wwword, a website about words, did an interview with me [Update: wwword appears to be no longer operating, unfortunately, but here is a copy of the page on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine], where I talked about some of my favorite lettering pieces and how I did them.

The images that accompany the article are a bit small, so I’ve put larger versions up here….

One of my favorite bloggers, Jason Kottke, posted an item and link today about a story on the NPR site about “the longest word in the English language”.

This piqued my interest. When I was a kid I used to watch the Mike Douglas Show every afternoon after school. One time he had some sort of word expert on the show who revealed what the longest word was. I was impressed and taught myself to pronounce it correctly (still can).

Was it still the longest word? Sure enough, it was in the article:

Well… not the longest word anymore, if it ever was.

But then I noticed that all the “long words” in the article were set in one of my fonts—Felt Tip Woman! (My partner, Pat, whose handwriting was the model for Felt Tip Woman, loves words and language, not to mention NPR, and thought this was pretty cool, too.)

So I memorized a word that’s not really as special as I thought it was. On the plus side, NPR is using one of my fonts, so I’m happy anyway.

I was surprised and delighted to see Mostra Nuova playing a supporting role in JibJab’s latest “Year In Review” video.

I know I’ve been lax in posting items to Notebook lately. Somehow, between Twitter, Typophile, and making fonts (mostly), I forget it’s here.

Anyway, a really cool thing happened last Wednesday: Lost World’s Fairs. It demonstrates the support of web fonts in the new Internet Explorer 9 for Windows, but it works equally well in most other desktop web browsers (not on mobile phone browsers yet, as far as I can tell). You can read about how it was put together on Jason Santa Maria’s blog.

The big surprise for me was that all three of the demo pages feature fonts designed by me, served via Typekit. Many of my fonts have been available for web use through Typekit for a while, but recently also through Extensis’ WebINK service, Fontspring, and Fontdeck. Note: WebINK and Fontdeck ceased operation in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

If you pay close attention, you may notice two additions to the list of fonts over on my site: Diane Script and Filmotype Honey. I’ve been meaning to add these for a while (a long while in the case of Diane Script).

Diane Script (and Diane Script Première) were released in late 2008 through FontHaus, who commissioned me to digitize them. More about Diane here.

Filmotype Honey is my latest contribution to the Filmotype project and was released on the Font Bros site back in February.

Craig Eliason has been writing a pangram almost every day for over two years on his site The Daily Pangram. For the last week, they’ve been about me or my fonts, which is quite an honor.

Pangrams are tricky enough to write without having to keep track of all the letters, so Craig uses my Pangrammer Helper so he can focus on the creative part of the task. He’s gotten quite good at it.

Craig and I both work in St. Paul, so we see each other from time to time, traveling in similar circles (he teaches art history at the University of St. Thomas and is learning to design type).

I should really just end this with a pangram, except I can’t quite think of any words that fit that have a z. Hmm…