Notes from a quiet week

A short post. A few small things I noticed in the studio this week, written down before they stop being interesting.

The new client sent a brief in the post. Printed. On Colorplan. With a hand-written note pinned to the front. I have not received a printed brief in three years. The brief was no better than the PDF version would have been. The fact of receiving it as a printed object did, however, change the seriousness with which I read it. The first read, of any printed document, is slower and more attentive than the first read of any PDF. I had forgotten this.

The studio’s own RSS feed has more subscribers than I expected. The number is small, in absolute terms. It is also several times what I assumed it was. I have not checked the number in years and discovered, this week, that the assumption I had been operating on was wrong by an order of magnitude. The lesson is not about RSS. It is about how rarely I check the things I assume are not worth checking.

The new variable font release from a foundry I trust is too clever. There are eight axes. Two are useful. The other six are the foundry showing off. I will use the two and ignore the rest. This is a familiar pattern. Foundries with deep technical capability sometimes ship features that do not survive contact with the projects designers are actually shipping. The features that do survive are the boring ones.

The studio’s calendar for May has more white space than any month in the last two years. This is by design. I have written about this before. Living through it, after years of the calendar being densely scheduled, is genuinely strange. Three afternoons last week with no commitments, where I worked on whatever felt most important. The work that came out of those afternoons is some of the strongest I have produced this year. The pace is slower. The output is better. I am not yet sure whether the relationship is causal.

A small note on note-taking. The studio’s system, for what it is worth, is Apple Notes for fleeting things, a single Markdown file per project for working notes, and this site for things that are worth keeping. The system has settled, after years of trying every PKM tool the field has produced (Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, the lot). Most of those tools were over-engineered for the actual problem, which is mostly remembering specific things on Tuesdays that need to be remembered on Wednesdays. Apple Notes does this well enough.

The earlier piece on why the studio still runs on a static site covers some of the same ground.

That is the week. The next post is probably about the new brief, once the project is far enough along to write about.