Second person birds| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I decided to switch things up and use a display font for the main headings (h1 in HTML) on my website. This display font is a fun one called Dinger, created by Jacob Cummings, aka Dingbat. From what I can glean off the web, Jake is from Connecticut (but presently in Austin, Texas) and is a Mets fan, judging by the Dingbat specimen.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Crucial Tracks is one of my new favorite things on the web. It is a good music blog with regular round-ups of new releases, interviews, and the other usual stuff you’d expect from a good music blog. It is also a music journaling app where you can share the crucial tracks you care about, and see what other people are listening to. | Posts and notes from Nick Simson
This summer, I came up on a milestone: one year since purchasing an omg.lol address. I thought it might be fun and helpful to write up how I’m using almost all the fun features of this web service/platform/thingy, but I want to get two important things out of the way:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Mike Monteiro, “How to lose a child”:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
This post is my entry for August’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Marisabel.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I spend a lot of time thinking about what better collaboration looks like between design and development teams, and got to see a bit of effective collaboration in action at work today. | Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Depending on how tired I am on Wednesday evening, how easily I can get my kid to bed, and whether I have a work meeting (cameras off, thankfully) at 7:00 am the next day, I am an infrequent presence at the virtual Home Brew Website Club.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Maxwell is hosting the IndieWeb Carnival this month: | Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I recently had a bit of a revelation: Every place I’ve lived for more than one year was featured prominently on The Simpsons. This might be inevitable given that this is one of the longest-running shows on television. Anyway, here are the locations:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
It’s just another tool| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
June 2025 was my very first time hosting the IndieWeb Carnival. I received 36 entries total, which comes out to more than a one per day, so a lot of you had something to say about the theme I came up with.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
A while ago I signed up to host June’s IndieWeb Carnival and chose the topic “personal style”. Earlier this year, Pablo hosted a Carnival on “self-expression” and I panicked a bit… maybe my theme was too similar?| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I immediately feel like a bad person for being here| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
It is warming up here in New Mexico, and I am thinking about the flowers I want to put in my garden. The new Gambel oak we planted in the fall is sprouting new green leaves, and we are opening the windows in the house to let the fresh air in.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I can’t open my RSS reader anymore without seeing one of these. Reilly did it. So did Tracy and Naz and Ethan and Susan too. I’ve read responses from Katherine, Rachel, and Adam. Jeremy gave us all permission to jump in, so I thought I would give these eight or so questions my own spin.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I’ve moved around a bit since 2008: Arizona to Tennessee to New Mexico, many apartments and houses in between. And I’ve done the same online, since purchasing a domain name in February 2008 to represent myself online. Maybe it’s only appropriate that I re-launch this in February, 17 years later.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
James tagged me in a recent post to respond to a set of prompts on the topic of creativity. I enjoyed thinking about each prompt, and I got kind of wordy! My answers are below.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Adam Newbold’s post on “The InclusiveWeb” (sadly no longer up) really resonated with me last year. Especially this part:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Listen to Rachel Baiman’s wonderful version of this song, originally penned by John Hartford. On this recording, Riley Calcagno is playing a banjo that belonged to Hartford.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
“I’m a web designer.” Elly Loel states simply in her blog post from March last year.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Nick Heer, writing in September 2024:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
In 2024 I developed a writing habit. I made this goal as easy as possible: write for a few minutes a day during the work week, and a little more time on the weekends. There’s some days I certainly missed, but I mostly stuck with the habit. I found it rewarding, and really good for maintaining my focus and attention.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I don’t have any great insights into my reading list in 2024. Most of the books on this list have been in my “want-to-read” list for some time. Others were impulse books I picked up on a whim.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I look forward to joining my Wiggle Work pals again in a wintertime writing challenge. This year instead of a daily blog post in February (we chose the shortest month of the year intentionally), this year’s challenge is a bit simpler and more inclusive: One weekly post every Wednesday in January.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
It’s early December and I’m already feeling End-of-the-Year Energy™. Days are cooler and shorter here in Albuquerque, and still quite dry. I was away the last week at work as well as taking a short break from posting stuff on the web.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I’m currently reading Dust Bunnies, a memoir by singer/songwriter Tommy Womack. I picked this paperback up at Parnassus Books in Nashville in 2018, and sadly am only getting around to reading it now. If you are interested in the process of writing a song, and working in a creative industry like the music business, it is an entertaining read.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
On opening day, I checked in with my neighbor across the street to see how he was feeling about the upcoming baseball season. T is the biggest Cubs fan I’ve ever met, and he’s not even from Chicago. Big Cubs logo flag flying over his garage. Rarely seen outdoors without a Cubs hat on. He has a vanity license plate broadcasting his fandom to the state of New Mexico, too.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I’m starting to sketch out the next major version of nicksimson.com, and there are a few things that might be changing around here. These are loosely held thoughts, not final decisions. I thought I’d just share these [possible breaking changes] if it helps anyone out there.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I recently got a rubber stamp made with my N.S. “spark” logo. This is an “inspector stamp” from Cranky Press (based in Salem, Ohio). The inside of the black cap is an ink pad with bright red ink. The metal part is outfitted with a key ring, which is nifty too.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Every web account requires you to register some kind of username, and I’ve been using “nsmsn” everywhere for more than a decade now. I registered the domain name nsmsn.co and have it currently pointed at my omg.lol profile, since that destination kind of collects almost all of my various accounts with the same handle.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
In reply to Looking for a comfort watch? Turn on baseball, our pop culture critic says by Linda Holmes (NPR).| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
In reply to 15 Books with the Most Impact | Living Out Loud.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Once in a while you come across a message that reminds you that you are not alone:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Bookmarked Web Design Engineering With the New CSS by Matthias Ott.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Bookmarked Give your blog a name by Anne Sturdivant.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Rachel Monroe’s latest for the New Yorker reports from the East Valley suburbs of Phoenix, an area I’m intimately familiar with. My family moved to the region (from a rural community in upstate New York) when I was a teenager, and my mom still lives in Chandler.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I visited the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque this week to check out the museum exhibits, and eat lunch at the incredible Indian Pueblo Kitchen. One of the current exhibits (up until October) is called Pueblo League Baseball: Stitching Our Community Together.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I recently finished reading Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock by Jesse Jarnow (ISBN: 9781101588680).| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I recently finished reading So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets—The Best Worst Team in Sports by Devin Gordon.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
This week I’ve seen a number of people link to what looks like a promising new API service (and WordPress plugin) to automatically update your robots.txt file as more and more unwanted chatbots and data scrapers come online.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
This post is my response to the March 2024 IndieWeb Carnival: Accessibility in the Small Web. I’m looking forward to reading more of the posts at the end of this month.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I’m doing some weekend maintenance on Eleanor’s portfolio, a WordPress site we’ve been running since 2013. Eleanor keeps the content and images updated and I’m responsible for plugins, new features, navigation, and keeping the little copyright notice up-to-date.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
It’s the real, real end of 26 Days of Type. I really don’t know how to close out the last day of a month-long daily writing and publishing challenge.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
My spouse was reading an older book set in ITC Korinna, a very 1970s/80s design. If you’ve watched Jeopardy!, you’ve seen this font, or at least the uppercase letters.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
In planning, researching, writing and designing my 26 Days of Type series, I wanted to cover a diverse array of typefaces and topics in an accessible way. I’m proud of the work I was able to do on my blog this month, but a personal project from one person’s perspective has its limitations.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Really? This is how he chose to end it?| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Yrsa and Rasa are open-source typefaces released by Rosetta Type. Yrsa is a Latin script typeface supporting over 300 languages. Rasa is a Gujarati script typeface supporting 3 languages (Gujarati, Kachchi, Avestan). Both are available as variable fonts supporting italic (Latin only) and weight axes. The design and production on these typefaces was completed by Anna Giedryś and David Březina at Rosetta.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
A typeface’s x-height refers to the height of its lowercase x. That’s pretty much it.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
When an industry is dominated by a single race and gender, this not only creates a lack of diversity in peoples and experiences but ideas and creations as well. That’s why Vocal Type is working to diversify design through the root of all (good) works of graphic design—typography.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I’ve been attempting to show italic and oblique styles for most of the type I’m featuring in the 26 Days of Type series this month. Italic type was historically influenced by cursive and calligraphic script, and began to be widely used in the sixteenth century. Owing to the influence of calligraphy, most italic forms slant toward the right and often take on a more condensed appearance from their upright Roman counterparts.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
We covered Old Style serifs already, in which we learned the difference between Old Style, Transitional, and Modern/Didone. Now let’s dig deeper into Transitional serif typefaces.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
The script classification describes typefaces that are based on handwriting or calligraphy. In this way, it feels a bit like the geometric classification to me, since all type is based on handwriting or calligraphic forms. It’s not to be confused with the term “script” as it applies to writing systems.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I vaguely remember mentioning a variable font or two earlier in this blogging series, without elaborating on the topic much further. I knew it was something I wanted to dig in deeper down the road.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
In yesterday’s post I wrote about combining type and brought up the concept of a superfamily: a collection of fonts in different classifications (usually at least a serif and a sans) sharing a name and similar design features. Today I want to explore one superfamily a little further.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Disclaimer: You don’t always need to pair typefaces. You can launch a revolution with one font. Martin Luther’s 95 theses and Tim Berners-Lee’s first website only used a single typeface. These days you can totally get away with a minimalist design, and use one typeface at one size, with an italic style for emphasis, and maybe a bold weight for headings for your entire document or project.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Not talking about a beer label today, but a type classification for fonts like Garamond.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Welcome to the 14th installment of 26 Days of Type. And Happy Valentine’s Day! I thought it might be appropriate today to open with a sonnet, and who better to write a love poem to this “coldest”, most “sterile” of typeface genres, than ChatGPT?| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
We’re halfway through the alphabet today, and up until now I’ve barely mentioned the monospaced classification. These fonts are derived from typewriters and early computing, but are still very useful today.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
What follows isn’t legal advice. If you do need legal advice, please find a lawyer. I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internet.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I just can’t get enough of these quirky-looking grotesques. This time around we’re looking at Karla, an open-source design by Jonny Pinhorn and released by Google Fonts in 2012. After Google, Pinhorn went on to the Indian Type Foundry (ITF), and is now at Dalton Maag.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
When I started planning out 26 Days of Type, I had a sense I would be writing about my design school education, when I really started taking notice of visual culture, or was at least developing the vocabulary for it. And this would mean I’d be risking nostalgia.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Back before I started making and keeping lists of fonts, I did what I imagine a “normal” person might do. I started out typing out my text (maybe a headline or a paragraph) into a word processor or design app, and would literally go through the font menu one by one, until something interesting popped up. That was how I came across this:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Halyard is a family of grotesque sans-serifs in three optical sizes: Display, Text and Micro. The type family was conceived by Joshua Darden, with design contributions by Eben Sorkin and Lucas Sharp. The typeface was released in 2017 by Darden Studio.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Isn’t all typeface design geometric? Letters are usually a mixture of straight lines and curves and angles. The genre or classification we call geometric sans-serifs are called that because the forms so closely resemble pure geometric shapes: circles and rectangles and sometimes triangles. Geometric typefaces are a century-old innovation, coming out of the Bauhaus movement in the 1920s.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I’m sure you’ve seen this one. Maybe on a poster or a magazine headline. Or in the Windows 95 font menu. The MoMA logotype is based on it. It’s named after Benjamin Franklin, the most famous printer in American history.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Welcome to the fifth consecutive post in my 26 Days of Type series. My goal for this series is to highlight typography in an accessible way, and part of that is including several free and open-source fonts.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Drop caps, or “dropped capitals” are a design element that can add a little oomph to your page (or screen). The idea is this: a large capital letter, the first letter of the first word of your paragraph, stands out as a decorative element. This captures your reader’s attention, hopefully drawing them in. The standard size of a drop cap is 2 or more lines tall. If you are reading this article on my website, and not in some RSS reader or Instapaper-type app, you may have noticed that the ...| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Before the gig app economy, there was the gig mill economy.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Before Adobe Fonts and Creative Cloud, there was Adobe Font Folio, back when software was still sold in boxes. There was an education version of this product, and that’s surely how I encountered (and came to love) Chaparral as an undergraduate design student.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Welcome to day two of #26DaysOfType. Today’s featured font is Besley*. Owen Earl, the typeface designer behind Besley* puts an asterisk next to his font names as a kind of branding or distinction for designs released under his foundry, Indestructible Type.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I am trying out something new for the month of February. Each day I’m going to explore a different typeface or topic related to typography. I’m calling it 26 Days of Type.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
The following took place in Knoxville, Tenn. in the 2010s.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Maria Bamford has over 40 years of experience arranging chairs into circles in libraries and church basements. Thankfully she breaks the sacred rule of anonymity to share her experience with all the various 12 step programs she’s tried.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I don’t have a lot of insights on my reading habits from this past year. I notice I can handle one book in each format (physical, ebook, audio) at a time. Any more is too much mental switching for me. Long books take a long time to finish. I had a bunch of books I did not finish last year, or haven’t finished yet.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I wasn’t planning to write a year in review post, but having blogged all year long, it is actually quite easy to put one together.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
The DC Holiday Market, in front of the National Gallery of Art| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
It’s December again. Winter will be here soon in the Northern Hemisphere. I can see snow on the Sandia Mountains outside my office window.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
On Friday we stopped at Aztec Ruins National Monument on our way home from Thanksgiving. This is a 900 year old site that was part of an Ancestral Pueblo migration journey, near what it is today the town of Aztec, NM.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Finished reading: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein, ISBN: 9781039006904| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
It seems like an exciting time to be a flag designer in North America. Several states in the U.S. are adopting or considering new flag designs. Here are some you may have heard about:| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Our family was planning to attend a flu and covid shot clinic at an elementary school last week. The covid vaccine shipment was delayed for this event, and the three of us were all feeling sick, so we ended up not going.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
In reply to Books I’m Reading at the Moment by Pablo Morales.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Bookmarked Travelers’ Map by Camille Verrier.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
👋 Hey there!| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I vividly remember looking at apartments in Knoxville on January 13, 2010. I only remember that it was the thirteenth, because it was the morning after Lane Kiffin announced he was leaving the Tennessee Vols. It was quite the weekend on sports talk radio as I was driving around town. | Posts and notes from Nick Simson
I recently purchased a great domain name (at least I think so). Over the last couple weeks I’ve slowly been tinkering away at Typo.town, a personal resource on typography. I have a vision for what I eventually want this website to be, but it will take me some time to get there. So right now, it’s pretty much a landing page plus two lists, with some classification stuff I hope will be useful metadata in the future.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
The #NewwwYear hashtag was popularized by Jen Simmons on Twitter in 2017 for the purpose of making commitments and improvements to your personal website. The idea behind it is similar to New Year’s resolutions: taking small, but concrete steps toward building and improving one’s website. | Posts and notes from Nick Simson
In 2022, the books I was able to finish tended to be on the shorter side, compared to previous years. You’ll find several books on this list hovering around or under 200 pages. | Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Today is Giving Tuesday, a worldwide holiday for giving to organizations working to transform their communities. Since 2012, it has been celebrated the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday to highlight charity, philanthropy and nonprofits doing good around the globe. The official GivingTuesday.org website uses the phrase “radical generosity” throughout its content, defined as “the concept that the suffering of others should be as intolerable to us as our own suffering.”| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Day two at my new (fully remote!) job. Costumes were “highly encouraged”.| Posts and notes from Nick Simson
Never say never. These are some things I have not done.| www.nicksimson.com