1976: One hour by bus from Osseo (an outer-ring suburb) into downtown Minneapolis.
1977: Half hour by car from Osseo into downtown Minneapolis.
1977: Twenty minutes by bus from Saint Louis Park (an inner-ring suburb) into downtown Minneapolis.
1979: Fifteen minutes by car from Saint Louis Park to Saint Paul.
1981: Twelve minutes by car from South Minneapolis to downtown Saint Paul.
1985: Ten minutes by car from South Minneapolis to South Minneapolis.
1992: Five minutes by car from Saint Paul to Saint Paul.
2000–Present: Under one minute on foot (working at home).
I don’t understand why people put up with long commutes.
Permalink
Probably more than you ever wanted to know, but it was fun rummaging through my old stuff to piece the story together.
(Thanks, Brian!)
I first launched my website in spring of 2000, offering my services for design, illustration, and lettering. Oh, and I also showed a few fonts I’d made.
I’d just quit my job as a product designer at Rivertown Trading Company, and I had a big plan to do all the things I had long dreamed of doing, but couldn’t because of my “day job”. I wanted to get back into doing illustration. I wanted to try to sell my services as a lettering artist, something I’d only previously done on my own design projects. And I also wanted to get back into making fonts, something I hadn’t really done very much since I released a few fonts through FontHaus in the early nineties.
My website has evolved over the past thirteen years, just as my career has. The illustration thing never really went anywhere. The lettering thing peaked about 2005. But the font thing really took off. My site has changed to reflect this.
The new design, which I’m launching today, is all about the fonts. Among the changes, I’ve created all-new PDF specimens, added more complete “where to buy” information, and I’m (finally!) using webfonts on my site (Proxima Nova via Typekit). There is a new Licensing FAQ and a new feature called “Evolution of a Typeface” where I go into excruciating detail about the design process that goes into making a font. Plus: A studio tour.
I kept the blog (“Notebook”) intact, and folded my early articles (“The Scourge of Arial” and “Typecasting”) into it. My writing has been sporadic in recent years, but I plan to change that and write more regularly again. I’ve even gone through and replaced all the tiny 350px-wide blog images with big hi-res versions—Notebook: Now available in HD!
The new site is what they call responsive, meaning that the layout changes to fit any screen size, from a 25-inch desktop monitor to a 3.5-inch smartphone. Not only that, it’s all high-dpi-ready, so if you’ve got a “retina” screen, the site will look nice and sharp.
In the past, I did all my own web coding and design. But this time around, I decided to leave that work to the professionals. (You wouldn’t hire a web designer to make a font for you, would you?) The new site was designed by Trent Walton, Dave Rupert, and Reagan Ray at Paravel in Austin, Texas. (Thanks to Jason Santa Maria for recommending them.) The back end stuff was done by Matt Weinberg and his team at Vector Media Group. I’m really happy with the way it turned out (and discovered what a terrible client I can be—I’m not used to being on that side of the fence!) and I look forward to working with the new design for years to come.
Last week I did a talk for Type Tuesday in Minneapolis where I did a live demo of early font editors on a real Macintosh Plus. I’ve uploaded a video recording of it on YouTube, or you can watch it here.
6/27/24 Update: I’ve also posted a video about the story behind the Mac Plus I used for my Type Tuesday talk:
After last night’s geeky Star Trek post, fellow type designer Jackson Cavanaugh suggested on Twitter that I share some of my stories about Mystery Science Theater 3000, the cult comedy TV show from the nineties (and slightly earlier). Great suggestion, Jackson!
I was going to start tonight, but I was busy attending a Type Tuesday event this evening. (Type Tuesday is a monthly get-together of type aficionados in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.)
In the mean time, above is something from my scrapbook: A ticket stub from the first MST3K live show, performed at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis in 1992. All I will say about it is, my face ached from laughing.
More tomorrow.