Gotham is probably the one typeface that defines our millennial aesthetic. I’m sure you’ve seen it, Gotham had taken over the world by 2019.

What you may not know is that in 2014 there was a dispute worth $20 million within the firm that created Gotham: Hoefler & Frere-Jones. The drama was bad enough that Hoefler is accused of “most profound treachery” in Frere-Jones’s lawsuit. Ultimately the pair settled out of court.

Drama between type foundry partners is not new. In this article from Colossal we learn about Doves Press and their founders T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker. They founded the firm in 1900, but by 1909 they had dissolved their partnership. And in 1917, to ensure that no one would have access to Doves Press’ type—including Walker—Cobden-Sanderson dumped it all in the River Thames!

Robert Green, a type enthusiast, began searching for the missing lead type and in 2014 he miraculously found a lone ‘v’. And with the help of scuba divers, the team found 151 sorts (i.e., individual pieces of lead type) out of possible 500,000(!). Here’s a short film about the search:

It’s always fun to be reminded of the physical nature of typefaces…one reason why leading (LED-ing) is called leading, because of the lead in lead type.

I learned today that in the US, according to federal regulation, the only traffic sign that is allowed to be round is the “Railroad Crossing Ahead” sign.

The “Do Not Enter” or “X is prohibited” signs are not round! They are white rectangular signs with round images.

Edit (5/29) - Why is this the only round sign? According to Richard C. Moeur’s Manual of Traffic Signs:

The greater number of sides on a sign, the more critical a message it conveys. This is why a circular shape was adopted for the Railroad Advance warning sign (i.e. infinite number of sides), as a collision between a train and a typical vehicle will nearly always end badly.

I never realized how big professional darts is in Europe, specially in the UK. I started following it last year during the 2023 PDC World Championship where 16-year-old (!!) Luke Littler shocked the world by making it all the way to the final and finishing as runner-up.

Littler has continued to perform at an incredible elite level this year; and today, he won the prestigious Premier League!

The video below is of today’s final, where he hits a nine-darter: a perfect leg where the minimum amounts of darts are thrown to reach 501. According to Wikipedia:

“It is regarded as an extremely difficult feat to achieve even for the sport's top players, and is considered the highest single-game achievement in the sport, similar to a maximum 147 break in snooker or a 300-point game in bowling”.

Darts can be so fun and exciting! Watch the video and see it for yourself!

Breaking records left and right as the “youngest to do X” gives me “Lebron-the-Chosen-One”, Tiger Woods prodigy, type of vibes.

My wife and I have been playing tons of Dr. Mario (1990) on the NES Classic for the past couple days. Part of why I’ve enjoyed playing it so much is the funky droning background music, especially “Chill”:

(My wife swears that the more upbeat “Fever” is the better song…the winner of our matches gets to decide the music.)

Dr. Mario’s soundtrack has passed the test of time…with it being constantly re-adapted for multiple games.

I still think the original 1990 beep-boop version is the best. Perfect work music.

Tumbleweeds are not lonely plants rolling down a deserted western landscape. I learned that tumbleweed “stampedes” are taking over towns across the United States. Take a look at this photo!

As always, CGP Gray does a fun job explaining the ongoing trouble with tumbleweeds:

It’s always cool to see emergence happening from inanimate objects.

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On March of 2014, the world was gripped with the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370. How could an airliner simply vanish in a world of ubiquitous tracking with radar and GPS?

The Green Dot Aviation channel released this nerve-racking, hour-long video using flight simulation software with conjectures on what might have happened within the cockpit. Of course, a lot of the video is unproven and it simply shows what a plausible scenario could have been.

The deductive reasoning based on incomplete information used to build a scenario on how aviation instruments were used/manipulated is pretty interesting.

Not sure if it’s just me, but I have found it extremely difficult to remember what the laundry care symbols mean. Being paranoid about not wanting to ruin a piece of clothing, I find myself Googling what each of the icons represent: “what does the dot inside a circle inside a square mean again? Is it dry clean or no dry clean? Is the dot a good thing or a bad thing?”

The American Cleaning Institute (!!) has created a guide that actually helps! Instead of remembering every single permutation, you simply need to remember the following 5 symbols:

And the following modifiers:

Nonetheless, still incredibly confusing, since not all the icons adhere to this syntax. What does this mean?

The vertical three lines: drip drying; the diagonal lines: in the shade

How is it possible that Kansai Airport (KIX) hasn’t lost a single piece of luggage out of the estimated 10 million baggage items it processed in fiscal 2023!?

Image generated on Microsoft’s Copilot—powered by DALL-E 3

I’ve been taking an (Lean) Operations Management class and would be really interested to see what processes, rituals, and culture they have put in place to achieve this (even if they are padding the numbers a little…).

At the very least, it looks like they are practicing a very “Lean” approach to continuous improvements by listening to front-line workers: “CKTS updates the manual regularly to incorporate staff suggestions.”

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On a related note, I have had the unfortunate experience of having our bags lost, and I truly think that I wouldn’t have been able to retrieve it if I didn’t place AirTags on them. The customer service agent had assured me that our bags had made it to Portland (according to what she could see in the system) but I was able to let her know that they had been left behind in Toronto! Thankfully she was able to get in touch with Toronto Airport staff to get our bags onto the next plane to PDX.

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I am terrible at peeling hard boiled eggs. I’m impatient when having to carefully shed the shell, and just end up taking off chunks of egg while I peel it.

According to Kenji Lopez-Alt (formerly of Serious Eats), after hundreds of experiments, the key is to add your eggs into boiling water (instead of boiling together with cold water). Boiling cold water with the eggs “causes the proteins to coagulate slowly, and they end up fusing with the inside membrane of the egg shell.” Whereas, if you add the eggs to already boiling water, those proteins seize up immediately.

I’ve been getting into professional sumo these past few months!

The overall sumo wrestler ranking system and the promotion/demotion process is really interesting. Every two months there is an official tournament, and each wrestler is given a rank. The rankings for each tournament is published in a meticulously hand-brushed listing called the banzuke.

Each banzuke includes each wrestler's full ring name, hometown, and rank is also listed. The highest ranked wrestlers are at the top of the page printed with the largest characters. This is followed by wrestlers in lower divisions, with accompanying smaller characters.

The characters are part of the set of Japanese calligraphy typefaces used towards the end of 18th century of the Edo era. The typeface for the banzuke is Sumomoji (相撲文字) and it was specifically designed for sumo advertisement. According to this video, the bold strokes in sumomoji are meant to represent the physical strength and power of the sumo wrestlers.

Here’s another example of a really striking Edo-era typeface—Kakuji (角字) which was used for making seals:

I try to avoid flying Southwest Airlines because of its open seating policy. Open seating brought out some weird behaviors: setting an alarm to immediately check-in a second after online check-in is open, calculating in your mind if it’s worth sitting in the middle seat to risk no one sitting next to you, judging fellow passengers that have boarded before you as you decide where to sit…

Thankfully, there’s news that it might go away.

Nonetheless, this CGP Grey video shows how finding an effective boarding procedure is a surprisingly complex problem. Also, it’s interesting that the “common-sense” system of boarding back-to-front is actually slower than boarding in a random order(!).

More interestingly, the theoretically best solution is not feasible because of social implications.

Maybe airlines have an incentive to make boarding as painful as possible as it gives them opportunity to sell boarding related perks like priority boarding or even seat selection…

This WSJ article reminded me of how confusing hotel light switches are such a visceral example of mismatched mapping with controls. Watch this TikTok video and tell me…how does that make sense?

@chelseazeferina why are hotel lights so complicated #hoteltour #hoteltok #solotravel #solotravelfemale ♬ original sound - 🍓 CHELSEA 🍓

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Definitely a throwback to Jakob Nielsen's 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design, namely #2: Match Between the System and the Real World. It’s nostalgic to see the stovetop as the example on that page, as it was my first “aha!” moment when I realized that it was bad design that led me to turning on the wrong stove over and over.

Maps not only serve as visualizations of space but also of context and culture.

In this video learn why limited information, laziness, literary fantasy, and lopsided incentives lead to misrepresentations in maps (even in the age of satellite imagery!).

Know that you’ll find guaranteed chuckles with every Map Men video.

I particularly enjoyed learning about how a novel about the New World led to (Baja) California being shown as a massive island in so many older maps.

UX research allows teams to deeply understand the needs and motivations of customers. It is important to define how we will take action once we gather this new knowledge. In this article about empathy, Baruch Sachs defines three broad approaches to actionable empathy:

1. Empathy to solve real problems

2. Empathy to innovate

3. Empathy to manipulate

Be careful when a team/stakeholder goes into a research study wanting to understand: “how do we make our users do x”? That question dangerously flirts with using research to manipulate behavior. Organizations will not be successful if they try to force a solution on a customer.

I’ve been going on a deep dive of Formula 1 this season, in part thanks to a Netflix miniseries F1: Drive to Survive. Naturally, I found myself rooting for Haas F1 team, the only American team on the grid.

This year, Haas’ title sponsor is Rich Energy, a company that no one has heard of. This profile on Jalopnik tries to uncover the mystery of how a company with seemingly no assets can fund the millions of dollars needed for an F1 team:

In retrospect, Rich Energy in F1 makes perfect sense. A seemingly multinational company offering a slippery product, backed by a soft-core porn billionaire and someone who made money profiting amidst political strife and Zimbabwean economic, cultural, and societal turmoil.

To add more to the mess, Rich Energy recently lost a court battle with Whyte Bikes for allegedly copying their logo.

Honestly, I just miss last year’s livery:

Because of our schooling, we typically think of “research” as quant research that exists to predict future behavior and deliver objective(?!) truth. This thread by Dr. Sam Ladner is a helpful reminder that our stakeholders might have a knowledge gap in the role of qualitative research.

Researcher friends and frenemies: if you don't know what interpretivist research is, you're not ready to do qual research. Positivism only works for studies with falsifiable hypotheses, which does not happen in qual research.

— Dr. Sam Ladner (@sladner) May 20, 2019

I’ve grown up with the pressure of being productive with my time. Weaning myself from the guilt of idleness can be a challenge but this NYTimes article on the necessity of doing nothing helps.

I’ll be fighting for more time idly looking at nothing and letting my mind daydream in boredom.

Caroline Jarrett presents the Question Protocol to introduce a process to wean out unneccessary survey questions:

A question protocol is a tool for finding out which form fields are required and lists

• every question you ask

• who within your organization uses the answers to each question

• what they use them for

• whether an answer is required or optional

• if an answer is required, what happens if a user enters any old thing just to get through the form

The rest of the article can be found here.