Sites We Like: The Baffler & Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

We’re deep into winter now (although the days are getting longer!), which makes this a great time for some reading — and to study what makes a nice reading experience. We thought these two sites got a lot of it right.

The Baffler

With an enlightening mix of nonfiction, stories, and poetry, The Baffler does all these literary forms justice by setting them in Minion — a classic serif with a surprising degree of flexibility for its sturdiness. Most of the site content is set in varying weights and sizes of the serif, with Proxima Nova as a very occasional sans-serif alternate.

Seven Brief Lessons

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Choosing and pairing typefaces for cookbooks

We teach a cookbook design class at TypeEd, which demonstrates how to set up a book proposal to pitch to a publisher and guides designers on how to format different types of content along the way. A common question we hear at the beginning of class is, “How do you choose typefaces?”

There are many ways of setting up typographic systems, and we learned early on that choosing and pairing typefaces can be compared to the classical approach to cooking: Choose ingredients that will serve the overall flavor of the dish as well as complement one another. Too many ingredients, and the flavors conflict. …

Upcoming speaking events & beyond

So you’re already keeping up with the Typekit blog — great! Want even more from our team? Check out these opportunities to hear from some of us in person, or to catch up with some of our writing.

Elastic{ON}

Senior computer scientist Marko Iskander will be speaking at a session at Elastic{ON}, a user conference on Elasticsearch that’s being held in San Francisco from February 17–19. Marko’s session is on the 18th, and will cover how Typekit adds context to queries in its API and UI. Registration is still open as of this writing.

Git for Humans

When he hasn’t been occupied with …