hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #650 (2025-05-06): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop discusses typography’s impact on design, emphasizing advanced OpenType features like variable fonts, alternates, and swashes to enhance visual appeal. It highlights the importance of choosing bold sans-serif fonts for thumbnails to attract viewers and encourages exploring curated minimalistic web designs at Dead Simple Sites for inspiration on clean aesthetics.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #647 (2025-05-01): Toss-Up Thursday

    Today’s theme-less Drop covers two projects: Bluefish, a web diagramming framework emphasizing relations for flexible diagram creation, and Quartz, a static-site generator focused on Markdown support and speed. It discusses experiences with LLMs, warnings about misleading outputs, and mentions innovative protections against malicious bots using zip bombs.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #646 (2025-04-30): Web-Slinging Wednesday

    The midweek Drop covers advanced CSS features, including the CSS text-box-trim for precise vertical text spacing control, Kate Morley’s 12-bit rainbow palette for improved data visualization using the LCH color space, and the CSS Shapes Module which enables non-rectangular content flow, enhancing layout and design flexibility.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #645 (2025-04-29): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s edition of the Drop explores typographic infrastructure, highlighting IKEA’s journey from traditional fonts to modern self-hosting solutions. It also presents FontDiffuser, a framework that enhances font generation through innovative diffusion techniques. The featured free font, Costaline, balances contemporary elegance with classic elements, offering diverse styles and multilingual support.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #643 (2025-04-22): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of The Drop highlights new developments and challenges in font design. Key points include Microsoft’s Kermit typeface aimed at aiding children with dyslexia, the issues related to thin fonts causing accessibility problems, and the declining status of the em dash due to AI overuse in writing, threatening typographic culture.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #642 (2025-04-21): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop covers GNU Recutils, an efficient plain text database management tool; Joplin, a versatile open-source note-taking app with strong encryption and synchronization options; and inclusive dark mode design, emphasizing accessibility improvements.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #639 (2025-04-15): [Tardy] Typography Tuesday

    Today’s [tardy — due to DOGE] Typography Tuesday covers a study questioning I-beam designs using typeface cross-sections, the manicule’s historical significance as a symbol, and a modern sans serif font, Ronzino, contrasting with Arial in design and functionality.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #634 (2025-04-08): Typography Tuesday

    Today’s typography-centric edition of the Drop discusses the evolution of smart quotes and accent marks in typography, highlighting their historical context and modern usage. It also introduces the Style Manual, which provides guidance on British and American English punctuation, and features the DT Hebrinks typeface, a free serif font. Overall, it emphasizes the importance of…

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #632 (2025-04-01): [Tardy] Typography Tuesday

    Today’s [tardy] typographic edition of the Drop discusses the significance of typography in the series Severance. It also features two silly, but fun 🍜 fonts. The Drops are mysterious and important.

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #80 (2025-03-30): Shameless

    The Weekend [Shameless] Bonus Drop showcases a spiffy accessible color palette generator, a project that will help turn the “news” into a research corpus, and some updates on various personal projects.

    hrbrmstr