Just a quick update about what I’ve been up to so far this year.
If you’ve been frequenting the blog lately, you might be noticing some abrupt changes to my design and layout. Well, as I said at the start of January, it’s time for another overhaul. I guess I wouldn’t have much of a brand if I didn’t hit the reset button every couple of years.
My site runs on WordPress (that’s .org, not .com) with a theme I built from scratch, and while that’s fun and all, it’s stressful to be responsible for content as well as constantly checking the site to make sure everything works. I’m always paranoid that my website just won’t work properly on someone’s device for some unforeseen reason.
Such issues are inevitable and one of the big hurdles of web development. Nevertheless, I think it might be time to get some help. I know enough about web development to futz with a third-party theme as necessary, but it might be nice to have some of the fundamentals taken care of.
So, as of now, the site is running on the WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five theme, which I have indeed futzed with and have more or less made look like my older theme.
It might seem completely superfluous, but aside from (hopefully) some increased robustness, there are some other nice features; searches are now built into the site instead of going through Google, and I can use the block editor to do things like add borders to specific images (previously, I would just hardcode a border as an inline style, which is, admittedly, not ideal). You also might notice some neat accouterments at the bottom of my articles now.
That being said... I might just go back to my original one. Or better yet, do this all again in a year’s time. But I’ve been working hard these past few weeks or so to get this taken care of so I can get back to writing. Naturally, there are still things in need of fixing — lazy loading video content seems not to work properly, so I’ll have to address things as I find them.
The bigger part of this rebrand is actually just the text. I don’t really consider myself to be a typographer, but more of a… type enthusiast. Typography is the kind of thing you study in college and realize at the end of the semester that you mainly know what makes things look bad, more so than what makes them look good.
Before I launched this thing, I spent quite some time agonizing over what typeface I wanted to use. Google Fonts is extremely convenient, so I was naturally steered in that direction. I wanted to use the same typeface for the website as all the documents I would share, so I had to pick something robust.
I wound up on Open Sans, which is a very good-looking typeface. I soon found out that it is extremely popular — probably one of the most popular typefaces on the planet (Google Fonts reports that it’s in use on over 115 million websites).
It doesn’t necessarily make Open Sans look bad, but I found an interesting blog post claiming that it might rob your text of some personality because of how ubiquitous it is. That being said, you still need to be wary of fonts that have too much personality.
On a more technical note, Open Sans does have its shortcomings — most critically for me, it does not have true small caps.
I mainly use small caps for stickings, as there’s a pretty annoying but popular convention in the drumming world that calls for capitalizing accented notes and leaving unaccented notes in lowercase:
Everyone does it, and it drives me nuts. Aside from being completely redundant (I can read the articulations just fine, thank you), it’s bad typographic practice. You’re NOT supposed to capitalize things for EMPHASIS, as it can be VERY distracting to CONSTANTLY read shifting case. Can you DIG IT?
The easy workaround is to use small caps, which use characters that are all uppercase, but true uppercase text looks a little bigger, so something like a paradiddle would read Rlrr Lrll instead of Rlrr Lrll. You can fake small caps, but it is another so-called type crime: look at the real small caps on top of the faked ones, and see how the fake lowercase letters are too small and thin compared to the properly redrawn glyphs:
It used to be the case that small caps variations were part of a separate font family, but it’s now preferred that as many glyphs as possible be used by the same font family via the OpenType protocol, which allows things like CSS to easily use alternate characters.
Other OpenType glyph alterations include single-story and double-story variants (like “g” versus “g”) and numerals positioning, e.g., lining numerals “1234567890” and old-style numerals “1234567890.”
Unfortunately, the OpenType features a particular typeface has (or doesn’t have) aren’t well documented — your best bet is to check the font file with something like wakamaifondue.com (“what can my font do”) to see what features are hiding in the file. And since all the OpenType features use a shorthand, so you also need something like this to decipher it all (or just copy and use the CSS that wakamaifondue spits out).
Outside of double-checking font functionality, picking a typeface is always a tedious affair. I usually have to start by checking to see if a typeface has the glyphs I like; I prefer the aforementioned double story “g,” and I need to make sure I can use other weird things, such as the numero symbol (№). I also like to be artsy and use the old-school footnote symbols (*†‡§‖¶) rather than numbers.
The thing that really melts my brain is the large number of typefaces that don’t have an italic font. For instance, I found a typeface called Encode Sans that was described as “a versatile workhorse sans-serif superfamily ready for all kinds of typographic challenges.” You get excited reading that, only to discover that it has no italics. So… personally, no, I would not describe Encode Sans as being ready for all kinds of typographic challenges.
After some tedious research, I have settled on Source Sans… which is actually the typeface I used on my old band’s website. Originally known as Source Sans Pro, it was commissioned by Adobe back in 2012 and also has serif and monospaced counterparts, but I’m not sure how I will use them, if at all. I’m partial to using serif fonts for stickings and chord symbols — I just think the serif letterforms are better when they’re on their own.
Of course, after all that curating, I had one more obstacle to overcome: MuseScore.
As I have complained about in the past, MuseScore’s typesetting abilities are pretty dismal. For instance, in something like Pages, you can see all the fonts that make up a font family:
Note how there are two weights heavier than bold, as well as the intermediate semibold and medium, not to mention two weights lighter than regular. MuseScore doesn’t let you use any of those, and when it comes to OpenType support… well, I think you know the answer to that.
The Kludgy workaround is to make duplicates of the font that only have the glyphs and weights in question, so MuseScore is forced to use them. This does clog up your computer with redundant font files, but we do what we have to. People have brought up MuseScore’s OpenType shortcomings for several years now, and I don’t expect them to get resolved anytime soon.
To be fair to MuseScore, this is a common enough problem that people have made font-freezing tools that essentially make the OpenType features permanent in a new font file, such as small caps or those alternate glyphs I mentioned.
Oh, if you were wondering, the font I use for timestamps on my PDFs is DS-Digital by Dusit Supasawat. I know nothing about who this person is, and I think I found it by searching “LCD Font,” or something to that effect. I’m not crazy about how the colon looks, but I haven’t found a good replacement, so I think I will stick with it. I used to write timestamps with Lucida Grand, for some reason, but I think it’s charming to make the timestamps look digital.
Anyhoo, I’ll try to get back to writing shortly. I will be redoing all of the screenshots of my old articles, since I want the transcriptions to use to new typography. That is going to be… tedious, but I hope it won’t get in the way too much.
We’re also going full steam ahead into what’s generally my least favorite time of the year; combined with the fact that it’s impossible to do anything online without being deluged with evidence of America’s inexorable implosion and the immediate human cost, it’s tough to stay motivated. But I’ll do my best.
(Since I’ve brought up footnotes and glyphs, the up arrow I use to link back from footnotes looks a little too short and squat with Source Sans [↑]. I guess the more proper way to do it is to just use a chevron [^] instead. If I really wanted to be tacky, I could use something like a manicule [☝︎]. )
