GoKawiil
Tech News
Tobias Frere-Jones, the designer behind typefaces used by clients including the New York City MTA, Carnegie Hall, the ACLU, Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and Zohran Mamdani's mayoral office, described his approach to letterforms in a recent interview. He described letters as the product of 'negotiation' and explained that he lacks a fixed daily routine, drawing inspiration from varied and sometimes obscure sources.
Major League Baseball has rolled out a refreshed visual identity, including a newly commissioned font library created by a branding and design agency. The agency assembled a team of type designers to build the new typefaces, which draw on the sport's historical visual references.
A Show HN project lets users create distorted, glitch-style fonts—dubbed 'bastard fonts'—that are exported as standard OpenType files. The visual distortion is achieved through contextual ligature substitutions embedded in the font file, which most browsers and design tools enable by default.
A small JavaScript library called semfont analyzes each word in a passage and automatically applies visual styling—highlighting, coloring, bolding, and italicizing—based on scores it computes for valence, salience, surprise, and certainty. These scores combine dictionary lookups with contextual rules, such as detecting negators, intensifiers, contrast words, and word rarity relative to common English and the surrounding text.