Whether you’re new here or back for another edition – welcome! I hope you had a very good festive break – seems like ages ago. 

This one was weird to write as I’m still easing my way into January. I really needed the pomodoro timer, soothing concentration music and to give myself a good talking to before I could get going. I hope you like what’s coming up, and as always I’m happy to hear from you. So, get in touch and let me know what you think.

When I stopped for the Christmas break, I decided I really like writing this newsletter and sharing designery things. So, I started sharing a bit more on social media and writing blogs (although they are in the “to be published” folder – soon, soon).

Wine and cheese, Fred and Ginger, Ant and Dec*, they make good partners. Fonts work together too, the technical term is “font pairings”. It would be a bit boring if there was only one font in the whole of a magazine or a website. It’s more interesting to use more than one font, and there are certain pairs that look good together. 

Playfair and Lato come to mind as a classic pairing. They work well together and have different weights to design with. Lato is a sans serif font (featured in the first newsletter) and Playfair is a serif font. 

So, this newsletter is dedicated to:

The good news is it’s free to use, but as always do check the licence. It can be found on Google fonts and can be activated within Adobe. It’s designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen, a type designer based in the Netherlands.

A bit of history coming up - Google says: “Playfair is a transitional design. From the time of enlightenment in the late 18th century, the broad nib quills were replaced by pointed steel pens. This influenced typographical letterforms to become increasingly detached from the written ones. Developments in printing technology, ink, and paper making, made it possible to print letterforms of high contrast and delicate hairlines.”

I love Playfair’s dot above the i, the tail of the y and the ascender in the a. Must be the circular feeling.

Wow! Playfair Top stat!

1.47 billion is the number of times Google Fonts registered Playfair Display being used over the last week (at the time of writing on Jan 24th). Playfair Display is featured in more than 2,800,000 websites.

If you’d like to read more on font pairings, one of my blog posts actually made it out of the “to be published” folder! You can read it here.

* Who? If you’re not in the UK, you may not have heard of Ant and Dec. They’re childhood friends who made millions entertaining the public by hosting Saturday night TV shows and… anyway, enough about that.

Abduzeedo

Don’t even ask me how to pronounce that!  It started off as a design blog in 2006, and now people submit their work to be featured. It’s a collective of individual writers sharing articles about design, photography, and UX. 

Need to turn something into a tiny winy file?

I do love using tinypng.com and seeing the Panda, but here’s another site that will compress images for you. And what a fun name to say! Squoosh! 

A forever student

I promised myself I would NOT buy a course this year until I’ve finished the ones I’ve already bought. Well luckily, I snuck in a Procreate course in December (not finished it yet). But while I was on the Domestika site I came across this page which has lots of free downloads to get you creatively inspired. Check out: 23 Free Resources to Inspire Creativity in 2023

Getting paid to draw

I’m sneaking this one in as I normally only do 3 designery things. But this is only available for a week, so you need to know about it now! It’s a free book titled ‘Getting paid to draw – Instagram for Illustrators’ by Mike Lowery. So cool. But arghhh he offers a course in Procreate… I must not be tempted… hmmmm?