Lauren Ashpole

Independent by Lemon Studio Type.

It’s almost 2025. Google Search is steadily getting worse. AI is flooding the web with dubious content and making it harder to know what’s even accurate. Social media is (mostly) for getting angry and discouraging links that might stop your scrolling. But, on a positive note, newsletters are all the rage.

So I’m jumping on that bandwagon! As everything gets harder to find (and since I don’t see webrings or blogrolls making a comeback), I want to highlight some of the tutorials, tools, podcast, books, and other content I find useful every month. Topics will be the same as here: programming, fonts, design, and tech in general.

I’m going to start collecting links for the end of January so sign up below and watch your inbox then!

Abhartach by Fontdation.

Gremlin by TypeFactory.

Recommending two fonts with a similar vibe by the same foundry. Why choose? Pearson and Philipa are two tall, bottom heavy fonts by TypeFactory. Free for personal use.

ZT Shago by Zelow Type is a pretty fun, unique font family. The regular version is available to download free for personal use although I'm most partial to the extra rounded bolder weights.

Ugh, I’d hoped to get this out way back in February and really lost my motivation after missing Valentine’s Day. I guess the day before the 4th of July will have to do.

The Paper Hearts font now has improved kerning and three new variations: outlined, color, and color outline. The color files are OpenType SVG and work in all browsers and programs that support that format. Get it here.

It also seems worth mentioning why these updates were taking so long and the lessons I learned. A while back, I switched to the Glyphs App but, after years of using much older software, I hadn’t explored a lot of its features. So I was trying to outline each heart shape manually and taking ages on every character while also not getting the consistent look I wanted. But it turns out there are easier ways! The tutorial How to make a monoline font goes over using the Offset Curve filter to apply an outline to an entire instance and the forum post Apply strokes to all glyphs explains how to use mekkablue scripts to add the same stroke settings across the board. I used the latter for this font and it saved so much time. 

It’s a new font you can download! La Jefa is short, scrawl-y, and very loosely based on a card I received from a former boss (hence the name). 

Cherry blossom season just ended but you can still enjoy this bloom inspired font. Blumebungabloem by GlyphStyle is a bold, flowery display font that you can try free for personal use only.

Moodstone by Adante.Creative is a fun, quirky font. I like the combination of loopy letters and blunt edges. Free for personal use only.

Been traveling a lot lately and got behind on trying out new fonts so I'll just post one every Friday until I'm back on my one a month schedule.

Ring Angle by Isolatype is a fun, hand drawn font that would be good for kids books or projects. It's free for personal use and includes an italic style. I especially like the alternate characters (like the R, g, and A above)!

I love this podcast. My only complaint is that it's newish and I sped through every episode and now I want more.

I don't download a ton of script fonts but I'm really into Party Attack by NihStudio, maybe because it has a bolder, blockier feel than most. While you're downloading, don't miss their gallery of sample usages in menus, invitations, and more. Free for personal use only.

Shift + 2 has completely changed my relationship with Figma. Zoom right to whatever object you have selected. No more tediously zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth trying to center.

I have big plans in the works to overhaul a few projects and, to prep for that, I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on different approaches to publishing JavaScript packages. These are a few resources I’ve found particularly useful and informative.

How to Publish an Updated Version of an npm Package – Cloud Four - I’ve used different tools to automate releases in the past but had no idea what they were doing under the hood. This article walks through creating a release and publishing to npm and Git with detailed explanations at every step. It’s a great starting point since understanding the manual process makes evaluating different automated strategies a lot easier.

Automate npm publishing with GitHub Actions, proper changelog, and release notes - I'm looking for a solution that includes independently versioned monorepos so this guide isn't a perfect fit. However, using GitHub Actions to manually trigger a release and enter the correct version bump (major, minor, patch, etc.) is a really clever approach.

Release Workflow | Yarn - Package Manager - Yarn's release workflow for monorepos is an experimental feature so I’m holding off for now but I hope it pans out. The section on deferred versioning and record keeping is especially intriguing.

Tools! Trying to figure out which of these options would best serve my needs:

semantic-release - My current tool of choice. semantic-release depends on commit messages that follow Angular's commit message conventions for versioning. Unfortunately, it doesn't play nice with monorepos (for more details, here's a little extra credit reading The chronicles of semantic-release and monorepos).

Auto - Intuit - Automates releases based on pull request labels. I used this at a previous job and appreciated that it didn't require linting commit messages or any extra effort from contributors. The downside, Lerna is a must for use with monorepos.

Release It! - This seems promising. A CLI tool that can be used in interactive or continuous integration mode. The big appeal for me is a Yarn workspaces specific plugin.