There weren’t as many web fonts to pick from when I started my freelance career in the early 2000s, still I was always overwhelmed by the number of fonts to choose from. With no formal education in design or typography, my choices were uninformed and limited. — It’s kinda funny to look back and realise that it was harder for me to choose fonts when there were fewer to choose from than now. I had moved away from being a freelance graphic designer in the years since then, but I still do branding, web design, and graphic…

This is the period when I usually receive a couple of emails in which people ask me if I’ll have a Black Friday sale for my book. My answer is always “no, I don’t do Black Friday sales” and then I never hear back from them. They never ask why but I decided to write this post and share my thoughts. — Black Friday is often referred to as the “consumerism holiday” and I can’t help myself but this sounds so wrong to me. The level of consumerism that we got to in the world today is absurd. Maybe I think that because of my minimalist mentality and lifestyle. Minimalism is something…

I’d always used the Monaco font and Sublime Text for coding but I recently decided to switch to VS Code. That change also led me to explore monospaced fonts suitable for coding as I worked on customising my VS Code theme. — Originally published on the Better Web Type blog. At some point, I found Fira Code and loved the fact that it had coding ligatures, so I made the switch. That wasn’t long ago, but I recently did even more research into monospaced fonts and found my new favourite, you can…

I continued with my habit of reading for at least 30 minutes a day in 2019. It’s now such a fundamental part of my life that I can’t imagine spending a day without it. If someone told me this when I was a teenager, I’d have a good laugh and…

Do you love doing what you do? Do you love it to the point that you’d do it for free? — I remember telling this to the CEO of the first company that hired me as a full-time UX designer: “thanks for the raise but it really isn’t about money for me. If I could, I’d do this for free.” They were really happy with my performance so they gave me…

I recently received an email from a designer called Jared. He went through the typography lessons that I offer as part of the free course and he was very grateful for them. He said he learned a lot but also had one important question: how do I go about choosing a font for my project? — This post was originally published on the Better Web Type blog. He told me that he works for a design agency and choosing fonts for websites they work on is something he does all the time. It’s also something that frustrates him a lot since he never studied design and…

Designing with a baseline grid in Sketch speeds up the visual design process, enables designers to produce consistent mockups and establishes a consistent vertical rhythm in the designs. — This post was originally published on the Better Web Type blog. The first major article that talks about aligning type on the web to a baseline grid was the one by Wilson Miner for A List Apart back in 2007. Revisiting the article now, it feels a bit clumsy to…