sweet treat of the same name as its starting point. This is not a polite, restrained script, but one with a loud, confident personality. Thick, confident strokes and precise details give these letterforms a jazz-like syncopation: a sense of forward propulsion and playful energy that helps to bring designs to life on the page.”

    And seriously: who doesn’t love a biscuit?

    Software woes, rants and hopes
    Part One: Adobe

    I’ve not had much good to say about Adobe recently, I’ll admit. I’m also not thrilled to be back, bemoaning something else. It’s a shame they’ve given me another reason to.

    Recently, I’ve noticed that in Photoshop, the “canvas size” dialog (among others) has looked … well, off. Windows-like, even, which is most assuredly not a compliment. But on a more fundamental level, it’s broken — it has, to use the parlance, lost its focus sequence: the standard workflow of open dialog, type value, tab, type, enter (no mousing required) is just gone. Each value has to be manually selected and entered, a much more arduous process — it’s additional movement, clicks, and time unnecessarily added.

    The old interface is on the left, “new” on the right. Screenshot courtesy of Unsung.

    You can bet I’m not the only one to have noticed.

    Marcin Wichary, at the excellent Unsung:

    I generally avoid such harsh labels on this blog, but: this is awful work. 

    I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in the face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software – because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. 

    I know I brought up that an existing power user base can be a huge pain in the ass, and I am a decades-old Photoshop power user. But this is different than other examples where the product needs or at least wants to evolve past its core audience or toward a different market. For Photoshop here, nothing I see indicates any change in course or clientele – and yet all of these good moments in UI that used to help me out no longer exist.

    Plus, all those transgressions are solved problems. Those issues are not buried in pages of heavily litigated patents, or in seven collective brains of world-class interface designers whose driveways are presently occupied by cash-filled trucks sent over by frontier companies. This isn’t some long lost art that requires archaeologists to decipher. This feels like carelessness and laziness in face of basic UI engineering; in a likely internally-motivated effort to refresh the interface, the team threw an entire nursery worth of babies [out] with the bathwater.

    — Marcin Wichary, Unsung

    “It’s not just about disservice to craft. It’s not even about disrespect for change management, trivialization of institutional memory, and disinvestment in quality assurance. This isn’t only […] sloppy coding,“ he continues. “This is a failure of imagination.”

    Jason Snell, at Six Colors:

    I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.

    But, as Wichary detected, what Adobe is doing with the Modern User Interface is not to make a new, improved, modern interface. Adobe’s own description gives it away: It’s a hammering of all of Adobe’s user interfaces so they look alike, across Creative Cloud. It’s a “multi-platform design system,” which means in addition to Adobe being committed to “modernizing” Photoshop by making it look like Premiere, it’s also going to make it look the same on the Mac as Windows.

    Already, Photoshop desperately wants to run in single-window mode, with multiple documents opening in a single uberwindow—in other words, the stink of Windows. Fortunately, you can turn that feature off, and I have. […]

    That all said, of course, this decision could benefit Photoshop users, because Adobe could put in the work to make the app better while also fulfilling its own corporate goals of homogeneity.

    Ha ha ha. Sorry. I tried to write that with a straight face.

    — Jason Snell, Six Colors

    It gets worse. Nick Heer, he of PixelEnvy, noted:

    If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript […].

    This is loathsome.

    There are people out there who will insist it is unfair to blame the tools and that bad user interfaces can be built in entirely native languages, too, which is true. Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at home on either MacOS or Windows. Maybe it really is possible to build a web app that feels platform native. But I have never used one — not once — and for this mess to be increasingly used in the industry-standard professional suite of creative tools is maddening.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    John Gruber, on Daring Fireball, notes that, “The before-and-after screenshots look like examples from a lecture on user interface design  —  if you swap them around make the new ones ‘before’ and the old ones ‘after’. Better balance, better focus behavior, appropriate platform-native typography.”

    Michael Tsai has a post on the whole “conversation” if you’d like to get a sense of just how many people are upset; for what it’s worth, it includes a comment from Adobe’s “Lead Scientist” for user interface: “These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t entirely trust their reassurances.

    Wichary did provide a solution, however temporary: turn off the interface “improvements.” There’s an option buried in the settings:

    Uncheck the box, then note the last line.
    Part Two: Folklore

    The hope part: Gruber followed up with a thought-provoking piece called, “Software as the Product of Obsession Times Voice.” He reminds us of a famous quote from Walt Disney — “We don’t make movies to make money; we make money to make more movies” — and that it applies to software development, especially for independents. To wit:

    It feels like the world of software is bifurcating quality-wise. This whole thing about Adobe’s new craptacular “modern” UI language (a.k.a. “Spectrum”) exemplifies one side of that bifurcation — the bad-and-getting-worse side. Software that is the product not just of an ignorance of long-established principles of interaction design, but of a willful disdain for those principles. What Adobe is now shipping is just inexplicably bad UI, ignoring literally decades of great work and long-mastered concepts — a lot of which work was pioneered by Adobe itself!

    — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

    He goes on to discuss that what’s expected from Apple is “insanely great,” and that Adobe is failing so hard precisely because they’re Adobe and know better. He also mentions a concept known as software brain — read the post to get that — but, in a nutshell, it’s not about the quality of the software. It’s about the quality of the profits. Quelle surprise.

    However, “[t]he other side of the software fork is not deserted. It’s just populated, more than ever, by the products of small independent developers who obsess, first and foremost, over quality and artistic vision.”

    Which leads us to Folklore. Mentioned on Upgrade’s Apple 50th anniversary podcast episode, Folklore is a list of 123 great stories from Apple’s early days, from when Apple was that company obsessing, first and foremost, over quality and artistic vision.

    Great stuff. Wander through the list at your leisure — and revel in the glory days.

    Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

    — Margaret Mead

    Special bonus #2: Taken, a single webpage that shows just how much information you share by … visiting a webpage. Sigh.

    Special bonus #3: Boring, an interactive essay arguing that some of the items mentioned above have, in fact, gone too far — and that forces are at work to redress. Speaking of hope: let’s do that.

    BMW Alpina

    So, it’s finally happened: after what seems like forever — including several mentions here on Foreword — we’ve now seen where BMW is going to take the Alpina brand.

    I’m both relieved and excited: it could be very cool.

    Image courtesy of BMW.

    Unlike BMW M, which is focused on sport, BMW Alpina will be focused on speed. Mile-munching, cross-continent stuff. (If you’re a Mercedes fan, think closer to Maybach than AMG — or maybe an amalgamation of both.) “[T]he understated character of ALPINA fits the way wealthy buyers are spending now,” writes BMW Blog. “That is the market BMW is aiming at — not M buyers, not 7 Series buyers, but the segment above both.”

    “An ALPINA is for connoisseurs, meaning people that love driving, they like driving fast, but they don’t want to communicate to the outside world that they bought a race car,” said BMW Group Chief Designer Adrian van Hooydonk. “That would be an M customer. And therefore we thought that is the position, that is the opportunity for ALPINA.”

    Image courtesy of BMW.

    Which makes sense. It’s what Alpina always stood for: faster than standard models, more luxurious than M models. Exclusive and expensive.

    Four images above courtesy of BMW Blog.

    There’s nothing about this I don’t like. It’s a great design in a great color with a fantastic interior. Indeed, it’s a great presentation, and looks like a great place to park yourself for hours on end while scenery rips by.

    Of course, not all is perfect: it’s only a “vision.” BMW’s concept cars tend to get watered down fairly extensively, and this one’s no exception; the first model isn’t even going to be a coupé but rather a modified 7-series sedan. They’ll be both gas — ahem, petrol — and electric, and will cost Bentley money.

    The concept on stage at the 2026 Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este. Image courtesy of BMW Blog.

    Alpina has always been the car for people who found M too loud and Rolls-Royce too theatrical. The buyer who knew what a it was and didn’t need anyone else to. I’m excited that Alpina is going to, thankfully, continue to represent that — and seemingly, successfully transition to a new era under direct BMW control. 

    Read more at BMW Blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) or The Autopian.

    This month’s photography round-up
    Space #1: More from Artemis II

    “NASA has released a tranche of 12,000 photos taken during the historic voyage that were shot on a combination of the Nikon D5 SLR, Nikon Z9 mirrorless, and iPhone 17 cameras that the Artemis crew took with them,” PetaPixelnotes in a post showing some of their favorites. (This is Colossal has a post of their favorites, as well.)

    Hank Green — of the Sci Show YouTube channel, among many others — has put together the very cool Artemis II Photo Timeline, as noted long-time Mac guy (and co-founder of the Relay network of podcasts) Stephen Hackett.

    The timeline is an interactive way to scroll through photos from the mission — but pinned to NASA’s official schedule. Green also explains something I was wondering, which is why there are no credits on the photos: “the four astronauts together agreed that they did not want credit for any photos taken on the mission. I’m somewhat conflicted about this because this project is about giving as much context as possible, but of course there is also something very beautiful about not wanting to take individual credit for something that was the result of so much collaboration.”

    Hat tipped to all of that. A month later, and the excitement is still palpable.

    Space #2: The Milky Way
    “Night at the Remarkables.” Photograph by Tom Rae.

    The 2026 Milky Way Photographer of the Year winning images have been announced, and they’re stunning. “Every year, this collection reminds us that photographing the Milky Way is not only about technique or planning. It is about curiosity, patience, and the desire to experience the night sky in places where it still feels wild,” says Dan Zafra, editor of Capture the Atlas.

    “Perseid Meteors Over Durdle Door.” Photograph by Josh Dury.

    See all of the winning images at This is Colossal, PetaPixel, or the contest website.

    Space #3: Triple Arch
    The Matterhorn, the summer arch (left), the Gegenschein (center), and the winter arm of the Milky Way (right). Photograph by Angel Fux.

    From high up in the Alps, a stacked image of events that took place in one night, taken from one location by one photographer, with no AI involved: a celestial phenomenon that has never been captured in this exact way before. Awesome. PetaPixel has the details.

    And Finally: Lightning Bugs, Indeed
    “Presence,” Australia. Photograph by JJ.

    PetaPixel brings us the story of JJ, who went on a mission to capture lightning sprites, an elusive-yet-beautiful item — and got something else, too.

    “Those little fireflies reminded me of why I do this in the first place. It reminded me that it wasn’t about getting something better; it was about fully appreciating things there in the moment. And this is why I named the image ‘Presence.’” 

    Special bonus #4: Engagement with the arts slows aging!

    “[R]esearchers believe that a significant part of why engaging with the arts slows biological aging is the diverse range of visual, sensory, and physical stimuli associated with art, as well as the social interactions that often accompany it,” PetaPixel notes. 

    “The new findings go much farther than that, though: they also found evidence that artistic engagement can have roughly the same health benefits as physical exercise. This is a huge deal, especially for those in middle- and late-age groups who may find strenuous physical exercise too difficult.”

    So, be glad: taking the time to read Foreword today may have had benefits beyond entertainment. Thanks for visiting.

  • Beautifully Briefed 26.4: Showered with… [Insert Here]

    Beautifully Briefed 26.4: Showered with… [Insert Here]

    This month, Apple turned 50. Plus, the usual dose of great design, fonts, and photographs. Let’s spring into it!

    This month’s Spine
    The University of Iowa Press.

    Genius placement of record label, great typography, and more — although the folks at the University of Iowa generally don’t respond to requests for information (hence the lack of designer credits), their production department deserves all the kudos. Great stuff.

    See the whole list of University Press Coverage at Spine.

    Apple turns 50

    I’m just enough older than Apple that it’s been pretty much a constant presence in my life. Early on, it was only in schools that I interacted with them; we couldn’t afford a Mac in 1984, and I was stuck, nose pressed up against the glass, until 1990.

    The original Mac 128k. Photo courtesy of Apple.

    My first Mac was the same iconic beige, except it was a Mac Plus — which, together with a 20MB (!) Jasmine external hard drive and an ImageWriter — really allowed me to start down the path of making documents and publications lookgreat.

    Over the years, I’ve been through many Macs (more than I should probably try to count, honestly). I still use and love the platform today.

    Of course, I’ve added iPhones, iPads, and miscellaneous others, too. (Oddly, I was never an iPod person — I’ll take speakers over headphones if at all possible.)

    iPad wallpaper courtesy of Basic Apple Guy.

    There are too many great opinions on this anniversary, frankly, for mine to really matter — so I’m going to point to a few excellent items from others, in case you’ve not read them or would appreciate some additional perspectives:

    If you’d rather listen, this episode of the podcast Upgrade (Jason Snell and Myke Hurley) also covers the early — that is, really early — years:

    Whew. Enjoy.

    Meanwhile, I have to point at another article that will probably surprise … well, none of my regular readers: a great Architectural Record piece on the many Apple Stores and their fantastic, now-iconic look.

    Apple Aventura (Miami). Photograph courtesy of Architectural Record / Nigel Young, Foster + Partners.

    The possibility exists that I might have mocked Apple in 2001 for announcing that they’d be opening brick-and-mortar locations. (They had resellers, after all.) But, man, did I get that one wrong. Five hundred plus stores later, all over the world, Apple’s story is being told every day through great products — and great architecture.

    Apple Zorlu Center (Istanbul). Photograph courtesy of Architectural Record / Nigel Young, Foster + Partners.
    Apple Marina Bay Sands (Singapore). Photograph courtesy of Architectural Record / Finbarr Fallon.

    Many thanks to Apple for making my daily life better. It sounds strange to thank a company with a nearly four trillion dollar market cap, but as someone who’s been there since the dark days of the ’90s — indeed, basically all of those 50 years — they’re more than just a company to me. May there be many more anniversaries to come.

    Late-breaking supplement: new Apple CEO

    As it turns out, Apple’s 50th also marks a turning point:

    Today we announced that I’m taking the next step in my journey at Apple. Over the coming months I will be transitioning into a new role, leaving the CEO job behind in September and becoming Apple’s executive chairman. A new person will be stepping into what I know in my heart is the best job in the world. That leader is John Ternus, a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job.

    John cares so much about who we are at Apple, what we do at Apple, who we reach at Apple, and he has the heart and character to lead with extraordinary integrity. I am so proud to call him Apple’s next CEO. 

    — Tim Cook, CEO, Apple

    John Ternus and Tim Cook. Photograph courtesy of Apple.

    Ternus’ long-time role at Apple has been as its head of hardware. Among the things Apple does extraordinarily well, hardware arguably tops that list. Every piece of hardware has an level of quality the rest of the industry just can’t match; from the early days of the iMac to today’s MacBook Neo, from the first iPhone to the orange powerhouse that is today’s iPhone 17 Pro, there’s a feel that Apple does like no one else.

    That also means, for all intents and purposes, that Apple recognizes that the next CEO isn’t going to — can’t — increase its net worth another thousand percent the way it did under Cook’s tenure. They’re going to concentrate on what they do best: products.

    I hope.

    For more on the CEO announcement, see also: 

    Special bonus #1: What happens when you put greed first. I’ve spent a minute slogging on Adobe — hopefully fairly — but Nick Heer of PixelEnvy summarizes better than I have.

    Design
    Penguin’s 2026 cover design award

    This CreativeBoom article is framed as “Gen Z judges books by their covers” — breaking news, surely — but is really about what happens when you give some design novices1Entrants had to have no more than one year of paid creative experience, and 60% of those on this year’s shortlist were students. an assignment redesigning covers of two iconic titles. Here are a couple of winners:

    Night Watch design study for Penguin UK by Peter Goddard.
    Night Watch design study for Penguin UK by Sunny Tsang.

    Of course, there are a couple of age-related stats in the article worth mentioning: “40% of 18 to 24-year-olds like to display books at home, with nearly a third using them as interior design objects or art pieces. Among the over-55s, that figure drops to 8%.” (Raises hand on the latter.)

    The other title is the always-awesome A Wrinkle in Time. Take a look.

    Post of goodness

    While we’re on the subject of awesome: “Print and design studio Risotto is marking 100 months of artist postcards, all printed by hand and posted worldwide, with an exhibition that puts the beauty and breadth of Risograph on show,” It’s Nice That writes.

    A sample of Risotto postcards, oddly with envelopes.

    “For the Glasgow-based print and design studio Risotto, a connection to slower publishing in a fast world has been part of its fabric since its beginnings. Risotto’s Riso Club has been a constant print project running in the background at the press for the past decade: A monthly not-for-profit postcard subscription that directly supports independent artists by sending their colourful work to a community of print enthusiasts around the world,” the article continues.

    More of the fantastic artists’ postcards.

    “It’s a bit of an antidote to the speed of the doom scroll or just the amount of content that’s out there,” studio owner Gabriella Marcella says. I couldn’t agree more — in fact, if I had even a smidgen of display space available, I’d subscribe (and may anyway).

    Read more at It’s Nice That or CreativeBoom.

    That’s the ticket

    Kottke, while bringing us a quick snippet with a brand designer’s “compendium of transit tickets” from around the world, also reached back into his archives to bring us these absolute gems:

    Golden Tickets, Milwaukee, week 7, 1949.

    A collection of weekly bus passes from Milwaukee, WI. Years covered are 1930-1979.

    Golden Tickets, Milwaukee, week “53,” 1952-3.

    Originally posted at the not-cited-enough Present & Correct.

    Special bonus #2: Extra large Pan Am ticket recreations as art, framed, for your wall:

    Flight of fancy by Ella Freire. 

    These are perfect for an Air BNB or other travel/hospitality locale — as mentioned above, my walls are full — but no matter what, looking through the destinations is fun. Check it out. (Via Daring Fireball, citing another not-cited-enough item, SimpleBits by Dan Cederholm.)

    Special bonus #3: Speaking of travel and hospitality, “Letterform Archive has turned a century of vintage hotel luggage labels into 330 gorgeous stickers: a new sticker book from the San Francisco-based design archive revives the golden age of travel through the vibrant graphic art of hotel luggage labels.” Awesomeness at CreativeBoom.

    April’s typography greats
    Mark Simonson’s start in type

    …actually has a great story attached:

    Hand lettering for Mark Simonson’s 1975 yearbook.

    “Fifty years ago this month, March 1976, at 20 years old, is when my interest in type design began,” he writes. I’m not going to spoil it — just go read instead.

    CreativeBoom‘s April selections

    Nineteen in all, but as usual, I’m only going to mention a few faves:

    Boundt (not cake), by Ahmadi Hasan.

    “Boundt arrives from Drizy Font with a clear visual proposition: bold, architectural geometry at display scale, informed by mechanical bolt-and-nut structures and the graphic language of vintage broadcast design. The mechanical metaphor gives the letterforms a coherence that purely decorative display faces often lack: a sense that the same underlying system generated them all.” See more.

    MWT Sheller Stencil by Jesse R. Ewing. (Who was not shot for their efforts.)

    “Sheller Stencil originates in the stencilled lettering found on agricultural machinery from Tiffin, Ohio, in the late 19th century: anonymous commercial graphics that, on close examination, turn out to be genuinely inventive. Some characters split at right angles; others follow curvilinear breaks that track the Art Nouveau-inflected letterforms rather than cutting across them mechanically. The result reads as antique but carries enough formal authority for contemporary packaging, editorial work and heritage-positioned branding.” See more.

    Herald News by Kevin Foley.

    “The story behind Herald News is a personal one. Kevin Foley grew up with the Fall River Herald News (delivered it as a paperboy, absorbed its typography over years of handling), and later found himself scanning its pages to find his daughter’s name in the results after track meets. That very human relationship with a newspaper’s visual character is precisely the kind of deep familiarity from which good type design grows.”

    This is a serif family was built for editorial work — and I like so much, it’s been bookmarked for when the right project comes along. See more.

    Boxal by The Northern Block.

    “Boxal is The Northern Block’s newest typeface – a meticulously crafted, retro-inspired pixel font that captures the nostalgic charm of classic arcade gaming while delivering modern precision and versatility. With the personal design history of founder and type designer Jonathan Hill very much in mind, Boxal draws on the pixel artistry of iconic titles like Zelda, Shinobi, and Cops and Robbers, and represents a cultural homecoming for the studio.”

    Fantastically retro yet proportionally spaced, best at large sizes, preferably slowly scrolling up a screen. Awesome. See more.

    Zed, for when Z just isn’t enough
    Zed’s icon family by Typotheque.

    “Zed is extremely practical, both in terms of its extraordinarily broad language support and the stylistic variations available via its adjustable width, weight, roundness, and slant. It even offers Braille characters and an icon font. But Zed is also simply beautiful. It’s a font family and type system that exemplifies the belief that rich accessibility and pure aesthetic appeal are not at odds,” Daring Fireball writes. (In, admittedly, a sponsored spot — but his sponsors are so highly curated that I actually read the posts … and, occasionally, pass them along.)

    Zed used in a display at the V&A, London.

    See more.

    HVD Bodedo
    Hand cut, not fried.

    No, your eyes are not deceiving you: those are potatoes, carefully carved in the service of Bodoni. Mostly. But it’s got tasty ink content — and is free. Check it out. (Via Kottke.)

    Special bonus #4: ChatGPT can now think … about type, traditionally one of AI’s weak points:

    Generated. (“Create everything at once,” Open AI claims.) We’re all going to be out of a job!
    April’s Photography Round-up
    Artemis II (#1)

    Only a few items this time — but that partially because, at least in my mind, one event more or less dominated photography during April: the Artemis mission.

    “Room with a View.” A view from the window of the Orion spacecraft approximately 9 minutes before Earthset during the Artemis II lunar flyby on April 6, 2026. Photograph courtesy of NASA. (No specific astronaut credited.)

    “I like perspective. As much as I enjoy the wide, sweeping shots of our Moon and Earth set against each other (and I do very, very much enjoy those), my favorite photos remind me that there were people there,” Jason Schneider writes at PetaPixel. I couldn’t agree more: the shot above, for instance, is both spare and overwhelmingly expansive. Awesome.

    See also: NASA’s official photo page, the Planetary Society’s favorites, Scientific American‘s twelve favorites, and Space.com’s sweet sixteen.

    Artemis II (#2)
    Artemis II launch. Photograph by Steven Madow.

    How did that image get created — I mean, it’s practically right on the pad? “Photographer Steven Madow has been photographing rocket launches for over a decade, but arguably no rocket launch he has photographed has been as big of a deal. […] Madow set up 14 different Panasonic Lumix cameras to cover the monumental event, including seven remote cameras at the launch site. His outstanding photos are the result of years of practice and planning,” PetaPixelwrites.

    For Artemis II, Madow partnered with Space Explored, a website dedicated to sharing all the inspiring stories surrounding spaceflight and exploration. Read the whole story.

    Patterns: the book
    “Big Diatom Stack, Edit 2.” Photograph by Jon McCormack.

    “In the words of Georgia O’Keefe, to see takes time,” says photographer Jon McCormack. His new monograph, “Patterns: Art of the Natural World,” is a “beautiful visual love letter to nature and all its intricate patterns, from microscopic and rarely-seen to vast and majestic,” writes PetaPixel. 

    Patterns cover.

    McCormack’s photographic journey, which started with a hand-me-down film camera in the rugged, rural Australian Outback and has taken him all over the world to — get this — the iPhone camera software lead at Apple. (The man has a clue, ladies and gentlemen.)

    The book is something after my own heart. Read the entire piece. (You can also see the book at This is Colossal.)

    Hans Hansen’s explosions
    1988 Volkswagen advertisement. Photograph by Hans Hansen.

    …aren’t quite what you might expect — but might be something you remember, like the above VW spot from the ’80s (which triggered a memory of the awe experience upon first seeing that collection of, well, parts).

    “Hans Hansen is not necessarily well known to anyone but the most studious of photographic historians. Throughout a long career, the self-taught German photographer has quietly carved a niche as a master of still life and commercial image-making. His work explores colour and composition, as well as drawing lessons from modern artistic movements, resulting in some of the most striking and memorable product images of the 1970s, 1980s and beyond,” Wallpaper*writes. 

    See more great examples.

    Finally: X-ray *this*
    X-Ray Microbus. (Don’t ask how.) Photograph by Nick Veasey.

    Over at The Autopian, Jason Torchinsky writes: “Seriously! Full-scale X-rays! Of cars! Using five X-ray machines and/or a massive German-sourced X-ray machine, in a studio that features 30-inch-thick walls, British artist Nick Veasey took X-ray images of so many cars, and they’re stunning.”

    Have a great rest of your Spring, everyone!

    • 1
      Entrants had to have no more than one year of paid creative experience, and 60% of those on this year’s shortlist were students.
  • Beautifully Briefed 26.3: The Ides of Equal Madness

    Beautifully Briefed 26.3: The Ides of Equal Madness

    This month, some optimism, some interesting books, some creative fonts, and some fantastic photos, and somepositivity — plus a smidgen of pessimism — in the form of Adobe.

    On the whole, it’s mostly optimism, promise. And there’s butter. And a sleeping fox. And duck.

    This month’s Spine
    Rutgers University Press. Cover design by Ashley Muehlbauer; production editor, Vincent Nordhaus.

    “Our initial direction for [the designer] was to create a clean, simple text design that conveyed crisis, dread, or the element of threat,” this title’s production editor said in response to my request for information.

    “To say that someone lit a fire under those directions is an understatement,” I wrote in this title’s commentary. “In today’s American academic reality, where every day could indeed be … shall we say, fraught, this cover takes the brief and runs straight onto the dean’s list.”

    See the rest of this month’s University Press Coverage at Spine.

    Why she’s an optimist 

    Joan Westenberg (previously) has another great essay up about the AI doom loop — why it’s easy to believe that the downward spiral is tightening, to roughly paraphrase — and why she believes it just isn’t true:

    In 1810, 81% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Two hundred years later, it’s about 1%. If you had shown someone in 1810 a chart of agricultural employment decline and asked them to model the economic consequences, the only rational projection would have been apocalypse. Where would 80% of the population find work? What would they do? How would anyone eat if the farmers were all displaced by machines?

    The answer, of course, is that entirely new categories of work were created that no one in 1810 could have conceived of, and these new jobs paid dramatically more than subsistence farming. Factory work, office work, services, knowledge work, the entire apparatus of modernity: none of it was visible from the vantage point of the pre-industrial economy.

    — Joan Westenberg, “Everything is Awesome”

    “The transition was brutal and uneven. [People] suffered,” she writes. “But the trajectory was real, and the people projecting permanent immiseration […] were, in the fullest sense, catastrophically wrong.”

    The essay isn’t perfect; it’s too long, and the editor failed to catch a few typos (he said, hypocritically). But … it scales. Zoomed out, it applies to more than AI.

    “The doomers may have the best stories. I believe the optimists have the best evidence,” she concludes. I agree. Or, at least, I’d like to. 

    Go read it and see whether you do.

    Great web moments, x2
    Kottke.org 

    Kottke Turns 28. There are few websites I nod along with as often as this gem from the late ’90s, still going strong.

    Kottke.org: 47,300 posts and counting.
    Scripting.com

    Dave Winer shoots for the stars:

    We’re going to try to reboot the web.
    Doing what the social networks do, but only using the web.
    Every part replaceable. 

    — Dave Winer, scripting.com, “Mission Statement”

    Scripting News has been around since ’94 and if you’re even a little interested in a free web, his site is a fine place to start learning how you can contribute to keeping it free.

    Note: scripting.com is, famously, still non-https — which means that if you click on either of the above links you’re likely to get a warning that the site isn’t secure. It’s very much a safe link.

    Book notes, x3
    Oliver Munday, Head of Household
    Somehow, I expected someone older. (Courtesy of Debutful.)

    Nearly every one of his book cover designs could be called an instant favorite. He has a wry, brief expression that often delights.

    So, when he wrote a book, did he do the cover? Well … no, as it turns out — and he preferred it that way.

    Cover design by Chris Brand.

    Munday’s collection of stories has an interesting cover by industry veteran Chris Brand, and I like it — although some of the alternatives seem to me like better fits for Munday’s take on life. 

    But, of course, that’s the point: it’s not about him, it’s about his book.

    See the other book cover design drafts Brand designed for Head of Household at LitHub. (And a short Q&A.) Enjoy also this interview with the author/designer at Debutful.

    The Butter Book
    Book design by Lizzie Vaughan.

    No, it doesn’t soften when left out — or spread any larger meaning. It’s just a great book cover (and jacket).

    Chronicle gets a kick out of “things that look like other things.” We made a notepad called Pad of Butter that has been selling steadily since 2015. So, imaginations did not need to stretch when a butter-focused cookbook with a vellum jacket was proposed. It’s our “bread and butter,” so to speak.

    — Q&A with author Anna Stockwell and designer Lizzie Vaughan, PRINT

    “It’s important to find joy wherever you can these days and it’s hard to hate on butter,” the article says. Read the rest at PRINT.

    “Naïve” design
    Image courtesy of the LA Times.

    The LA Times examines the latest book design trend: naïve design. (Yes, I pretentiously style that like the New Yorker does. The LA Times does not.) It’s where serious subjects wear … nostalgic cover designs, to use a phrase. Find out why.

    Parenthetically, of the covers mentioned in that article, only one — by design legend Na Kim — has found its way into my 2026 Favorite Covers folder. It’ll be a minute, but stay tuned to find out which.

    Special bonus #1: “You’ll need a magnifying glass to read these,” says This is Colossal:

    Courtesy of the V&A Museum.

    Special bonus #2: A favorite collectible (and slight tangent), these books “keep a lost design legacy alight,” says It’s Nice That:

    A sample from The Matchbook Book by CentreCentre. 

    Update, 1 April: CreativeBoom has a nice feature on this title as well, with additional images. Check the slipcover:

    Awesomeness courtesy of CreativeBoom.
    Fonts March Foreword
    CreativeBoom’s March faves

    CreativeBoom‘s regular feature contains sixteen choices this month — awesome! — but I’d like to just highlight my three favorites: 

    Archibrazo by Rubén Fontana.

    “Rubén Fontana is one of the most respected figures in Latin American type design, and Archibrazo, released through TypeTogether earlier this year, represents a characteristically considered piece of work. The typeface brings together two traditions that might seem at odds: the fluidity of calligraphic practice and the hardness of sculptural form. The result is a serif family that wears its sources with confidence, without collapsing into historicism or affectation.”

    See more at TypeTogether.

    Djaggety by Alessia Mazzaarella.

    “Djaggety began in a classroom. Alessia Mazzarella of Typeland, who teaches type design to BA Graphic Design students, uses an 8×8 grid exercise as a standard introduction to letterform construction. The constraint, she explains, strips away the paralysis of infinite choice and forces students to focus on what makes a character recognisable within a tightly defined system. During one iteration of the exercise, she found herself drawn into the process rather than simply demonstrating it. […] Overall, it’s a good lesson in how constraint can generate, rather than foreclose, creative possibilities.”

    See more at Typeland.

    Musikal by Fred’s Fonts.

    “After three years in development on Future Fonts, Fred Wiltshire’s Musikal has reached v1.0: a significant milestone for a typeface that began with a conscious act of divergence. Herman Ihlenburg’s Obelisk (1880s) served as the starting point: a high-contrast, ornamental display face of considerable geometric rigour and decorative confidence. Rather than reviving Obelisk directly, Wiltshire took its ‘playful nature’ as a conceptual springboard and built something clearly of the present.”

    See more at Future Fonts.

    Letterform Archives’ new celebration of hand-painted type
    One example — I mean, who can argue with “Lettres Riches Fantaisie“?

    “A new book published by Letterform Archive, Lettres Décoratives: A Century of French Sign Painters’ Alphabets, celebrates the vivacity and timelessness of French sign painting from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Compiled from lithograph portfolios, which range from 1875 to around 1932, the volume includes more than 150 full-color reproductions of these bold lettering samples. These portfolios once served as catalogue-like albums, providing inspiration for styles and motifs that could be translated onto large billboards and small signage alike.”

    Read more about this great new book at This is Colossal or PRINT.

    Cambridge’s old Baskerville ounches

    Heavy metal for the type crowd:

    Image courtesy of Cambridge University.

    “John Baskerville was an influential 18th-century printer and type designer; you’ve probably used (or at least heard of) the Baskerville typeface. Cambridge University has the original punches used to create his signature typeface and has made high-res digital photos of them available online,” Kottke writes. “[S]eeing close-ups of the actual cut & shaped metal from 1757 is something else.”

    In case you’re not familiar:

    The typographic punch is the initial design for the letterform and one of the first of three stages in the manufacturing of metal type: short lengths of steel onto which his letters were cut in reverse and in relief. The punch was ‘tempered’ to increase its toughness and enable its use as a tool. Secondly, the punch was struck into the surface of a softer piece of metal (copper), leaving an impression of the ‘right-reading’ character to be cast. This was called the matrix. Finally, type was manufactured when the matrix was passed to the type-caster and inserted into a mould, into which molten lead-alloy was poured. This produced a cast of the type in relief and in reverse which were then arranged to create a text block and once inked, paper could be pressed against it.

    Not just hi-res photos of punches for various sizes of type, either: some have 3D versions. Very cool.

    Special bonus #3: The menu that never was:

    World Class Female Singers.

    Okay, okay, that’s not actually an unused menu from before Apple’s Macintosh was released in 1984, but how it came about isn’t something I’m going to quote. Instead, I’m just going to ask you to read it in full — it’s fantastic.

    Courtesy of Unsung, Marcin Wichary’s awesome blog. (Yes, he of Shift Happens fame.)

    Great graphic items, x2
    The Tenth Muse
    Screenshot of the Tenth Muse home page.

    “The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”

    (Via Kottke.)

    AIGA NY: 50 years of posters
    Just one example of the many posters now available for your persual.

    “A 50-year goldmine of design: AIGA New York unveils its poster archive to the public,” It’s Nice That reports. “A newly opened window into its design archive, this unique visual library provides the public with an inside view of the design, art and activism that’s emerged from the city’s recent history. AIGA NY has ambitions for the collection to become physically accessible with an accompanying book that will showcase the posters in more depth.”

    Adobe, yet again
    DNG now standard

    Let’s start with the positive:

    “In March 2004, Australian photographer Robert Edwards asked a simple but meaningful question on Rob Galbraith’s now-defunct photography forums: ‘Could Adobe make a RAW format?’ The answer was very much ‘yes,’ and Adobe announced the DNG format, or Digital Negative, later that same year. Now, more than two decades later, DNG is now the official standard under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO),” PetaPixel writes.

    From back in the day.

    I remember lurking on Rob Galbraith site. Such were the importance of his forums — and, for that matter, the overall size and condition of the ’net in the early Aughties — that Thomas Knoll himself, one of the creators of Photoshop, would post there.

    In case you’re not familiar, a camera’s RAW file is what the sensor sees at the moment of exposure, stored in a format for later editing. It’s completely different from a JPG file, which has all the camera’s choices baked in to the final image. Sports or journalism photographers usually shoot JPG, due to the need to post immediately; social media photography is, of course, its own animal.

    Most fine photographers — that is, folks who shoot for art or pleasure, including your author — only shoot RAW, because it gives you maximum flexibility in “look.”

    I’m honestly not sure how much of a difference this will make, but it’s nice to see DNG accepted as a standard — and it’s an example of Adobe meaningfully contributing to the bigger picture. 

    Train Adobe’s AI on your style

    From the “mixed” department:

    It’s not tin foil.

    Adobe has launched Firefly Custom Models, “allowing artists to generate image variations that ‘more consistently reflect’ their own style, subject, or characters. 

    Adobe’s Deepa Subramaniam says, “Today, we’re expanding access to Firefly custom models, which let you turn your creative style into a reusable model trained on your own images. In this public beta release, custom models are optimized for ideation in character, illustration and photographic style.” 

    The goal of Custom Models, according to PetaPixel, is to “allow artists to train Adobe’s Firefly AI specifically to unique workflows so that when it generates content, it is more aligned with their specific style.”

    Hmmm. How ’bout practical effects? Seriously, this might turn out to be useful. Time will tell. Helmet of tin flowers and all.

    CEO retires. Stock … down?

    Here’s where the attitude sneaks in: most of us, present company included, are sick of Adobe’s attitude towards its customers.

    “Adobe’s longtime CEO, Shantanu Narayen, announced this week that he is stepping down after 18 years as CEO and nearly 30 years at the company. If you ask shareholders, Narayen was, for a long time, among the very best in the biz. If you ask Adobe’s core customers, the artists who were once indispensable to the company’s success, it’s a different story,” writes Jeremy Gray in an opinion piece for PetaPixel.

    Adobe made more than $7 billion in net profit last year, a clear win for shareholders. This is due to their choice to treat creatives as a profit center. But their stock is down because their AI efforts have fallen flat — Firefly is way behind Midjourney or Gemini — and the planned additional profit center has failed to materialize. 

    And by “down,” I mean significantly. During Narayen’s tenure, Adobe’s share price increased from around $40 in late 2007 when he took over to an all-time high of $688.37 in 2021. But as of this writing, it’s $243. “Although Adobe and Narayen are painting his departure as entirely the outgoing CEO’s decision,” Gray continues, “it’s easy to wonder whether tumbling share prices had something to do with the transition, or at least sped up existing plans.

    “I respect the sheer scale of what he achieved. I admire that he grew Adobe so that it could hire more great workers to build better software. But for me, Narayen’s legacy is ultimately one of treating [creatives] like an afterthought […] using our passion and love for art to boost his brand.”

    I understand that Adobe has become one the Internet’s favorite punching bags of late, and I try to distance myself from that sport (no matter the subject). But I can’t help but agree with many of the things expressed in that piece.

    Let’s hope that the future bring change, one way or another. For many professionals, Adobe essentially holds a monopoly. 

    But then, so did Microsoft.

    Special bonus #4: Unsung asks, “Why wouldn’t everyone deserve the gift of focus?” He’s talking about the tragically-short-lived focus mode in Photoshop, wherein the user isn’t automatically shown pop-ups or blaring (bleating?) buttons regarding new features.

    I mention this because I just uninstalled Acrobat, Adobe’s PDF management program, because I couldn’t turn off the pop-ups, sharing invitations, or requests to add comments. All I wanted was to proof documents, but what I was gifted with was frustration — even anger, on days where a deadline was involved. 

    Special bonus #5: “A slap on the wrist” is understatement writ large:

    “Canceling a software subscription is supposed to be easy — that’s what US law dictates. Adobe, however, has played fast and loose with its Creative Cloud subscriptions in the past. The company was sued by the Department of Justice in 2024 due to its practice of hiding hefty termination fees when customers signed up. The case has now been settled, with Adobe agreeing to a $75 million fine and matching free services to users of its products,” Ars Technica writes.

    The company doesn’t admit to violating the law. “While we disagree ⁠with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe said in a statement.

    March photo round-up

    Okay, let’s switch gear and end with inspiration — even happiness.

    International Garden Photographer of the Year 2026

    Yes, you read that right: there’s an international contest for the best garden photograph. (If you want hard-hitting stuff, see Sony’s awards. There’s enough “news” in the world, so….)

    Grange Fell Last Light. Overall Winner. Photograph by Mark Hetherington.

    Soothing. The image also earned first place in the Breathing Spaces — more soothing —category, and was captured in Borrowdale in England’s Lake District; the “photograph shows heather, silver birch trees, and the warm light of sunset viewed from Grange Fell,” PetaPixel writes.

    See all the winning photographs at the contest website.

    British wildlife
    Asleep at the Wheel. Winner, Urban Wildlife. Photograph by Simon Withyman.

    It’s a shame these are still photographs. Hearing a red fox bark in a British accent would be a hoot.

    Standing Tall. Winner, Animal Portrait. Photograph by Alastair Marsh.

    Proof that excellence in photography extends to all parts of the realm. See all twenty-one winners at This is Colossal or PetaPixel.

    London Camera Exchange Photographer of the Year 2026

    Last of the items originating in the UK this month, although the excellent photographs within aren’t limited to just those countries. Some examples:

    Crossing the Curves. Winner, Street. Photograph by Helen Trust.

    “A lone cyclist moves through sweeping arcs of light and shadow at the City of Arts and Sciences. Reflections echo the architecture’s rhythm, momentarily aligning human motion with structure, symmetry, and space.”

    Saving Lives at Sea. Winner, Action. Photograph by David Lyon.

    “Captured from the shore, during a regular Newhaven training exercise.”

    Magical Uphill Lincoln. Winner, People’s Choice. Photograph by Andrew Scott.

    “This image was taken during golden hour in Lincoln. The image captures the historic streets and architecture of Lincoln as a golden sunset sets in. […] The golden glow of the sky, cobbles and light from the window add that extra dimension in terms of how the overall image works as a result.” (The description somehow missed “soothing.”)

    See all the winners at the London Camera Exchange website. Via Macfilos.

    Andrew Moore: Theater

    “Known for his atmospheric photographs of landscapes, interiors, and urban centers that feel mysteriously locked in a not-so-distant past, Andrew Moore’s enigmatic images invite us into a slippage of time,” This is Colossal writes.

    Grand Luncheonette, New York, 1996. Photograph by Andrew Moore.

    Not only great, but currently on display: Moore has a solo show running at Atlanta’s Jackson Fine Art. (Update: The show ended March 21st, darned it. I’d have gone if I’d read that properly.)

    Cinematic plastic

    No, not current events — something better:

    Jurassic Pit. Photograph by Chuck Eiler.

    “Chicago-based photographer Chuck Eiler transforms action figures into cinematic, story-driven miniature worlds that blur the line between toy photography and film. Through meticulously crafted sets, practical effects, and careful lighting, he creates immersive scenes that bring nostalgia and storytelling to life,” PetaPixel writes.

    Apex Predators. Photograph by Chuck Eiler.

    Awesome. (And available as prints, in case you want for your sandbox walls.)

    Finally: duck this

    Last month saw the incredible fresh pasta camera. Well, in case you think I only recommend a vegetarian lifestyle, there’s…:

    Four Minutes in London.

    Martin Cheung’s Chinese roast duckcam. 

    Presumably, he throws a fresh camera into the oven every time he needs one: “I will continue making Duckcam while I travel, so next time when you see a person with a roasted duck on a tripod, please say hello to me.”

    Enjoy your spring, everyone!

  • Beautifully Briefed 25.12: Old and New

    Beautifully Briefed 25.12: Old and New

    To close out 2025, a bunch of disparate items for your edification and enjoyment: the usual categories plus some stuff imported from left-field. Get caffeinated, get comfy, and let’s get to it.

    Please note that the photography trip planned for mid-December had to be cancelled at the last minute — circumstances beyond my control — and hasn’t yet been rescheduled. Apologies.

    December’s Spine
    Stanford University Press. Cover design by Jan Šabach; art director, Michele Wetherbee.

    Fourteen great University Press book covers in December’s column, including the genre-bending example above. Check it out.

    December 25th: designer holiday cards
    Charles and Ray Eames, 1940s. (Image credit: © 2025 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved. Via Wallpaper*.)

    “Long live the Christmas card — a ritual that feels increasingly endangered in our digital age. The simple act of putting pen to paper and sending wishes inked in black or blue is, in a word of instant messages, profoundly gratifying,” Wallpaper* writes. “In celebrating this venerable tradition, we found ourselves asking: what sort of Christmas card does an architect send?”

    January 1st: Public Domain Day
    Image courtesy of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke Law.

    On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1925. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. The literary highlights range from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage and the first four Nancy Drew novels. From cartoons and comic strips, the characters Betty Boop, Pluto (originally named Rover), and Blondie and Dagwood made their first appearances. Films from the year featured Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, the Marx Brothers, and John Wayne in his first leading role. Among the public domain compositions are I Got Rhythm, Georgia on My Mind, and Dream a Little Dream of Me. We are also celebrating paintings from Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. [In this post] you can find lists of some of the most notable books, characters, comics, and cartoons, films, songs, sound recordings, and art entering the public domain. After each of them, we have provided an analysis of their significance.

    — Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, Duke Law

    The annual list is, in every manner of speaking, a gift to society. (Via Pluralistic.)

    Has judging a book by its cover gone too far?
    Cover design by David Pearson.

    Excellent question from It’s Nice That, discussed in a post with book designers Na Kim and David Pearson. Book covers these days are driven by trends that are all-too-fleeting — what does that mean for what’s contained within? Is “salability” all that matters?

    Perhaps the question should be, “Where are we as a society, and is this it, in microcosm?”

    Special Bonus #1: 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025, from LitHub:

    A reminder that press size and cover quality do not necessarily correlate — as noted in the above item, small presses might be willing to bend the “rules” more readily than the big players.

    “Our guiding principles were ‘read a lot, recommend a few’ and ‘seek out a diverse array of authors and publishers,’” they write. “We were especially interested in BIPOC and LGBTQ authors and publishers, who have an even steeper climb to mainstream recognition.” Enjoy.

    Special Bonus #2: Bar codes as design objects:

    This short piece from type foundry Pangram Pangram includes several book covers.

    CreativeBoom: six surprising illustration trends for 2026
    A linocut by Emily Robertson.

    Contrary to popular belief, illustration — like photography — is not on its deathbed. Despite the temptation for some companies (or budgets) to reach for generative AI, the consensus is that in order to stand out, bringing something unique to the table will be worth the effort. CreativeBoom talked to seven illustration agencies to get an idea what will work in 2026.

    Special Bonus #3: A repository of mid-20th-century illustration, for research or just enjoyment: “Illustrator Zara Picken has an incredible searchable archive of mid-century modern illustration from c.1950-1975. It’s a goldmine of graphic, type, color, and texture inspiration.”

    Smokey the Bear stamps from 1967.

    Zara’s illustrations are in a cut-paper style and awesome; link via SimpleBits Studio Notes #60. (The entire series of Notebook entries is cool when you have a few extra minutes.)

    Creative Review‘s movie posters of 2025
    Poster by Empire Design.

    Begonia was mentioned in October. A couple are by Empire Design, including the above — which is a master class in nested photographs. (“Claustrophobic,” CR says.) Great stuff.

    Typefaces, pt. 1: notes for December
    Snowee

    CreativeBoom‘s new font post for December includes Snowee, which is far and away my favorite: interesting, characterful (heh), and just fun — something lacking amongst the sea of Helvetica wannabes.

    It’s caps-only and not great at small sizes, but given a headline or poster or … whatever, it could be a pleasant, different choice. (I love that the O looks like an olive.)

    LEGO’s letterforms

    Meanwhile, LEGO features in a new project called “A2Z,” an international effort to create letterforms highlighting strength found in limited systems:

    LEGO “offered an ideal blend of fixed constraints and room for playful exploration. Each brick’s scale and form could not be altered, but the grid’s size could be individually defined,” This is Colossal writes of this hand-printed awesomeness.

    Gotham

    From Tobias Frere-Jones, the story of how Gotham came to be:

    Tobias Frere-Jones‘ inspiration for Gotham.

    “In 2021, Monotype bought Hoefler & Co, and with it several families that I designed. As these families are now further removed from their origin, I want to ensure that their stories are accurately recorded,” Frere-Jones says. (Part of a series, in fact.)

    The Garamonds

    Lastly (for now), John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is among many who point out that condensed serifs are back in vogue, including — naturally, given the source — Apple Garamond:

    It’s TrueType, but now open source.

    Gruber also reminds us that Apple’s gone through more processor types than typefaces.

    Special Bonus #4: Gruber also has a quick item linking to a brilliant essay arguing that not all Garamonds are created equal — ITC’s version, especially. (Which Apple Garamond was based on, interestingly.)

    Special Bonus #5: Who doesn’t love a Pilcrow?

    Hoefler & Co’s brief item is worth it for the varied examples alone.
    Fonts, pt. 2: the Calibri flame-out

    Let’s face it: type rarely generates headlines. But these aren’t “normal” times. Headlines were definitely made when the US State Department decided that its house style rules ditch Calibri, a font chosen to be more readable — more inclusive — and revert to Times New Roman. Because … tradition? Politics? Readability?

    Let’s stipulate for the moment that the memo’s drafters saw choices as limited to the defaults available in Microsoft Word. (Because … you saw that coming.)

    John Gruber was all over it, and argued thus:

    While neither is a good choice, between the two, Times New Roman is clearly better. […] I just think it’s stupid for an institution with the resources of the U.S. State Department to shrug its shoulders at the notion that they should license and install whatever fonts they want on all of their computers. Anyone making excuses that they “can’t” do that should be fired. […]

    Calibri does convey a sense of casualness — and more so, modernity — that is not appropriate for the U.S. State Department. And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities. People with actual accessibility needs should be catered to, but they need more than a sans serif typeface, and their needs should not primarily motivate the choice for the default typeface.

    — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

    But he didn’t stop there. He somehow got his hands on the complete memo written by Secretary of State Rubio, and it’s … surprisingly sober. Gruber comments:

    It drives me nuts when news sites in possession of a statement or original document do not make the full original text available, even if only in a link at the bottom, and choose only to quote short excerpts.

    With regard to today’s news regarding Marco Rubio’s directive re-establishing Times New Roman as the default font for U.S. State Department documents (rescinding the Biden administration’s 2023 change to Calibri), I very much wanted to read the original.     The New York Times broke the news, stated that they had obtained the memo, and quoted phrases and words from it, but they did not provide a copy of the original. 

    The State Department has not made this document publicly available, and to my knowledge, no one else has published it. I have obtained a copy from a source, and have made it available here in plain text format. The only change I’ve made is to replace non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) with regular spaces.

    Please do read it yourself, and do so with an open mind.

    It seems clear to me that     The New York Times did Rubio dirty in their characterization of the directive. The Times story, credited to reporters Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, ran under the headline “At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke.”

    — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

    Engagement sells?

    Wallpaper*, a UK publication I generally enjoy (and cite elsewhere in this post), is one of many examples where a chosen narrative framed the piece. However, they did one thing to help: they introduced us to Calibri’s designer:

    Lucas de Groot, font designer.

    His comments, directly quoted (from HackerNews — sorry — but also via DF):

    The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable. Calibri was specifically designed to enhance readability on modern computer screens and was selected by Microsoft in 2007 to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. There were sound reasons for moving away from Times: Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman tend to appear more distorted. While serif fonts are well-suited to high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, on typical office screens the serifs introduce unnecessary visual noise and can be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.

    Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman—a typeface older than the current president—presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.

    Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.

    — Lucan de Groot, LucasFonts

    I don’t know whether there’s much needed beyond that takedown. Okay, maybe this:

    [Y]ou can still make good typography with system fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy. Not by typographers. Not by you.

    — Matthew Butterick, “Typography in Ten Minutes”

    In case all you encountered were the headlines, now you know there was more to the story.

    See also: The Scourge of Arial, A Brief History of Times New Roman, and Typefaces for Dyslexia, all from Daring Fireball, and The Guardian‘s fun Calibri: Is this Really the World’s Wokest Font?

    While I’m at it: word of the year
    Getty stock image, made awesome with brown.

    Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

    “It’s such an illustrative word,” Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow told The Associated Press. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying, and a little bit ridiculous.”

    To select its Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster’s editors review data on which words rose in search volume and usage, then reach consensus on which term best captures the year.

    — Benj Edwards, Ars Technica

    I’d like to suggest an alternative: “brown.”

    Brown is the color you don’t want to be in the U.S. right now, lest you face legalized discrimination, illegal arrest — or worse. Brown is the color of the FUD the “Health Department” employs to prevent use of lifesaving treatments and vaccines. Brown is the substance, or lack thereof, the United States exports worldwide in the place of aid, education, fairness, or leadership. Brown is the color of the ink the Supreme Court uses to write opinions stripping people of their rights. Brown is the color of the flag a supine Congress continues to wave, surrendering its authority. Brown is the color of everything that comes from the stool-sample spectacular otherwise known as the U.S. Executive. And, of course, brown is today’s engagement-driven social media, a fecosystem of algorithms and AI built to exploit people for profit.

    Red Scare? Been there, done that. Welcome to the new.

    The Brown Scare.

    [/soapbox]

    Briefly: Jaguar

    On multiple occasions, I predicted that JLR might actually succeed at making something interesting out of Jaguar — in the face of, well, the Internet. They’re still working on it:

    The actual new Jaguar previewed by the Type 00 concept.

    Alas, the world has changed around them; EVs are no longer what they were, and basing a new, ultra-high-end product line exclusively around an EV platform might not work out quite the way they’d hoped.

    “Are we seeing the back of Jaguar?” Wallpaper* asks.

    Frankly, the pullback from EVs is beyond stupid — ask anyone who owns one — but then, “stupid” is something to be proud of these days. (I know: soapbox. Sorry.)

    What’s important regarding Jaguar at this moment in time is, supposedly, the company has pulled so far back that it fired its chief designer, Gerry McGovern.

    Or not. There are questions.

    Professor Gerry McGovern, OBE, in 2021.

    “It’s long been rumoured that McGovern was personally liked by Ratan Tata, who ran JRL’s parent company,” The Drive quotes. “Mr. Tata passed away last year, leaving Autocar India to speculate that ‘key support’ for Mr. McGovern may have waned in the corporate titan’s absence.”

    That was on December 2nd. On the 15th, rumors started circulating that the news stories weren’t correct: Jaguar has reportedly stated it’s “untrue” that McGovern was “terminated.”

    Time will tell.

    Special Bonus #6: How ’bout a mash-up? Cars and type: Volvo has a new corporate font, Centum, designed “with safety in mind.” (Naturally.) Dezeen has the story.

    December’s photography round-up
    A royal competition
    Runner-up, “Between Auroras and Dawn — A South Pole Sunrise After the Longest Night on Earth.” Photograph by Aman Chokshi.

    See the winners of the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2025, ten images that showcase “the best scientific photography worldwide across multiple categories, celebrating the overlap between compelling art and influential science.” (Via PetaPixel.)

    Nature’s best science photos of 2025
    “Rings of Fire,” lenticular clouds, Villarrica volcano, Chile. Photography by Francisco Negroni.

    Nature’s annual picks for favorite science photography reflect a diverse range that’s always worth checking out. While it includes the skydiving image covered briefly last month without appropriate comment, the others delight (especially the sloth). Props, too, for the excellent web design on show here.

    International Landscape Photographer of the Year 2025

    Three examples among the twenty winning — and astonishing and inspiring — images:

    “Morning in Dolomites,” Italy. Photography by Martin Morávek.
    “Shiprock,” New Mexico. Photograph by Karol Nienartowicz.
    “Starry Night.” Photograph by Joyce Bealer.

    The rules of the competition state that all images must be taken by the photographer and AI-generated images of any kind are prohibited. Photographers are required to edit the images themselves as the competition “consider[s] this part of the art of landscape photography.” Nice.

    The competition’s website is unfortunately offline as of this writing (Dec 31st), but see more at PetaPixel or This is Colossal.

    Northern Lights Photographer of the Year 2025
    “Arctic Rain,” Tromso, Norway. Photograph by Vincent Beudez.

    “Capture the Atlas has unveiled the winners of its eighth annual Northern Lights Photographer of the Year contest, and the 15 award-winning photos […] are as beautiful as they are inspiring,” PetaPixel writes.

    I remember lying on my back on the rocks by the Maine beach where I grew up, watching with wonder at the natural display. It’s a pleasure to revisit, however vicariously.

    Otherworldly forest photos
    Photograph by Michelle Blancke.
    Photograph by Michelle Blancke.

    “‘I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that our perceived reality is shaped by our minds and reflecting our inner world,’ says artist Michelle Blancke, whose ethereal photographs of trees, glens, and foliage invite us into a familiar yet uncanny world,” writes This is Colossal. Great stuff.

    Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards 2025
    “Now Which Direction Is My Nest,” United Kingdom. Photograph by Alison Tuck.

    Have yourself a smile.

    The “AI-inside” camera

    At MacFilos, Andrew has a new piece of kit — an “unexpected trade deal benefit” — that’s capable of making all his images everything he’s ever dreamed of:

    AI image generated by Andrew Owen-Price.

    “May we all remain capable of laughing and smiling through these turbulent times,” he writes. Yes, please!

    Wishing you a safe and happy New Year.

  • Beautifully Briefed, 25.11: More than Turkey Here

    Beautifully Briefed, 25.11: More than Turkey Here

    This month, the usual fontastic newness and photographic excellence. and I veer into nostalgia — maybe, perhaps, soapboxing — for the web’s “old days.” Also, for those in the U.S., I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Pack up your leftovers and settle in.

    University Press Coverage on Spine

    This month’s column has some good stuff — On Gaslighting has been a favorite for a minute, and Post-Weird is pretty much guaranteed to make an appearance in January — but I thought I’d give the first of two shout-outs to the University of Georgia:

    Cover design by Erin Kirk.

    Check out my regular column at Spine. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the other UGA mention below.

    50, Mega: It’s all auld Neue
    CreativeBoom: 50 Fonts for 2025
    Hatton by Pengram Pengram.

    In their annual feature (previously), CreativeBoom lists fifty fonts that “will be popular with designers in 2025.” Most are paid, a few are free, and several are awesome.

    Neue Machina by Pengram Pengram.

    It’s sometimes hard to see — yes, a new website is on the radar — but there are links in the captions if you’re interested. (Just to the website; I don’t do affiliate links, full stop.)

    RST Thermal by Reset.

    See the whole list.

    Megazoid
    DJR’s mega effort. The website is cool, too.

    Described by Kottke as having “Radio Shack vibes,” David Jonathan Ross — DJR — brings us this retro-futuristic fantastic-ness, to coin a term.

    Auld English
    A “playful experiment” that is, in fact, quite a bit more.

    In addition to the “Mock Tutor” long-s character (optional), it’ll even (temporarily) change your spelling to proper English, none of this American stuff. Oh, and it looks properly auld school. Free for personal use, with licensing for professional use.

    Special Bonus #1: 90 years of Penguin type, brought to you by CreativeBoom.

    I must be getting old, part one: griping
    Needy software
    A detail of the advertisement in the print edition (!) of The Onion.

    The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

    — About Us page, theonion.com

    “It is an incredibly competitive market for Creative Software. Adobe knows the best way to stay relevant in a space with so many options is to provide their customers with incremental adjustments and AI-powered conveniences to improve their birthday invitations on a monthly basis, all at a fluctuating yearly price point,” The Onion tells PetaPixel in an email. “This is the kind of ingenuity and integrity we are proud to advertise in America’s Finest News Source.”

    Meanwhile, Pixel Envy points us to a post by Nakita Prokopov — no, I’ve never heard of him either — with an incredibly salient point: that software has gone from something we need … to something that needs us.

    The company needs to announce a new feature and makes a popup window about it. Read this again: The company. Needs. It’s not even about the user. Never has been.

    Both of those are worth a read — but it’s the notation after the quote that makes the Pixel Envy post special: mention of Photoshop’s “Quiet Mode.”

    Wait. What?

    That’s right: Adobe actually recognizes that it’s gone so overboard with it’s notifications, blue dots, pop-ups, and helpful “feature introductions” that it’s invented a preference setting to reduce — not eliminate, ’cause — interruptions to your workflow.

    Now all they need to do is bring it to InDesign, Lightroom, Illustrator, ….

    Cracker Barrel: falsehoods, cheesy falsehoods, and statistics

    CreativeBoom usually works for me: more content than not, if you know what I mean. (The article on typography and Penguin linked above, for instance.) Alas, their recent article on Cracker Barrel — “The Cracker Barrel rebrand: a $100M masterclass in brand value” — so widely missed the mark that it’s shameful.

    All because the author is speaking to a fixed narrative instead of the facts.

    “When Cracker Barrel’s shiny new look caused its stock to drop by almost $200 million, the internet laughed. But buried in the chaos was a golden lesson: what happens when you forget that brand isn’t just visuals—it’s value, emotion, and culture, all rolled into one,” writes Cat How, a founder and executive creative director of How&How branding agency and, apparently, her real name. (“A former journalist and design critic, she leads climate and mentorship initiatives including GetSet and GetEven, and […] an Ambassador for UN Women,” her bio reads.)

    The thing is: her journalism is at issue here. But what gives me, basically a nobody, the right to say that? Well, thank Brand New.

    That website is subscription, so I’ll have to summarize their brief post. No, to heck with that, I’ll quote it in its entirety:

    Cyabra, which offers an AI platform that shields companies and governments by uncovering fake profiles, harmful narratives, GenAI content, deepfakes, and other digital misinformation, analyzed the Cracker Barrel backlash and found that 21% of profiles discussing its logo change were fake accounts orchestrating a coordinated disinformation campaign that, in turn, triggered thousands of direct engagements from real profiles, which is when things start to snowball. This, apparently, is a full-fledged business known as Rage Farms, deploying bots to purposely harm brands. 

    — Armin Vit, Brand New

    Those twenty-one percent of profiles discussing Cracker Barrel’s logo change were identified “as fake accounts orchestrating a coordinated disinformation campaign, whose […] content reached over 4.4 million potential views and thousands of authentic profiles’ engagements, [and that] manufactured outrage correlated with a 10.5% stock price drop,” and, viola, $100M in market value, Cyabra writes.

    “Disinformation-as-a-Service” has become a profitable, global criminal enterprise: low-cost, high-impact bot networks hired to attack and destroy businesses and individuals … like you. And the social media platforms that could stop them won’t, because chaos is profitable. Propelled by AI, these strikes are targeting brands big and small. And the financial consequences are real — sliding stock prices, damaged brand equity, ruined careers.

    — Mark Schaefer, businessgrow.com

    That second quote, a follow-up to Cyabra’s post, is worth reading.

    Now, to be clear: without complete information, Cat How’s post at CreativeBoom seems legit. But with that information, published almost a week before, it’s exactly what those fake profiles were after: justifying something when it shouldn’t be — and damaging reputations, including Cat How’s.

    “One wonders how often this occurs,” he said … without a trace of snark.

    Special Bonus #2: Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era. “This is likely not the first story you have read about a freelancer managing to land bylines in prestigious publications thanks to dependency on A.I. tools,” Pixel Envy‘s Nick Heer writes, “but it is one told very well.”

    Special Bonus #3: Things do not necessarily need to be an outright fake to contribute to the problem. Many of you might have seen this image:

    Accomplished, complicated, and … not quite what it seems.

    PetaPixel speaks glowingly of the process, the coordination, and laps up the marketing. But: it’s a composite. Interesting parts made with a good deal of effort — but made into something implied to be awesome when, in fact, it’s Photoshop.

    I must be getting old, part two: those were the days

    Elizabeth Spiers, “Requiem for Early Blogging”:

    The growth of social media in particular has wiped out a particular kind of blogging that I sometimes miss: a text-based dialogue between bloggers that required more thought and care than dashing off 180 or 240 characters and calling it a day. In order to participate in the dialogue, you had to invest some effort in what media professionals now call “building an audience” and you couldn’t do that simply by shitposting or responding in facile ways to real arguments.

    There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.

    — Elizabeth Spiers

    A progressive columnist, Spiers makes the argument that it is possible to work against the rage that so dominates at the moment; if you’ve not heard of her, she says, “Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com.”

    As a reminder, I don’t participate in social media. What I have to say is said here, on the record, under my own name, with all the consequences that entails. (Especially this month.) I’m old school enough — I’ve been blogging since the ’90s — to expect want any responses to be posted in a similar venue: a conversation between people rather than a fight between usernames.

    Special Bonus #4: Doc Searls, old school emeritus, suggests that it is, in fact, appropriate to capitalize: Internet and Web, even if there’s a “the” involved. On the other hand, Dave Winer, arguably the most emeritus of the old school, doesn’t. Section 7.85 of the Chicago Manual of Style says no — but Doc’s argument is a strong one.

    While we’re on the subject of social media…

    Short-form video platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now a major part of daily life for many people. Our synthesis of 71 studies revealed that greater engagement with these platforms is associated with poorer cognitive and mental health in both youths and adults.

    — 2025 American Psychological Association study

    One fix? Art. According to The Guardian:

    The research clearly shows the stress-reducing properties of viewing original art and its ability to simultaneously excite, engage and arouse us. Stress hormones and inflammatory markers […] are linked to a wide range of health problems, from heart disease and diabetes to anxiety and depression. The fact that viewing original art lowered these markers suggests that cultural experiences may play a real role in protecting both mind and body.

    — Dr Tony Woods, researcher, King’s College London

    “It’s always a good time to look at art,” Kottke writes, pointing to Korean artist Lee Hyun-Joung’s work, Poetic Texture:

    Artwork by Lee Hyun-Joung.

    We all need museum breaks — make time whenever you can. Even if it’s from home.

    Special Bonus #5: I would argue that the average reader of this blog would suggest books, too; check out LitHub‘s interviews with National Book Awards Finalists for some worthwhile titles.

    November’s photography round-up
    UGA: Historic Rural Churches

    For a while, I had it on my list to do a photographic tour of rural and abandoned churches across Georgia. There are a ton, and some of them are quite photogenic.

    This one in Talbotton,1I took the opportunity to remaster these photographs to both correct an unnoticed error and for better consistency between the photographs taken in 2022 and those in 2025. for instance:

    Historic Zion Episcopal Church, Circa 1848, Talbotton, Georgia
    Zion Episcopal Church (Detail #3), Talbotton, Georgia

    Alas, that project faded in importance, partially because I learned of the first volume of … you guessed it, Historic Rural Churches of Georgia, from UGA Press.

    Now there’s a second volume — and a bundle — available. Check ’em out.

    Oregon’s Trail of Tears, photographed

    While we’re on the subject of interesting photography projects, this one is worth notice: retracing one of America’s (all-too-many) Trail of Tears:

    Photography by Nolan Streitberger.

    By any measure, photographer Nolan Streitberger has built a practice that bridges art, history, and the profoundly personal. His work, particularly his acclaimed project Oregon’s Trail of Tears, transforms beautiful photography into both historical document and dialogue, a means of reclaiming memory and giving voice to stories long overlooked.

    — Kate Garibaldi, PetaPixel

    Done manually, using a wet-plate, Eastman No. 33A large-format camera from 1935, he’s done something extraordinary. Take a moment and explore this great work.

    Where George Orwell wrote 1984

    Another large-format discovery:

    Jura Stream, Scotland. Photograph by Craig Easton.

    “Easton’s interior photographs of household items perfectly capture the simplicity of Orwell’s life[.] Collectively, they create an atmospheric vision of Orwell’s time on the island and the mood, desire and hope he experienced,” PetaPixel writes.

    Table Still Life, Scotland. Photograph by Craig Easton.

    Get the story.

    Close-Up Photographer of the Year shortlist, 2025
    Fatal Jump. Photograph by Bence Mate.

    Some great stuff to peruse — admittedly, most long-list than shortlist — in multiple categories of natural subjects at the website. The winners will be announced in January.

    Farewell to Autumn. Photograph by Catherine Illsley.

    Via This is Colossal.

    Nature Photographer of the Year, 2025
    Overall Winner: Sundance. Photograph by Åsmund Keilen.

    Another in the “annual treat” category, this European contest features some incredibly accomplished work.

    Chamois. Photograph by Jakubowski Radomir.

    See a round-up at PetaPixel or visit the contest’s website.

    British Photography Awards, 2025

    Standard photography contest, perhaps, but I swear there’s a bit of that uniquely British humor showing.

    Bar Hair Day. Photograph by Jayne Bond.

    If you’ve ever been close up to a pelican, you’ll know that they’re neither small nor particularly friendly; this great shot ably demonstrates both.

    While we’re on the subject of neither small nor particulately (sic) friendly:

    Shadows of Industry. Photograph by Harvey Tomlinson.

    Imagine living there. No, don’t: go enjoy the other winners instead. (Via PetaPixel.)

    Royal Photographic Society Awards, 2025

    The Royal Photographic Society Awards began 147 years ago — the world’s oldest — celebrating photography as an art form.

    This shot, for instance, taken without a camera:

    Full Moon, Hawthorn. Artwork by Susan Derges.

    The RPS notes that Derges’ photographic work explores humanity’s relationship to the natural world, often by bringing natural phenomena to life in the photographic medium in new and exciting ways. For example, Derges has exposed the physical movement of rivers and oceans onto photosensitive materials at night using moonlight, carefully composing plants and other natural matter in front of photosensitive paper, and then exposing it to light, and exposing photosensitive materials to sound waves, letting the frequencies create the final prints.

    — Jeremy Gray, PetaPixel

    Plenty of other deserving artists, as well, but they use cameras:

    Artic Heroes, Ittoqqortoomiit Storm. Photograph by Ragnar Axelsson.

    See the website for all the honorees. (Via PetaPixel.)

    Best nature photography, 2026 showcase

    No, you read that right: the first winners of next year, from the North American Nature Photography Association:

    Cormorant Diving. Photograph by Kevin Lohman.

    Most of these contain detail best seen at larger sizes. (See the website.) Well, okay, except maybe this one, which is cute at any size:

    Fox Kit with Helper. Photograph by Marcia Walters.
    Thank you for visiting

    That’s it from here for November. I still owe you coverage of AIGA’s 50 Books | 50 Covers (update: posted); weather permitting, there will be a new photography gallery mid-month; there will, of course, another Beautifully Briefed at the turn of 2026; and, don’t forget my annual Favorite Book Covers post mid-January. Please have a happy and healthy holiday season.

    • 1
      I took the opportunity to remaster these photographs to both correct an unnoticed error and for better consistency between the photographs taken in 2022 and those in 2025.
  • Beautifully Briefed 25.10: [Blank] of the Century

    Beautifully Briefed 25.10: [Blank] of the Century

    In this episode, design whims and wins, fontastic links, a Toyota Century, and the monthly round-up of great photography bracket some thoughts on — what else? — AI, especially as it relates to art. Grab a beverage, brush, or a comfy chair, and let’s dig in.

    This Month’s Spine
    New York University Press. Cover design by Devon Manney, art director, Rachel Perkins.

    One could argue that this cover — and title — could work well even if the word “climate” was removed. See the whole list of University Press goodness.

    And check back for a special, mid-month post in honor of University Press week, Nov. 10–14.

    Good Movies as Old Books, Revisited

    Let’s start with something great: Steven Heller highlights the “talent and imagination” of Matt Stevens (previously) as the paperback version of his book, Good Movies as Old Books, becomes available.

    Cover design by Matt Stevens.
    Cover design by Matt Stevens.

    “My goal with the style was to try new things and create interesting combinations. Oftentimes, I was trying to do something that had not been done for a particular film,” Stevens says. Short and fun, the PRINT interview is worth a few minutes of your time.

    Old-Fashioned Methods, Delightfully Off-Kilter Results

    While we’re on the subject of movies, let’s slip closer to … well, what passes for reality these days: items “steeped in human anxieties and fever dreams.” It’s Nice That highlights poster and title design for films by Greek artist Vasilis Marmatakis.

    Design by Vasilis Marmatakis.

    With design, much like life itself, Vasilis says that his posters are his honest reactions to the films. The same approach runs like a red thread throughout his work, each poster leaning a little too heavily into one of the film’s themes. […] In Bugonia, Vasilis consciously restricts superfluous elements and allows the frames to breathe.

    — Arman Kahn, It’s Nice That
    Design by Vasilis Marmatakis.

    Even the font — and how it’s used — is interesting: the freely-available Churchward Roundsquare, customized with brush and ink. That and much more is discussed in this great article.

    New Vintage Classics Series

    It’s unusual not to relish a new set of reissues from Vintage, and the new editions of Julio Cortázar are no exception:

    Book design by Stephen Smith; art director, Suzanne Dean.

    The always great — and not mentioned often enough — Casual Optimist has more.

    Special Bonus #1: Via Kottke, Na Kim’s self-portrait:

    Fascist Posters, Italian Style

    Also via Kottke are these posters, which evoke a certain … something:

    In a fascist movement inspired by art, how does the fascist government influence the artists living in its grasp? This exhibition explores how Benito Mussolini’s government created a broad-reaching culture that grew with and into the Futurist movement to claw into advertising, propaganda, and the very heart of the nation he commanded.

    — Poster House exhibition The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy.

    The exhibit features “some of the best posters produced during the worst period in modern Italian history.” See more.

    Special Bonus #2: While we’re perusing the poster department, Archinect‘s ongoing lecture series (previously) has another winner:

    Fontastic Fall
    New for October

    CreativeBoom‘s monthly roundup is out, and while Grundtvig is retrotastic and the three-axis variable Pranzo is accompanied by some great illustrations, it’s Jovie that I’d love to use in print project:

    “Jovie’s character emerges through its soft-serif approach, which tempers traditional serif authority with contemporary approachability. Playful italics, expressive alternates, swashes, and ligatures provide designers with a rich typographic palette, whilst maintaining coherent family relationships across all variations,” they note. (Another variable-width item, too.) Great stuff.

    Custom Type is Everywhere, It Seems

    Meanwhile, custom type for branding is becoming the norm. In another article, CreativeBoom explains why: “Bespoke letterforms are no longer a “nice-to-have” and they are increasingly seen as a strategic necessity[.] Type has become the glue that holds their voice together,” they write.

    Those letters are your brand’s voice. They do the heavy lifting, they carry personality, and they create instant recognition – sometimes without the need for any other distinctive assets. […] Typography is everywhere in a brand system – packaging, products, campaigns, interfaces. When you build your own, you’re not at the mercy of someone else’s design choices, and you get a voice that’s tuned to your values, your audiences, and your long-term ambitions.

    — Frankie Guzi, business director, Studio DRAMA.

    Elizabeth Goodspeed (previously) agrees, mostly. “For most of the 20th century, branding treated typography as background, not backbone,” she writes. But now, brands are recognizing that, “[a]s a primary container for meaning, typography inevitably carries an enormous share of that emotional load.”

    An exception to the rule: a type gem — with legs! — from 1971.

    But, she cautions, “[s]peed also feeds a kind of conceptual shallowness. With so many studios drawing type, the market has been flooded with fonts that solve narrow visual problems but can’t stand up to long-term use. Too often, new brand fonts cling to a single gimmick while leaving the structure of the letters untouched.”

    Read the rest at It’s Nice That.

    AI All the things
    The Oatmeal, penned by Matthew Inman, has some thoughts on AI.

    The new-to-me FlowingData — via Kottke’s rolodex feature — first pointed me to this piece, and it’s gotten a ton of press. In summary, Inman suggests that AI art causes a certain discomfort; that, perhaps, AI art even deserves air quotes around the word art because it’s somehow less than “actual” art.

    Indeed, much of that press has been approving: a pile-on of people (not that such things happen on the internet) saying, “yes, AI art deserves those air quotes. It is less.”

    One of my favorite reactions was from Nick Heer:

    A good question to ask when looking at an artwork is “who made this?”, and learning more about what motivated them and what influences they had. This is a vast opportunity for learning about art of all mediums, and it even applies to commercial projects. Sometimes I look up the portfolios of photographers I find on stock image sites; their non-stock work is often interesting and different. There is potential for asking both questions of A.I.-assisted works in the hands of interesting artists. But it is too often a tool used to circumvent the process entirely, producing work that has nothing to offer beyond its technical accomplishment.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    “Who made this?” is the right question — to start. But let’s take that a step further.

    John Gruber, at Daring Fireball, quotes the piece: “[When] I find out that it’s AI art[,] I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bit bored. This feeling isn’t a choice.” Then says that he fundamentally disagrees with that premise:

    I think it very much is a choice. If your opinion about a work of art changes after you find out which tools were used to make it, or who the artist is or what they’ve done, you’re no longer judging the art. You’re making a choice not to form your opinion based on the work itself, but rather on something else. […] Stanley Kubrick said, “The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” If an image, a song, a poem, or video evokes affection in your heart, and then that affection dissipates when you learn what tools were used to create it, that’s not a test of the work of art itself. To me it’s no different than losing affection for a movie only upon learning that special effects were created digitally, not practically. Or whether a movie — or a photograph — was shot using a digital camera or on film. Or whether a novel was written using a computer or with pen and paper.

    — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

    “Good art is being made with AI tools, though, and more — much more — is coming,” he says. Over the next few days, he cited some examples, including David Hockney’s art made with a Xerox machine, and then this:

    Jonathan Hoefler’s ongoing series, called Apocryphal Inventions.

    The objects in the Apocryphal Inventions series are technical chimeras, intentional misdirections coaxed from the generative AI platform Midjourney. Instead of iterating on the system’s early drafts to create ever more accurate renderings of real-world objects, creator Jonathan Hoefler subverted the system to refine and intensify its most intriguing misunderstandings, pushing the software to create beguiling, aestheticized nonsense. Some images have been retouched to make them more plausible; others have been left intact, appearing exactly as generated by the software. The accompanying descriptions, written by the author, offer fictitious backstories rooted in historical fact, which suggest how each of these inventions might have come to be.

    These images represent some of AI’s most intriguing answers to confounding questions — an inversion of the more urgent debate, in which it is humanity that must confront the difficult and existential questions posed by artificial intelligence.

    — Jonathan Hoefler

    “This is art,” Gruber says, with no other text. I don’t think any other is needed.

    On a Related Note
    This is AI.

    “The top 200 photographers requested by Midjourney users have been exclusively revealed to PetaPixel — and it’s a world-famous, still active photographer that tops the list.” I bet you can guess who that is.

    This is, in fact, the majority of what Inman was thinking — or at least, feeling — when he drew out an argument on why AI art can be such a let-down, both intellectually and emotionally. The above “photograph” is both awesome and hugely disappointing at the same time.

    Further Reading

    I’m not qualified to speak with any authority on the state or potential future of AI, AGI (artificial general intelligence), or the continuing convergence of AI with … well, all the things. I will say that, to me, there’s a palpable sense of bubble going on; whether financial, material, or resource requirements, it feels like something is going to need to give fairly soon.

    Below are several articles on the intersection of AI with life, culture, or art that I found valuable. If you can set aside a few minutes, the information provided could be helpful in the quest to stay informed:

    Side Note: I’ve dropped the punctuation in “AI.” Not unlike capitalizing “Internet,” I think we’ve crossed that bridge.

    Special Bonus #3: AI apparently overuses em dashes, something that has, frankly, caused me to use them less. Which is a good thing — I overuse them. But then, I am a professional. [That’s only funny if you’ve read the link. —Ed.]

    The Century Coupé Concept

    Toyota (the company) has reorganized: there are now three levels. There’s Toyota (the car line), for the mass market; Lexus, Japan’s first answer to BMW et al from the late ’80s and also very much mass market (if targeted differently); and now, to compete in the ultra-high-end market, Century:

    Long hood, imposing “grille” — trend, recycling, or cliché, depending on outlook.
    The no-rear-window thing continues to grow in popularity. (For “cocooning.”) Hmph.

    Powertrain is yet to be determined; the rumors suggest it’ll be available both with a combustion engine (possibly a V12) and electric drive. In the case of the latter, owners will, of course, be able to send their driver off to get the thing charged while they lunch or plot takeovers — no range anxiety here.

    Century’s logo is a phoenix.

    Car geeks will know that Toyota’s Century sedan model has been around forever. It’s always been badged as a Toyota, and is aimed at Japanese executives and members of state (and will, in fact, still be produced). It was joined a few years ago by a SUV that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. Both existing Century models available only in Japan and China.

    The 2025 Century SUV. That D-pillar absolutely “borrows” from the Cullinan.

    Toyota has decided to make those three models into a new brand that’s just called, “Century.” It’s going to be set up with exclusive dealers, eventually be available worldwide, and compete with Bentley’s new EXP 15 (previously) and Rolls-Royce’s … everything.

    And, of course, Jaguar. The elephant in the room get a mention here because it’s looking more and more like JLR made the right call in targeting one-percenters with out-there, vaguely coupe-like designs. Because if the Century SUV resembles a Cullinan, the new coupé concept looks like a cross between the Jaguar Type 00 concept and said Bentley:

    The Bentley EXP15, top, with the Jaguar Type 00, bottom.

    Very much unlike the Jag, which is low and could possibly be described as “sleek,” the Toyota has a higher stance; a coupé/sedan and SUV mix seems to be a new answer to the so-called “death of the sedan.” Volvo’s ES 90 might also apply here.

    Bear in mind that I’m not talking about the coupé-style SUVs (BMW’s X6, for instance), which are a different animal — at least for now. It’s possible the whole class of “coupe-like things” might converge in the not-too-distant future.

    That being said, a member of that new class of vehicle being aimed at the chauffeur-driven market is new.

    The glass divider is to allow the chauffeured their privacy.

    One more item: The old-school isn’t going quietly.

    Did someone mention grille? (Lit, naturally.)
    Leaving the hood long behind.

    Mercedes is, arguably, the best (non-American manufacturer) at displaying “gangster” qualities. Oh, and check out the awesomely-retro interior:

    Note the lack of screens amongst that vintage style. And yes, velour is “in.”

    Read more about the Toyota (teaser or intro, both at The Drive) or Mercedes (The Drive, Wallpaper*).

    Special Bonus #4: Audi poached the Type 00’s designer. His first showing is the Concept C, Audi’s return to form, called “radical simplicity.” It’s a cross between their sports-driven R8 and designer-driver TT:

    Love the wheels. The grille less so (there have been dictator comparisons), and the lack of rear window not at all.
    October’s Photography Round-Up
    2x Film
    Grays Fisheries, Bradford (UK), left standing during inner city slum clearance. Photograph by Ian Beesley, 1977.

    From an interesting and moving feature at MacFilos, “Capturing the decline of industries and communities with a Leica M6”:

    At my recent career retrospective exhibition “Life” at Salt’s Mill, Saltaire (a world heritage centre near Bradford, West Yorkshire, England), a man came to talk to me. He said, “You won’t remember me, but I remember you. I worked in a camera shop in Bradford, and you were always coming in to buy rolls of black and white film. It makes me so proud to think that the film I sold you created some of these wonderful photographs.”

    I take this as a great compliment and a very moving one. It is one of the reasons why I decided to donate my entire archive of negatives, prints, notebooks (over 200,000 items) to Bradford City Art Galleries and Museums. I am hanging on to my Leica M6 for a bit longer, but at some point, it will be re-united with all the negatives it created.

    — Ian Beesley, MacFilos
    “Rocky Mountains On Wetplate Collodion,” Canada. Photograph by Bill Hao.

    “The Analog Sparks 2025 International Film Photography Awards celebrate analog photography as a medium and elevate the best film photographers worldwide,” PetaPixel writes. Some excellent reminders that sometimes, the old ways are still the best ways.

    Color and Pano
    “Beholders No. 1.” Photograph by Li Sun.

    “All About Photo Magazine unveiled the winners of its latest competition: Colors. The 25 prize-winning photographers demonstrate how powerful color can be in images, whether it’s vibrant, subtle, or minimal,” PetaPixel writes.

    To be honest: at first, I thought this was a coin-operated binocular thing you see at attractions or overlooks, and laughed out loud. Alas, the laughter died away when I realized it was, in fact, CCTV — an overlook of an entirely different kind. I guess there’s a certain irony in the “face.”

    The Mirror, Valencia, Spain. Photograph by Anto Camacho Villaneuva.

    It is possible to recognize a Santiago Calatrava building immediately, with its soaring, often winged structures. (The World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York springs to mind, for instance.) This panoramic photograph captures two of them — nice.

    A press release from Epson, the contest’s sponsor, notes that this year there was a “prevalence of ultra-wide panoramas and increasingly innovative perspectives, including very low angles, very close-up subjects, and aerial photography,” including the above. PetaPixel has more.

    Birds and Wildlife
    “Snowstorm,” Germany. Bronze Award, Best Portrait. Photograph by Luca Lorenz.

    “The 2025 Bird Photographer of the Year gives a lesson in planning and patience,” This is Colossal writes about this year’s contest winners (specifically, regarding the photo seen at the right in the header image) — but getting the cold shot, above, wasn’t an easy thing either. (See also: PetaPixel‘s plumage article.)

    “Ghost Town Visitor,” Kolmanskop, Namibia. Winner, Urban Wildlife and Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025. Photograph by Wim van den Heever.

    From PetaPixel‘s coverage of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 contest: “Capturing the unusual intersection between nature and abandoned urban spaces, Wim’s photograph is a haunting yet captivating image of a brown hyena wandering through the skeletal remains of Kolmanskop, Namibia’s long-deserted diamond mining town. The shot was taken with a camera trap and is the result of a decade-long effort that began when Van den Heever first discovered the animal’s tracks at the site.” [Emphasis mine.] See This is Colossal‘s post, too.

    Comedy and Dogs

    To round out this month’s super-long post — thanks for bearing with me — something from the light-hearted department:

    “It is tough being a duck.” Photograph by John Speirs.
    “Bad Hair Day!” Photograph by Christy Grinton.

    The Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards, 2025 edition, brings us 40 … um, moments. Awesome. PetaPixel has all the winners.

    “Suppertime,” winner of the Open category. Photograph by Katie Brockman.

    “Good Boys and Girls,” PetaPixel barks, regarding the 2025 Dog Photographer of the Year. (In the name of equal-opportunity pet celebration, I chose one that includes cats.)

    Have a great Halloween. If you’re in the US, be sure to vote, Tuesday, Nov. 4th. And, don’t forget to check back for the special Spine post, Nov. 10th. Thank you!

  • Beautifully Briefed 25.9: Generous

    Beautifully Briefed 25.9: Generous

    It’s fontastic, illustrative, and full of imagery: your beginning-of-fall design round-up here on Foreword. (And A.I., because it’s everywhere.) Enjoy.

    This month on Spine

    A fun and interesting University Press Coverage post on Spine when you have a moment, including this title from the University of Nebraska:

    That was not a simple photograph to set up. Awesome.

    Generative Book Cover Design

    How 2 Shout Media presents a how-to: 20 cover design prompts for ChatGPT. “Creating the perfect book cover starts with the right vision — and that’s where ChatGPT transforms from a writing assistant into your creative design partner.” (Emphasis theirs.)

    There are, for instance, specifics on “the anatomy of an effective prompt” and how to customize the provided templates; they even provide bonus templates to save and reuse, including one to quickly iterate on previous output.

    The article contains some good advice, honestly, but the most relevant suggestion — to “[t]hink of ChatGPT as [a] creative director who provides vision and direction rather than final artwork” — is buried at the bottom of a fairly long page. I’m willing to get there are more than a few (especially in the self-publishing space) who read this as the definitive how-to . . . possibly without judging the output versus what a professional can create.

    This cover sample is far and away the best of the eight illustrated options:

    The prompt: “Design a literary fiction cover for ‘[Title]’ using a single continuous brushstroke that forms both an abstract landscape and a human profile when viewed differently—an optical illusion revealing loneliness and connection. Executed in indigo ink wash on cream paper texture. The brushstroke starts thick and confident, becoming increasingly fragmented and uncertain. Minimal color palette: indigo, cream, with one tiny spot of cadmium red as a focal point (perhaps a bird or flower). Title integrated into the negative space using a classic Garamond variant, appearing to be part of the original artwork. Author name in small, understated caps at bottom. Overall feeling: wistful, sophisticated, gallery-worthy.”

    Take a moment to compare the output with the prompt, and you’ll see the generated output ignores several of the items, but overall, is kinda — sorta — close.

    The other examples not so much. But I’m not going to spoil the whole thing: Go and see for yourself.

    For now, I’d suggest that book design professionals — those that make a living from the art and science that is publishing excellence — are safe. Other professionals in the industry recognize what talent is and how valuable it is, and the designers themselves can take advantage of the power that some of these models offer to help brainstorm.

    That said, today’s A.I. models are gaining quality at a rapid rate. In 5–10 years, at most, publishers (and authors self-publishing) that might not recognize that they’re best served by professionals — or those who don’t have the budget, despite the recognition — will have access to what might very well be “good enough.”

    From Your Intelligence to Artificial Intelligence

    So, where do the A.I. engines get their training material? From you and yours, of course; to quote a source we’ll get to in a moment, “[i]n writing this […] I am acutely aware it will become part of a training data set.” Some sites, such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, have seen an exponential upswing in traffic — all from the so-called “bots,” programs sweeping internet content into the never-satisfied regurgitation chamber that is today’s ChatGPT, Claude, and others.1One of the reasons my photography, as presented both here on Foreword and in the galleries, is both relatively lo-res and watermarked is to preserve a sense of ownership; likewise, one of the (many) reasons I no longer participate in social media is due to posts specifically being used to train A.I. — Instagram/Meta, for instance.

    Ars Technica and Pixel Envy both highlight a new program, modeled on Really Simple Syndication (RSS), designed to “block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.”

    To quote Doug Leeds, the founder, “A.I. companies know that they need a constant stream of fresh content to keep their tools relevant and to continually innovate.” The “Really Simple Licensing” (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that’s designed to block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.

    Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train A.I[.]
    The new standard supports “a range of licensing, usage, and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response).”

    — RSL Press Release

    But — and it’s a big “but” — RSL is only one response to the problem. Another is to wall content off entirely, breaking one of the most valuable qualities of the internet itself: its openness.

    We’re watching the construction of a fundamentally different internet, one where access is controlled by gatekeepers and paywalls rather than governed by open protocols and user choice. And we’re doing it in the name of stopping AI companies, even though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of those same large tech companies while making the internet less useful for everyone else.

    — Mike Mesnick, TechDirt

    Here’s where Pixel Envy agrees:

    A.I. organizations have not created a bottom-up rebellious exploration of the limits of intellectual property law. They are big businesses with deep pockets exploiting decades of news, blogging, photography, video, and art. Nobody, as near as makes no difference, expected something they published online would one day feed the machines that now produce personalized Facebook slop.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    “One thing that might help, not suggested by Masnick, is improving the controls available to publishers,” Heer writes, going on to discuss the new RSL standard proposal and what it might do to help. But, in the end, he’s not optimistic:

    I simply do not know how much control I reclaim now will be relevant in the future, and I am sure the same is true of any real media organization. I write here for you, not for the benefit of building the machines producing a firehose of spam, scams, and slop. The artificial intelligence companies have already violated the expectations of even a public web. Regardless of the benefits they have created — and I do believe there are benefits to these technologies — they have behaved unethically. Defensive action is the only control a publisher can assume right now.

    — Nick Heer, Pixel Envy

    Yeah.

    Special bonus #1: From the you’ve-trained-it-so-enjoy-A.I.-for-fun department,Kottke introduces us to generativ.design. “I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these,” he writes. (Via the new-to-me sidebar.)

    Prefab Design

    Meet fabricá, a new hair care company, whose identity ticks all the boxes: it’s trendy, eco-friendly, and well put-together:

    But there’s a catch: fabricá doesn’t exist — at least not yet. It’s a fully-formed identity, available now at Brands Like These, a new prefab identity outfit from Lyon&Lyon.

    Now I’ll admit: at first, this seemed like a Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe thing,2Yes, I grew up listening to Car Talk. something that we all had a chuckle over before allowing it to shuffle into the background, readily available for use as a pithy line whenever we needed it: “Ha, we got Lyin’ and Lyin’ selling your precious startup canned … stuff.”

    Unfortunately, it’s not a joke.

    When Elizabeth Goodspeed, of It’s Nice That, got thinking about it, she had lots to say. “In a good design engagement, the back-and-forth between company and designer pushes the company itself to sharpen what it is; the ‘friction’ people complain about is also the juice that makes the work exciting.” (I find this true in editorial and publishing work, certainly.) But there’s a warning, too:

    If this cart-before-horse approach takes hold, it won’t just change how companies buy branding, but how designers make it. The skills a designer needs shift from listening and refining to cranking out polished shells that could plausibly fit anything. […] Even if sites like BLT only sell a brand once, the more ambiguous the design, the more it risks echoing a dozen others (and collapsing under trend fatigue).

    These models also threaten to hollow out the middle of the industry. We’ve seen this pattern before: bookstores went from indie shops and regional chains to Amazon or your local holdout; music from affordable CDs to either $50 LPs or all-you-can-stream. Branding may be headed for the same split – prefab kits at the low end, ultra-expensive bespoke at the high end, and little in between. And if prefab becomes the norm, it’s hard not to imagine the next step: why should these kits even be designed by humans? Once clients are trained to buy a look off the shelf, there’s little stopping A.I. from flooding the market with pre-packaged “brands” generated at scale.

    — Elizabeth Goodspeed, It’s Nice That

    This feels like an accurate prediction. Read the rest. (See also: her item on copyright, covered in February.)

    Okay, we’ve dealt with the heavy stuff. Let’s enjoy the rest.

    The New Type in Town

    Several articles to point to if you’re interested in expanding your font collection — including 50 predictions for what’ll be popular 2026. Nice.

    Steven Heller’s Font of the Month

    Over at I Love Typography, industry veteran and designer extraordinaire Steven Heller’s monthly column exalts Ritualist.

    CreativeBoom’s Best o’ September

    They have several, but my favorite is not dissimilar to the above, a new face called Urbolyt, a variable “that represents a clash between geometric rigor and organic forms.”

    Zelow Studio’s Nature

    Pixel Surplus brings us a new — and free! — variable grotesk typeface called Nature, available in a variety of styles.

    CreativeBoom’s 50 for 2026

    The vast majority of these are, basically, Helvetica; like Nature, the simple sans serifs are what’s in right now. (Sigh.) However, there are some gems on the list, and I’d like to take a moment to highlight an absolute favorite: Freight.

    Freight is a collection of integrated typefaces ready to add unique style to any design project. What Joshua Darden started as a serif family inspired by the warmth and pragmatism found in 18th-century Dutch typefaces became The Freight Collection and now ranges across multiple weights, widths, and optical sizes — from Big to Display, Text, Micro, Macro, Sans, Neo, and Round — all of which include companion italics. That’s 192 fonts that have the ability to be bold and daring just as easily as they can be quiet and unassuming.

    — freightcollection.com

    I’ve used Freight in a variety of book projects and the breadth of options available always satisfies. It’s referred to as a superfamily: from the standard Text and beyond-excellent Neo (a sans with style), there’s an option for going Big and even two — Micro and Macro — best used at small sizes (readable footnotes!).

    I cannot recommend more highly. Indeed, I could only take one font family with me to a desert island, I’d take Freight.

    Illustrations Open Doors
    Illustration Awards 2025

    CreativeBoom: “From playful packaging to poignant explorations of identity, the World Illustration Awards 2025 showcase the breadth of contemporary illustration. With over 4,700 entries from 85 countries, this year’s winners reveal how artists are shaping how we see, think and connect.”

    One of the overall winners is this great poster:

    Léane Ruggli – RTD’s Cocktail Campaign

    Book covers (adult and children’s):

    Jennifer Dionisio – The Talented Mr Ripley
    Jenya Polosina – The Country of the Blind
    Camila Carrossine – The Girl, the Ghost and the Beetroot Forest

    Site Specific:

    Ren Kyles – Pride mural in Wilsonville, Oregon

    The awards underline “how illustration continues to thrive as a medium of both beauty and urgency”: from packaging that delights to books that challenge taboos, the winning works reveal the versatility of illustrators working today.

    See the whole list of winners and commended artists at the WIA 2025 Online Showcase, including interviews and insights into their creative process.

    Illustration for Branding

    Another CreativeBoom article suggests that, “[f]rom murals to motion, illustration is starting to reassert itself in advertising,” because “illustration still offers unique advantages. Distinctiveness is the obvious one because, in a sea of photography-led campaigns, an illustrated execution can […] cut through precisely because they are unexpected.”

    As this great TfL poster exemplifies:

    “A Riot of Color and Joy”

    Yet another example of illustration done well, this time from — wait for it — 1956:

    A Saab 93 full-car cutaway.

    I still miss Saab. See more at The Autopian.

    Special Bonus #2: These minimalist cat illustrations define brilliant:

    Illustration by ShouXin.
    September’s Photography Highlights
    International Pet Photography Awards

    While we’re on the subject of cats — and dogs, whose entries far outstripped those for cats (and horses, rabbits, pigs, and all the other things folks keep for pets) — this year’s pet photography contest has some pretty spectacular results:

    Photograph by Mirka Koot.
    Photograph by Shandess Griffin.
    Photograph by Janneke De Graaf.

    Getting my dog to stand still long enough for a photograph is nigh-on impossible; some of the accomplishments shown in these winning photographs are fantastic. Kudos.

    Special bonus #3: Cats, book matched.

    Audubon Photography Awards

    The 15 winning entries for 2025 have been announced, including this one:

    “Burrowing Owl.” Photograph by Jean Hall.

    See more at PetaPixel or This is Colossal; explore galleries of this year’s winners and honorable mentions, or grab a copy of the Fall 2025 Audubon Magazine.

    Astronomy Photographer of the Year

    This is Colossal: “The universe’s workings may always remain a mystery. So it’s no surprise that when peering up at the night sky, whether it’s homing in on distant stellar clusters or simply watching the moon rise, photography helps us appreciate its enigmatic beauty.”

    “ISS Lunar Flyby.” Photograph by Tom Williams.
    “Saturnrise.” Photograph by Tom Williams.

    I didn’t realize until after I’d selected them that these were both from the same photographer, but unlike some that are just (amazing) night sky, these have an almost-science-fiction quality.

    ’Course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg: “The Royal Observatory Greenwich’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 17 contest showcases the best astronomical and night sky images of the year, captured by exceptional photographers worldwide,” writes PetaPixel.

    Two more that aren’t quite what you expect:

    “Encounter Across Light-Years.” Photograph by Yurui Gong and Xizhen Ruan.
    “Fourth Dimension.” Photograph by Leonardo Di Maggio.

    See the more winners, from here and beyond, at PetaPixel or This is Colossal.

    Special bonus #4: While we’re on the subject of Earth and sky, PetaPixel profiles Italian photographer Gianluca Rubinacci:

    Photograph by Gianluca Rubinacci.

    Special bonus #5: The UK’s Weather Photographer of the Year 2025 Competition list of finalists has been announced, including this one:

    Photograph by Lukáš Gallo.

    See all of ’em — and vote (until October 16th) — here.

    Natural Landscape Photography Awards

    This one’s a little different, in that there can be no generative AI, no compositing of different photographs, and RAW files are checked by judges to ensure authenticity. (Refreshing, honestly.) “The competition is designed to promote photographers looking to work within the constraints of the natural landscape and traditional bounds of photography.”

    From the Project of the Year, Sápmi (Lapland). Photograph by Hanneke Van Camp.

    See more at Petapixel, or to see all of the contestants head to the Natural Landscape Photography Awards website.

    “Cyberpunk” and “Gotham” vs. “Otherworldly” and “Forgotten”

    To close out this month, I’d like to mention a couple more book projects. Let’s start with Ben Moore, whose new photo book is titled Above & Across London. As the name suggests, he found high-up vantage spots: “I’ve always loved the look of a cool, urban, cyber-futuristic world, and at times I catch glimpses of that in London,” he writes.

    Photograph by Ben Moore.

    Meanwhile, photographer Bryan Sansivero feels a strong pull to document and explore forgotten dwellings; his new book, America the Abandoned, explores deserted homes around the country in 200 striking images — including this one:

    “The Grand Room.” Photograph by Bryan Sansivero.

    Have a great October, everyone.

    • 1
      One of the reasons my photography, as presented both here on Foreword and in the galleries, is both relatively lo-res and watermarked is to preserve a sense of ownership; likewise, one of the (many) reasons I no longer participate in social media is due to posts specifically being used to train A.I. — Instagram/Meta, for instance.
    • 2
      Yes, I grew up listening to Car Talk.