Resources
I’ve compiled this handy dandy page for you full of people, places, and things that I love. I try to update this whenever I find something new and awesome, and only endorse things that I’ve personally used / tried. I’m not getting paid by any of these companies to promote anything, just wanted to point you in the direction of awesomeness.
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Bella Figura
Send all brides-to-be here. Beautiful letterpress invitation designs by yours truly and dozens of other designers.
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Boxcar Press
Where I buy my letterpress plates.
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Briar Press
Great site for keeping up with Letterpress news and to peruse / post classifieds for buying and selling type and presses.
- Design Observer
- Design Sponge
- Favorites: NYC
A google map of my favorite spots in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Updated infrequently, but full of good eats and shopping.
- Grain Edit
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Humble Pied
Mig Reyes’s site showcasing inspirational creatives sharing one piece of advice over video chat.
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Inker Linker
A resource I created to help find printers. You can sort based on method, price, location, popularity, and more.
- Lovely Package
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Swiss Miss
Tina Roth Eisenberg’s smile-making blog of design and gift-giving inspiration.
- The Dieline
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Under Consideration
A network of great design-centric sites including Brand New, FPO: For Print Only, Art of the Menu, and Quipsologies.
General
Type-centric
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FontFeed
A daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world.
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Fonts in Use
Real fonts spotted in the wild plus articles and commentary by some very nerdy folks.
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IAMPETH
The International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers, and Teachers of Handwriting
- I Love Typography
- ILT Book Recommendations
- Ministry of Type
- MyFonts’s Newsletters
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Nice Web Type
A place for web typography experiments and reading about advancements and best practices in typesetting web text, handcrafted by Tim Brown.
- TDC Book Recommendations
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Type Directors Club
Promoting excellence in typography for over 65 years. The TDC offers excellent type related events, educational workshops, and a beautiful annual.
- Typedia
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Typographica
Stephen Coles’ outstanding blog of type reviews, books and commentary.
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Web Typography
Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style applied to the web.
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Wood Typer
Nick Sherman’s notes on large and ornamented type and related matters.
Web-centric
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A List Apart
A wonderful site covering all things relating to the web with well-written articles by the field’s top practitioners.
- Codecademy
- Code Academy
- CSS Tricks
Chris Coyier’s excellent and extremely helpful site with articles, code snippets, and other goodies.
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Don’t Fear the Internet
A site I created with Russ Maschmeyer to teach basic HTML and CSS to Non-Web Designers.
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Kirby CMS
I use Kirby as the content management system for my website. It’s amazing.
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Method and Craft
Web-centric interviews and articles “exploring the creative mind and beauty within each pixel.”
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Microformats
A resource for semantic HTML in general and microformats.
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Mozilla Developers Network
An open community of developers building resources for a better web, regardless of brand, browser or platform. Top online documentation for HTML, CSS, JS, DOM.
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Awwwards
Pure web candy.
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WordPress Codex
A massive site full of articles and forums as well as extensive documentation of all Wordpress features that is relatively easy to read and learn from.
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Zeldman
Web Design news and information since 1995.
Compatriots
Design
- Chuck Anderson
- Kelli Anderson
- Matthew Anderson
- Lindsay Ballant
- Ben Barry
- Scott Boms
- Kim Bost
- Damien Correll
- Lizania Cruz
- Nick Felton
- Javier Garcia
- Rob Giampietro
- Justin Gignac
- Tim Goodman
- Holly Gressley
- Headcase Design
- The Heads of State
- I Shot Him
- Labour
- Emily Lessard
- Louise Fili Ltd.
- Laura Brunow Miner
- Olly Moss
- Mucca Design
- Open
- Part and Parcel
- Richard Perez
- Celeste Prevost
- Mig Reyes
- Rumors
- Paul Sahre
- Script and Seal
- Joe Shouldice
- Bryn Smith
- Aymie Spitzer
- James Victore
- Workshop
Type
- Jos Buivenga
- Commercial Type
- Darden Studio
- Luc De Groot
- Michael Doret
- Dunwich Type
- Font Bureau
- FontFont
- FontHaus
- FontShop
- H&FJ
- Just Another Foundry
- Henrik Kubel
- League of Moveable Type
- Jeremy Mickel
- James Montelbano
- Okay Type
- Jim Parkinson
- Alejandro Paul
- Process Type Foundry
- Jesse Ragan
- Mark Simonson
- Kris Sowersby
- Erik Spiekermann
- Typekit
- Type Together
- Type Trust
- Underware
- Veer
- Village
- Hannes von Döhren
- Mark van Bronkhorst
- Webtype
Lettering
- Marian Bantjes
- Ken Barber
- Darren Booth
- Alison Carmichael
- Dan Cassaro
- Deanne Cheuk
- Jon Contino
- Keetra Dean Dixon
- Mike Essl
- Ray Fenwick
- Friends of Type
- Mario Hugo
- Linzie Hunter
- Seb Lester
- Maxwell Lord
- Luke Lucas
- Erik Marinovich
- Liz Meyer
- Daniel Pelavin
- Mike Perry
- Post Typography
- Jeff Rogers
- Elizabeth Carey Smith
- Will Staehle
- Dana Tanamachi
- Alex Trochut
- Doyald Young
Illustration
- Kate Bingaman-Burt
- Will Bryant
- Chris Buzelli
- Frank Chimero
- Josh Cochran
- Lisa Congdon
- Gemma Correll
- Jennifer Daniel
- Gilbert Ford
- Gina and Matt
- Grady McFerrin
- James Gulliver Hancock
- John Hendrix
- Caroline Hwang
- Ted McGrath
- Alex Eben Meyer
- Christopher Silas Neal
- Christoph Niemann
- Leif Parsons
- Gavin Potenza
- Brian Rea
- Edel Rodriguez
- Julia Rothman
- Rachel Salomon
- Leanne Shapton
- Shout
- Felix Sockwell
- Frank Stockton
- Katherine Streeter
- Neil Swaab
- Jillian Tamaki
- Gary Taxali
- Sam Weber
- Jing Wei
- Yuko Shimizu
Things I’ve Bought That I Love
Work Stuff
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15” MacBook Pro Retina
This is my primary computer, it’s super quick and much lighter than their regular MacBook Pros. Also, since Adobe updated their software to retina resolution, it’s super awesome.
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27” iMac + 24” Apple Display
This is my office set up. I am super spoiled having so much screen space to work with. Generally the iMac is my “work space” and the extra screen is for distracting things like twitter and browsers, or hulu and netflix if I’m working late and need Olivia Benson to help me through it.
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iPhone 5
iPhones. We all haz them. I use mine all the time and if you have a 4, 4s, or 5 the camera is good enough that it doubles as a scanner for sketches (not for high res artwork). I use Photoshop Express to crop and adjust my images before sending them off to clients. See software / apps for my favorite other ways to use it.
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Mobee Inductive Charger
I used to go through mouse batteries like crazy but now I can charge my mouse overnight. This thing is awesome.
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Bose Noise-canceling Headphones
These things are just the best. If you travel at all, you MUST own them.
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Lexmark E260D
Laser printers are shockingly useful for type designers and letterers. You have to print stuff out often to see how it looks and this is a good and cheap laser printer.
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Epson 3800/3880 Printer
Really impressed with the quality of prints you get from this printer. I did a lot of print on demand high end inkjet prints at one point and this thing never failed me. Also because all of the ink colors are separate cartridges, you go through a surprisingly little amount of ink. It took a number of months until I had to replace even one cartridge.
- Leuchtturm Sketchbooks
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Canon 5d Mark II
This camera was well worth the investment. I feel like it’s impossible to take a bad photo with this camera. I bought it primarily to shoot work, but end up using it as my main travel camera despite the size. If you get it, make sure you also get Lightroom for handling the RAW files. It comes with its own program but Lightroom is more fun to use.
Software / Apps
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Dropbox
Dropbox completely changed the way I work and how I organize files. I cannot recommend this service highly enough.
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Rdio
I love rdio. Streaming music...making collaborative playlists...it’s the bee’s knees.
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Rackspace
I host all of my side projects on a Rackspace Cloud account. Rackspace has been absolutely wonderful to work with, their customer service is AMAZING and I never have outages even when I push a lot of traffic to the sites.
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Laughing Squid
I host my portfolio site through these guys, who use Rackspace servers, but are set up to handle my weirdo .is domain and are super reasonably priced.
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Kirby CMS
I use Kirby as the content management system for my website. It’s amazing.
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Sign Now
Great web app for signing documents.
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Text Expander
Saves oodles of time in email.
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Cloud App
Automatically upload screen shots for quickie sharing. I use this extensively to get fast critiques from friends and clients.
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Basecamp
Good for project management, I use this to help organize TDC comings and goings.
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Big Cartel / Pulley App
My store is Big Cartel with their Pulley App integration for digital downloads.
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Wordpress
Most of the site’s I’ve made are made on a Wordpress backend beginning with Elliot Jay Stock’s Starkers Theme.
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Text Mate
Great text editor for html, css, and tons of other languages. I have yet to convert to Coda.
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CSS Edit
This is now a part of Mac Rabbit’s Espresso program, but I still use their simplified CSSEdit version, which is awesome for extracting style sheets to edit locally and preview changes without actually having to mess with the live site.
Life Stuff
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Breville Dual Boiler
This thing is just the best. Makes amazing espresso. Worth every penny.
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Presso
Great espresso maker for home or office. It’s all manual, looks nice, and is super easy to clean.
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Baratza Virtuoso Grinder
A good coffee grinder is shockingly important for making decent coffee, especially if you make french press coffee. Getting the grinds to be course but uniform just isn’t possible with a blade grinder or even a mediocre bur grinder. This is a great burr grinder recommended to me from some legit coffee snobs.
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Breville Electric Kettle
Looks good, boils water, nuff said.
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Travel Clothing Steamer
Ugly but works incredibly well. You’ll never iron again.
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Panasonic Lumix GF1
An amazing camera for travel—it’s very compact, shoots RAW, and has interchangeable lenses (the 20mm pancake lens is the best and most useful).
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Panasonic 1080p Projector
When Russ and I moved to San Francisco we decided against getting a flatscreen TV and did a bunch of research to find a good projector. This was definitely the best we found and the picture quality is AWESOME. It also is pretty nice looking and far less huge than some other models we were scoping out. Also, because the fan/vent is in the front instead of the back you can push it right up against the wall.
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BenQ Projector
This is a less expensive projector that I bought for the studio for presentations and other stuff. It’s not 1080p HD, but is still good and gets the job done.
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Mission Bicycle
Custom made bicycles, I am obsessed with mine and get compliments on it constantly.
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Keep Cup
Customizable travel coffee mugs from Australia. These are great because they come in a few sizes—I only need the little one for my espresso drinks.

