This article by designer Bethany Heck extolls the virtues of using lots of typefaces—far more than the commonly accepted good practice of limiting yourself to three—to create richly expressive design solutions.

This approach is antithetical to almost everything that I believe about how good typography is crafted, and Heck’s results are strike me as nearly alien to my own aesthetic. I would be loathe to advise any young designer to follow her lead.

And yet, the article is a wonderfully reasoned counter-argument to rarely questioned typographic dogma, a refreshing inversion of the “rules” to which designers can cling with too few questions. There’s also no denying that Heck’s results are wonderful, gorgeous even. With each typeface she uses, her designs become elaborate systems, almost like orchestras of typographic instruments. I’m humbled just poring over her work samples.

If you hunt for similarities in the typefaces you use and exploit them, you can have a great, diverse system of multiple faces that are fundamentally quite different but work well together because you have a specific role for each to play.

Read the full post at blog.prototypr.io.

It’s rare that it happens, but once in a while I do get to do a little freelance design work for other businesses. Recently I did some foundational identity and user experience design for Pluot, a startup in San Francisco run by two friends. Pluot is trying to reinvent video conferencing for small- to medium-size businesses; they have an elegant set-top box that hooks up to large, flat-screen TVs and makes the process of connecting to remote coworkers—both via camera, and also via sharing your desktop—incredibly easy. The company recently completed the Y-Combinator program and are in an early release phase right now.

The first thing I did was work on establishing a simple brand identity. I used varying weights of slightly hand-modified Rein Grotesk letterforms to imply a subtle motion in the letterforms, and added a small terminator dot at the bottom right that’s meant to suggest the power light at the bottom of an HDTV.

The logotype is actually meant to be somewhat quiet and is aesthetically less forward-leaning than the vision the company has of itself. The video conferencing market has traditionally been dominated by very conservative players who themselves market to often stodgy Fortune 1000 enterprises, but Pluot is focused on getting their product in the hands of startups like themselves and other technologically savvy companies—not because a Pluot box requires advanced skills, but in fact because these buyers are much more demanding in terms of having a superb user experience in their video systems.

Video conferencing software also relies on a lot of background screens, or wallpapers, and so I used those “surfaces” as an opportunity to communicate Pluot’s less conventional qualities. I strove to create an abstract visual language from photographic “materials”; I used a series of stock photos that are refracted through a geometric kaleidoscope, if you will. The effect distorts their details substantially but not entirely. Here are a few of the backgrounds that I created to set the tone.

In these designs you may also notice some of the patterns I set up for the user experience. The amount of space that you need on an HDTV (or even a web browser; Pluot also works on your desktop) to display video conferencing controls is relatively small, and so I really wanted to make the wide expanses feel intentional and not just a byproduct of poor layout planning. So I tucked everything at the bottom right of the screen—the “end,” if you read screens from top left to lower right—and stacked the elements up, one by one, from the bottom edge. In this example, you can see how the controls grow upwards as they get expanded:

I used that same stacking pattern for the setup wizard. As the user completes each setup step, it gets nudged upwards by a new one that replaces it below. The older steps also get progressively more translucent.

Establishing that lower right region as a central control area also set the tone for the Pluot experience on screen when viewing conferences, too. Users join meetings by entering a simple six-character code that’s displayed on the screen in the room; I broke the code into two parts and stacked them so that they would be easier to read from the screen and type into the control interface. The shared screens sit side by side or stack as necessary to accommodate all the participants; Pluot meetings can host as many as four of your colleagues at once (with support for more coming soon).

It was actually a lot of fun working through all the various permutations of video meetings and trying to create a cohesive user experience for combinations of video and desktop participants in all sorts of configurations. Working with Pluot was a great side project for me for a number of months; I was able to set a clear, finite scope with the company that allowed me to get a lot of these foundational pieces done in a limited amount of time. Unfortunately, due to being ridiculously busy with my day job and my family, I wasn’t able to stay really close to the implementation process, though I continue to chat with the co-founders periodically. They’re off to a great start though, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to work with them to get it out to the world. If you work at a company with remote colleagues, I encourage you to give Pluot a try and let me know what you think of the experience I designed.

Last week there was a bit of buzz around this guy who built a bot to write new scripts for “Full House” automatically, every day, forever. The write up over at nymag.com puts that project in the context of several others which have, in recent years, used the form of situation comedies from the 1990s as the basis for unconventional, semi-serious but mostly tongue-in-cheek art projects. Last year I wrote about a crazy, twenty-three minute video that overlays every episode of “Friends” on top of each other.

There’s more like that out there, apparently, including this one: a six minute supercut of countless moments from the immortal “Seinfeld” where nothing happens. As with the “Friends” video, this one is unexpectedly mesmerizing; I had watched nearly the whole thing before I realized it had me so hooked. Even though it’s nearly impossible to identify the particular episodes or narratives that any given shot was a part of, the overall sensation is surprisingly familiar and even intimate, almost like being on the set of the show without all the cast and crew. For some of us, I guess, these shows will forever be a kind of second home.

The International Bank Note Society has awarded its annual prize for best designed bank note to New Zealand for its $5 polymer note. The design features the face of native mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary, with a backdrop of Mount Cook and, for fun, a yellow-eyed penguin seemingly printed in metallic ink.

I know a lot of people complain about U.S. bank notes being unimaginative and not particularly attractive, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of other bills that strike me as significantly better. Like this New Zealand note, most seem overburdened with too many colors and too many details. I realize that a lot of these design decisions are security focused and so any evaluation of their aesthetic worth needs to be seen through that lens. But for me, most all of them fall down on the job of creating a distinctly original currency brand for their respective countries. It’s unfair to say that you can spot American money from a mile away—the notes themselves benefit from the huge worldwide brand that is the U.S. of A.—but for better or worse, our greenbacks are distinctive.

The New Zealand $5 note beat out runners up from Sweden, Russia, Kazakhstan and Scotland, but I bet if you mixed them all up, most people couldn’t tell at a glance whether they were from different countries or all from the same country, much less identify their origins. That seems like a missed opportunity.

Read more about the competition in this article at theguardian.com.

This is the last in a series of eight endearing tributes to Bill Watterson’s much beloved daily comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.” Each episode is a live action, verbatim re-creation of a classic strip. They’re very short and very watchable. And also, because everything is more appealing when it’s somehow related to hip-hop reimaginings of American history, the actor who plays Hobbes in this series is Daveed Diggs, who plays the Marquis de Lafayette in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.” It all comes back to that, in 2016.

See all eight “Hobbes and Me” videos at youtube.com.

Prince, rest in peace.

I’m still having a lot of fun with Apple Pencil and Adobe Illustrator Draw (see what I made with them last week). Here’s a new drawing, of a young Elvis Costello. I’m not sure if I got the likeness really right, as portraits are not really my thing. But I do know I had a lot of fun doing it.

As I’ve been using the Pencil, I’ve naturally had lots of thoughts about its design and how it works. Here are a few of them, randomly ordered.

The weight of the Apple Pencil feels just perfect. It’s substantial enough to be very satisfying to hold and write and draw with, but not so heavy as to be wearying to use. I’m not sure that any stylus should cost US$99 the way that the Pencil does, but this one is built solidly enough to make a pretty convincing case for the price tag.

As elegant a design as the Pencil is, I can’t help but feeling that it’s not a finished design. That there’s no way to attach it to your iPad, and there’s no available pen clip (there are cheap hacks out there, but none of them seem perfect). Those are two of the more notable shortcomings that people talk about frequently, but just as significant, in my mind, is the fact that you need an adapter to charge the Pencil with a Lightning cable.

The cap at the top of the Pencil hides a male plug that lets you charge the stylus in your iPad’s Lightning port, of course, but it’s very awkward to do so, and I would prefer to just be able to use the same cable I use to charge my iPhone. The Apple Pencil box ships with a strikingly diminutive Lightning adapter that lets you do that; I lost mine within a day or two.

I added a Pencil Cozy to the top of the Pencil to prevent loss of the cap. It’s also a great way to easily identify your own Pencil if you’re in a room full of people who are using iPad Pros and Apple Pencils, which is something that happens at Adobe.

Lastly, I’m very eager to see Apple Pencil support migrate further down the iPad line. I demonstrated Pencil and Illustrator Draw for several people, and more than any other demo of what an iPad can do, what I heard was, “I want one.” Apple Pencil really feels like a killer app for the iPad, but it faces a big problem right now: it’s not exactly cheap, and it also requires spending at least US$599 on an iPad Pro (or at least US$749 for a 128G model, which is really the smallest capacity model anybody should be buying). That price point is a significant hurdle for non-professional users, and I hope Apple clears them soon. Imagine if, by this year’s holiday season, Apple releases an iPad mini-style tablet—something at an entry level—that works with Apple Pencil. That could make for the biggest quarter the iPad has had since its launch.

It’s been interesting to me to see how startups have been advertising in the New York City subway in recent years. These ads from Casper are notable because of their genial illustration style. (As it happens, we recently bought a Casper mattress for a spare room in our house; the product does live up to the hype.)

These ads from StreetEasy also caught my eye. The particular illustration style they employ is not my exact taste, but I’m a fan of the fact that the company was willing to stray away from the antiseptic, vector-based illustration style that seems to be de rigueur for technology companies. Overall I think they’re great.

And then there are startups’ ads that are notable less for their aesthetic than for their attitude. I wrote very briefly about this brazenly obsequious advertisement for Uber back in February:

The basic worldview of that ad—that these customers are more important than the average person—shows up in advertising from other startups, too. Here’s one for TaskRabbit that I spotted recently; its message seems to be that cleaning is something that other people should do for you, so you can spend your time on more important things, like yoga:

The worst ad of this type that I think I’ve seen is from Seamless, which delivers restaurant take out. This particular billboard makes no bones about the idea that people who speak other languages—foreigners, basically—should really be doing the bidding of its privileged customers.

Before I got an Apple Pencil last week I wasn’t sure how much I would use it; now I can’t put it down. It’s reignited a part of my brain that’s been practically dormant for years; as I kid I used to draw endlessly—until, somewhere along the line, computers got in the way. I feel as if finally, after decades, technology has finally dovetailed with that part of me that used to pour myself into making pictures.

These are some drawings that I made over the weekend with Pencil and Adobe Illustrator Draw, which is vector based. That combination is really profound for me. It’s not like working with a replication of real world art supplies, though obviously many of the same principles apply. The difference is that I’m drawing in a way that’s native to the tools; the vector engine allows you to zoom in and out incredibly quickly, and so I can work at very, very fine levels of detail. There’s also unlimited undo, which makes me much bolder in making marks, and much more willing to experiment. Finally there’s also an unquantifiable character to the way the strokes I make with the Pencil are interpreted as lines by the app that’s much more forgiving—and fun—than drawing with pen and ink, at least for me.

I’m not saying that these are remarkable pieces of work, just that they were really, really gratifying to make. I felt better about these drawings than I have about any drawings I’ve made in at least the past ten years. That’s what technology is supposed to do; make you feel like you have super powers.