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.
Please note: WordPress has transitioned to version 7, and in the process broken some of Foreword‘s style sheets. Apologies for the slightly uneven appearance — I’ll fix it as soon as I can.
This month’s Spine
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.”
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
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 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:
That, as it turns out, has worked very well for her — she’s now amongst the elite:
“Yeah,” I hear you say, “but that’s only a runner-up.” Okay:
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:
“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.”
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.
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.
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
“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. […]
“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
“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 a 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.
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.
— Marcin Wichary, Unsung
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.
“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.”
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.
— Jason Snell, Six Colors
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.
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 […].
— Nick Heer, Pixel Envy
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.
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:
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.
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.”
Which makes sense. It’s what Alpina always stood for: faster than standard models, more luxurious than M models. Exclusive and expensive.
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.
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,” PetaPixel notes 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
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.
See all of the winning images at This is Colossal, PetaPixel, or the contest website.
Space #3: Triple Arch
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
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.
