2025-12-17 08:05:28
The letter is typeset in Papyrus, the typeface for which James Cameron’s affection inspired not one but two classic SNL shorts starring Ryan Gosling — which Cameron has a good sense of humor about.
Terrence Malick’s letter accompanying Tree of Life in 2011 was plainly and humbly set in Helvetica. David Lynch’s accompanying Mulholland Drive was also in Helvetica, but in a very Lynchian way. And then there is Stanley Kubrick, whose letter to projectionists that accompanied Barry Lyndon was typeset in Futura — quite the feat in 1975. (It was almost certainly IBM’s Mid-Century typeface, a beautiful adaptation of Futura for their Executive line of typewriters.)
2025-12-17 03:58:17
I dare say this post from Adrian Roselli — first published in 2015 and updated 16 times (and counting) since — is the definitive debunking of the pseudoscience claims regarding deliberately ugly fonts being somehow beneficial to readers with dyslexia.
2025-12-17 03:39:44
Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection. Her aim is to preserve and document outstanding examples of mid-20th century commercial art, creating an accessible resource for understanding illustration history.
Glorious collection of mid-century illustrations and graphic design. Also a good follow on Instagram. (Via Dan Cederholm.)
2025-12-17 03:08:56
Tim Nudd, writing at Ad Age a few weeks ago (paywalled, alas):
As we mentioned in roundup yesterday, Finneas (aka, Finneas O’Connell) has developed a new sonic logo for Apple TV, the streaming service previously known as Apple TV+. However, the rebrand, created with Apple agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab, goes beyond the audio mnemonics to include a striking new visual look as well.
The visual branding centers on layers of shifting colored light, a metaphor for the range of genres and emotions that Apple TV has cultivated since its 2019 debut.
I held off on posting about this new Apple TV fanfare (a.k.a. sonic logo, a.k.a. mnemonic ) until I’d experienced it a few times, and after a few weeks, watching a bunch of episodes from a few Apple TV series — Mr. Scorsese, a 5-star five-part documentary by Rebecca Miller, absolutely riveting; Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s excellent new the-less-you-know-about-it-before-you-start-watching-the-better series starring Rhea Seehorn; and The Morning Show season 4, a series that’s skirting just above the good-enough-to-keep-watching line for me — I’m willing to render a verdict.
I love it.
The old one was not bad. But “not bad” should never be good enough for Apple. I can’t find anyone from Apple stating so explicitly, but it seems pretty obvious that the piano chord accompanying the old fanfare was meant to evoke the Macintosh startup chime. That’s a neat idea. And no one is more a fan of the Macintosh than me. I’d argue that the Mac remains the definitive Apple product, the one that best exemplifies everything the company does and should stand for. So harking back to the Macintosh was an interesting idea for the Apple TV fanfare/sonic logo/mnemonic.
But: it just wasn’t great. What makes that chord great for a computer booting up doesn’t make it great for a cinematic sonic logo. Netflix’s “tudum” is so iconic that it’s the name of their company blog. HBO’s static + chanted om is the OG standard-setter. I suspect the new Apple TV fanfare will be seen in that class. The old one was not.
The new one feels like a branding stroke unto itself. Sonically, it doesn’t evoke anything else. It just sounds rich and cool. Visually, with its rotating prism effect, it does evoke the classic six-color Apple logo. Thus, despite moving away from a sonic callback to the Macintosh, the overall effect feels more rooted to Apple’s on-the-cusp-of-a-half-century history. The change makes Apple TV original content feel more like a part of Apple, less like a possible passing fancy (which is what many in Hollywood fear).
That prism effect was created practically. From a LinkedIn post from Apple’s longtime agency partner TBWA Media Arts Lab (no clue why they posted this on LinkedIn, of all places):
Built from real glass and captured entirely in camera, the new identity explores reflection, color, and light to express the cinematic spirit at the heart of Apple TV. Every shimmer was made for real, no CG shortcuts, a nod to Apple’s belief that craft should be felt, not faked.
The work spans the entire platform, from a sharp five-second show open to a full-length cinematic version for films, paired with a new sonic logo composed by Oscar winner Finneas and a custom typeface, SF TV, developed with Apple’s design team.
They include a very short video showing behind the scenes of its creation. It matters not to me that they photographed this practically, rather than via computer-generated graphics, but the bottom line is that it looks cool, timeless, and Apple-y.
Chris Willman at Variety has an interview with Finneas (O’Connell) regarding the music:
Mnemonic, Finneas says, “is sort of a beautiful word for a logo” accompanied by sound. “The things that I think of as real classic mnemonics are NBC — you can hear that in your head — or HBO has its static.” Finneas is well aware of how modern streaming consumption might make this especially ubiquitous, household by household. “If you’re binge-ing the whole season of Ted Lasso or Severance or Disclaimer” (the last of those being the limited series that he composed the score for himself), “you’re going to hear the mnemonic 10 times in one day. So it’s gotta be something that’s like the bite of ginger between rolls or something, you know?”
See and hear for yourself. Here’s the old Apple TV mnemonic:
Here’s the new 5-second version, shown at the beginning of each episode of Apple TV original series:
And here’s the full 12-second version, shown before Apple Original Films:
Bravo.
2025-12-16 10:52:31
Finalist is an iOS planner rooted in paper. Originally an index card system, it grew into a love letter to paper planners. You know the kind, leather folders with colored tabs and translucent dividers.
Unlike those old binders, Finalist fills itself with your calendars, reminders and weather forecast. Minimalist? Maybe not, but it’s become a UI playground designed to inspire, and looks great on iPad and Mac too.
Like the gorgeous new Year Planner for roughing in plans with the Highlighter (“intention paintbrush”).
iOS has tons of cool productivity apps. Finalist is a different take, and it might just end up in your dock.
2025-12-16 09:03:17
One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”:
Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage.
Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.
As Simonson mentions in “The Scourge of Arial”, regarding Helvetica’s enduring popularity:
As it spread into the mainstream in the ’70s, many designers tired of it and moved on to other typographic fashions, but by then it had become a staple of everyday design and printing. So in the early ’80s when Adobe developed the PostScript page description language, it was no surprise that they chose Helvetica as one of the basic four fonts to be included with every PostScript interpreter they licensed (along with Times, Courier, and Symbol). Adobe licensed its fonts from the original foundries, demonstrating their respect and appreciation for the integrity of type, type foundries and designers. They perhaps realized that if they had used knock-offs of popular typefaces, the professional graphic arts industry — a key market — would not accept them.
To my mind, Helvetica, Times, and Courier are the three canonical “default” fonts. One modern sans, one modern serif, and one for “typewriter”/code. (When I see Courier in print, at display sizes, my mind immediately wonders if the printer was missing the font that the designer specified in the document file.)
The Symbol font is a different story. It existed and was included with PostScript as one of just four defaults because the 8-bit character encodings of the time only had space for 255 characters. You needed a special font like Symbol to access “exotic” characters like Greek letters, math symbols (e.g. × or ÷), or arrows (↑ ↓ ← →). So there were really only three regular “fonts”, for prose, included with PostScript: Helvetica, Courier, and Times.
Courier and Times were eventually superseded in popular use by rivals that Microsoft licensed for inclusion in Windows: Courier New and Times New Roman, respectively. Times was from Linotype, Times New Roman from Monotype. Both versions of Times are legitimate digital interpretations of the 1929 hot metal design of Times Roman, and their differences are minor. Courier New, on the other hand, is so ugly — anemically thin and weak — that it hurts my teeth whenever I encounter it.
