2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
d e v o n

#extradirty
Xuebing Du

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almost home
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KIROKAZE
cherry valley forever
h
i don't do bad sauce passes
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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@glyphs-fi
I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.
Okayokayokayokaybut "My hand will wear out but the inscription will remain" is kind of a power line BEFORE you factor in that it is, in fact, over a thousand years old.
It’s always good to spend a few moments, on a quiet day, looking through the Family album.
made a thing
Type!!! We love glyphs, fonts, & typefaces!
Hello! re-typing this because i'm too lazy to copy-paste from @epenethesis,
I spent a great deal of time learning about various scripts, however this has been to the detriment of my ability to create new original ones as they have been too closely associated with existing ones.
I heard from them you may have advice, and i thank you wether you do or do not as long as you answer.
Be well, internet stranger.
Hi! So to introduce myself briefly I do type design & calligraphy and something I do often is learn historic scripts and styles from manuscripts etc and thats how I get feels for things. I think if you learn more about different styles of the scripts and notice patterns it'd help u make more original looking scripts. In any case, here are some of my general advices on creating & learning scripts:
1. scripts have rhythm, visually and in stylus movement
Scripts tend to have repeated elements. strokes, joints, spacing, etc. For example, lowercase latin has vertical weight between the baseline and the x height, and this is its natural resting space. Occasionally letters have ascenders and descenders. horizontally, letters have semi-evenly spaced downstrokes (see letters like m and n) with the writing pattern of ↓→↓→ etc.
2. "Intermediate stage" does not exist.
Something that people do commonly while evolving a script is that they create intermediate stages that do not have patterns or rhythms, but these intermediate scripts should be on their own self contained systems
3. Scripts have multiple styles simultaneously that influence each other.
Scripts don't simply evolve linearly. Modern latin has so many styles and that is the case for most scripts. Modern Greek letterforms are a fusion of original Greek minuscule forms and forms evolved from uncial (sigma has both, with the final form deriving from uncial)
4. Consider the motion of the pen
Some nib shapes make it harder to draw strokes in certain directions, and in general strokes going from left to right and top to bottom are more common because generally it is easier to pull than push. some writing utensils allow you to write in any direction, and often from switching from the former systems to the latter, scripts gain seeminglt redundant and complex looking connective strokes. (think javanese and copperplate calligraphy) Limiting stroke directions also helps with consistent writing rhythm. (try drawing a square multiple times with one stroke in one direction, you will find that it is significantly harder to keep it square than breaking it up into multiple strokes) (Note: Contrary to popular belief writing on leaves isnt what makes indic scripts look loopy and geometric, it is the unfamiliarity with the various scripts by people who perpetuate this myth)
5. Different styles with different quirks may be used for different purposes
Short titles and signs may use bold and ornate styles (black letter, lombardic capitals, aksar mul, bold cleric script, kanteiryu, kufic) or archaic styles (roman capitals, seal script).
Formal body text may use either space-efficient blocky styles (black letter, uncial, cleric script, jain nagari style) or more balanced organic styles (humanist, regular script, etc).
Informal body text may use semicursive (italic, bâtarde, running script, etc) or cursive (grass script, etc)
6. Don't trust online sources on script evolution
study your manuscripts and form ur own perception of things cause so many people are Wrong on the internet
---
Now for a more practical example, this is how i made Ekavathian:
I came up with this asemic sketch, borrowing the rhythm from Javanese and the diagonals from Lontara.
We felt that this was too visually cluttered, so I simplified the shapes and picked letters.
I iterated on it, writing text to see how it feels and making the letters feel more natural to write
I began working on the font, and I started with the square thing and expanded from there. I wanted it to have an indic pen angle with some stroke modulation
I settled on this for the stroke pattern. Feels natural for the kind of shapes i have.
This is my handwriting after making the font (brainstorming cursive idea) and its kinda funny how I got better at writing a completely made up script lol
In any case if you have questions about specific things ask me any time
Do you use & in your regular writing?
Yes, digitally & in writing
Yes, but only digitally
Yes, but only in writing
Yes, but only when alongside proper nouns
No
TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).
Bonus:
These are my people.
Betting I’ve reblogged this before. Betting I’ll reblog it when it turns up again.
In addition to the print terminology stuff: the visual shorthand icons and ad graphics for something about writing are still often pen-nibs, fountain pens and typewriters…
…while graphics of a monitor, keyboard and mouse remain visual shorthand for computing…
…even though most writers now use monitor / keyboard / mouse or even laptop / touchpad.
In addition, headers for “this blog / website is about writing” are often in one of the many imitation typewriter fonts complete with smudges, or just Courier.
The start and end call icons on most / all smartphones is still the handset of a classic desk telephone, and sometimes the open-app icon is a complete phone.
The term “hang up” for “end the call” refers to something even older - one of these…
And of course the Save icon is indeed a 3½ inch floppy disc.
Why it wasn’t a 5¼ floppy is a mystery. The icon version is just as distinctive.
Also, why various OP updates never changed “Save” to the graphic of a CD / DVD or flash drive is another mystery, and nowadays a Save icon should probably be a cartoon cloud.
Graphics and terminology are funny things.
reblogging this again for EVEN MORE information.
I’m mostly entertained by the guy who thinks you need to know that “case” means “box” in French as though that’s not what it means in English.
skeumorphism my beloved
It’s fascinating. This post alternately made me feel old and taught me something. Tumblr is amazing.
And because we continue to use signs of ancient hardware, youngsters come up with questions like “why is the icon for ‘save’ a vending machine with a can of soda?” (One day I’ll find that post and link it)
The reason the save icon is a 3.5" floppy seems to mainly be that 3.5" disks were the most common disk by the time graphical interfaces got popular on PCs. Earlier stuff was more text based so they didn’t have or need icons.
But there are always exceptions. Lotus 1-2-3 for windows uses 5.25" disks for the save and load icons!
One thing that still fucks with my head is that it’s also diskettes because you just didn’t have internal storage at the time
like in the DOS era you have your disk A with your OS, then disk B with your data and that’s it, it’s all removable storage
i made a font
i have no idea how much of a typography community there is on this site, but i wanted to take a stab at making my own font because i am a tiny bit of a font nerd
i don't think anyone will see this, but i wanted to add a choice to download it if you like just in case
(more typography mumbo jumbo under read more, i ramble a lot)
I made this little artwork because I thought it gave off children's book vibes. The eyes are made from the O glyph!
– Squint Typeface (2022), by Cat Wenthworth
This goes so hard no other type will top this
Typeface concept art for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse by Jesús Alonso Iglesias
It's a work in progress, but here's the new ambigram for my name. I went with "Dr. Tesseract" because it let me get fancy with the ESSE in the middle.
@glyphs-fi
if you didn't know, discord has a serious internationalization/accessibility problem where diacritic count is capped PER MESSAGE. this means if you have a decently long text in hindi for example it starts deleting VOWELS IN RANDOM LOCATIONS. yep. RANDOM LOCATIONS. it used to be just at the end but now they're removed from random locations. this has been an issue for years and i brought it up. it's such a fucking stupid problem that they introduced to themselves for some reason. they havent fixed it. i cant have funny copy pastas in hindi. fuck discord
this is me typing the syllable बा bā over and over again. its made of the base letter ब ba and the diacritic ा ā. you can see in this example that it just deletes the diacritic in random fucking places. this is definitely gonna lead to stupid fucking misunderstandings. My guess is that this was introduced for preventing diacritic spam like zalgo text or whatever. guess what diacritics is how scripts FUCKING WORK sometimes you stupid fuck
and because devanagari is an abugida vowel being deleted isnt obvious cause the base letter has an inherent vowel this is so fucking dumb this has been a problem for fucking YEARS fucking hell bitch
fix your fucking stupid app i cant believe how fucking stupid this is this is like such an obvious unicode oopsie they tell you not to do in programming classes
so happy this site has grotesk type as their branding
A poem scribbled on the back of a truck in China, apparently written by the trucker. Translation by me
I love eating lamb kebab,
and I can judge from its texture
the age of the lamb.
This lamb today is
about as old as I am,
both full of youthful vigor
to be slaughtered at will.
good riddance live
fonts: Trade Gothic Bold Condensed #20 & Pissjar (Regular piss)
i used tumblr live im sorry i just wanted to bring some actual fun content to it it was just for a few hours i swear;;;;;;;
Fighting a war rn (blocking people on the #typography tag if they’re a page posting mid poetry from a scanned book that has one of Three Fonts in Existence)
Do You Like This Font?: New Rodin
Yes
No
Mixed feelings (explain in the tags if you wish)
Released by Fontworks, recognized for its usage in many Nintendo games. Just a tiny bit confusable with Shin Go by Morisawa.
Fontworks website page