Hello! If you're new here, I'd like you to comment below with • your name • your location • your favourite typeface • anything else you'd like to share

According to this news release, researchers have found an even older alphabetic writing in a tomb from Syria: The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations. “Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. “And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.” “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought.”

You're facing a terrible choice. The world is devoid of typefaces, fonts have been dissolved into faint memories. Those glorious font selection menus cut down to a binary. Written communication persists, though; even though the selection is slim, you have options: Times New Roman or Helvetica. For all time. Which font will you use in all applications, forever? Why?

Hello type enthusiasts. I started this Skool group as an extension of my Instagram and later my newsletter. None of these outlets have been particularly active, and I'm now in the process of rethinking Typographic North as a whole. As a part of this process, I would love to hear your ideas about what this Skool group could become. Here's a few ideas that have been brewing: • Offer introductory courses in book and publication design • Offer Indesign and Affinity Publisher tutorials • Have recurring informal calls for members. Coffee hours, virtual co-working sessions, hangouts. • Arrange a book club • Create and share templates of various sorts Do you have any wishes or ideas for this group? Let's hear them! Together, we can shape this community's future. – Kris

Norway's former princess Märtha Louise and her «shaman» husband Durek Verrett are still generating news headlines in Norway – this one typography related: about their monogram on a bottle of gin they've released. Christopher Haanes, renowned calligrapher (and my former teacher) says that the M and the D deviate so much from normative letters that they can barely be recognised as such, and questions why the M is so dominant compared to the D. Others criticise the two letters for belonging to different stylistic periods, being disturbingly nearly symmetrical and lacking a consistent stroke width and curvature. What do you think of it? https://www.nrk.no/mr/skriftekspertar-om-monogrammet-til-martha-louise-og-durek_-_-amatormessig-forma-ut-1.16947100