Links / Web

• Displaay rethinks licensing with its new website and Serrif typeface

  № 103

  

  Over on The Brand Identity, Daniel Quisek explains how the Prague-based type foundry Displaay has overhauled its licensing and reimagined its website.

  The new licensing model strips away the usual complexity. Instead of tracking device counts, managing web traffic metrics, or navigating tiered user structures, it comes down to one question: how many people work at the company? That’s it.

  On top of that, they offer individual styles and custom variable packages. They even allow you to take out characters you don’t think you’ll use, and you can test everything for free on their website.

  This kind of flexibility is very non-standard in the world of type foundries, but may gain traction from here on out.

  Oh, and did I mention their new typeface, Serrif? What a beauty.

• The sketchbook of Rose Wong

  № 102

  

  My friend Ilse, an illustrator herself—for whom I’m designing a new website—pointed me to the sketchbook of Rose Wong. A beautiful collection of photos of her sketchbooks, full of (fineliner?) drawings.

  I just wish I could enlarge them to admire them more closely.

• Selling Lemons

  № 101

  Frank Chimero on “a market for lemons”, an idea taken from a 1970 paper by George Akerlof, used to—accurately, I think—describe the current state of the web.

  What makes the Market for Lemons concept so appealing (and what differentiates it in my mind from enshittification) is that everyone can be acting reasonably, pursuing their own interests, and things still get worse for everyone. No one has to be evil or stupid: the platform does what’s profitable, sellers do what works, buyers try to make smart decisions, and yet the whole system degrades into something nobody actually wants.

  The degradation of the web has been on my mind, so his post resonated with me. I guess the launch of an app called Vibes, made to spew AI-generated slop into a feed that’s full of it, only adds fuel to that fire.

• Loren Stephens

  № 89

  Loren Stephens is eighty years old, and he blogs. His blog runs on Eleventy and Netlify, and he speaks to Manuel Moreale about his life since retirement, his blogging, and his creative environment. It’s all very straight-forward, and ... isn’t that kind of the point?

  I quickly subscribed via his RSS feed. He’s had a few good posts up recently (1, 2).

• Your site, your home, your web

  № 88

  A post from Cory Dransfeldt (from January of 2024) on the fracturing of social media, and the opportunity it’s presented for the personal web.

  Call it the indie web, the small web or the slow web. Do or don’t label it—buy a domain, stand up a site, write and share. Find other folks doing it—maybe on Mastodon, maybe on another network, protocol or application—find out who they’re following and look at their sites. See what they’ve linked to and are reading.

  I don’t remember where I found the post, but it comes at an opportune moment, as I’ve been investing lots of time in my personal website in the past two months, have rekindled my usage of RSS feeds, and found quite a few great blogs to follow. And, I just finished setting up syndication to Bluesky, bringing me one step closer to POSSE.