Katie Deighton, reporting last month for The Wall Street Journal: Henry Modisett wanted his employer to stand out. Competitors of the artificial-intelligence firm Perplexity were embracing their science-fiction roots with futuristic branding that felt cold to him. So Mod...

Gift Card Database (GCDB) has a guide to spotting tampered gift cards: Whilst it may seem unusual, you should tear open this version of Apple gift card before you purchase it so that you can inspect the redemption code. Look for missing or scratched off characters (it ma...

You will recall the Apple Account fiasco of Paris Buttfield-Addison, whose entire iCloud account and library of iTunes and App Store media purchases were lost when his Apple Account was locked, seemingly after he attempted to redeem a tampered $500 Apple Gift Card that he pu...

Wes Fenlon, writing for PC Gamer: Did Windows 3.1 really ship with a garish color scheme that was dared into being? That was a story I needed to hear, so I went digging for the credits of the Microsoft employees who worked on the user interface back then and found my way...

The letter is typeset in Papyrus, the typeface for which James Cameron’s affection inspired not one but two classic SNL shorts starring Ryan Gosling — which Cameron has a good sense of humor about.

Terrence Malick’s letter accompanying Tree of Life in 2011 was plainly and humbly set in Helvetica. David Lynch’s accompanying Mulholland Drive was also in Helvetica, but in a very Lynchian way. And then there is Stanley Kubrick, whose letter to projectionists that accompanied Barry Lyndon was typeset in Futura — quite the feat in 1975. (It was almost certainly IBM’s Mid-Century typeface, a beautiful adaptation of Futura for their Executive line of typewriters.) Cool custom letterhead on Kubrick’s as well.

Modern Illustration is a project by illustrator Zara Picken, featuring print artefacts from her extensive personal collection. Her aim is to preserve and document outstanding examples of mid-20th century commercial art, creating an accessible resource for understanding illustration history.

Glorious collection of mid-century illustrations and graphic design. Also a good follow on Instagram. (Via Dan Cederholm.)

I dare say this post from Adrian Roselli — first published in 2015 and updated 16 times (and counting) since — is the definitive debunking of the pseudoscience claims regarding deliberately ugly fonts being somehow beneficial to readers with dyslexia.

Netflix’s “tadum” is so iconic that it’s the name of their company blog. HBO’s static + chanted om is the OG standard-setter. I suspect the new Apple TV fanfare will be seen in that class. The old one was not.

Finalist is an iOS planner rooted in paper. Originally an index card system, it grew into a love letter to paper planners. You know the kind, leather folders with colored tabs and translucent dividers.

Unlike those old binders, Finalist fills itself with your calendars, reminders and weather forecast. Minimalist? Maybe not, but it’s become a UI playground designed to inspire, and looks great on iPad and Mac too.

Like the gorgeous new Year Planner for roughing in plans with the Highlighter (“intention paintbrush”).

iOS has tons of cool productivity apps. Finalist is a different take, and it might just end up in your dock.

One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”: Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affect...

Back on November 28, I bought a new cap from New Era’s web store. They offered a discount of some sort if I gave them a phone number and permitted them to send me marketing messages. That got me curious about what they’d do with my number, and it was a 50-some-dollar cap, so...

Typographer Mark Simonson, all the way back in 2001: Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus ...

Todd Spangler, reporting last week for Variety: As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and vid...

John Keilman, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): The company that makes Roomba robotic vacuums declared bankruptcy Sunday but said its devices will continue to function normally while the company restructures. Massachusetts-based iRobot has struggled fin...

My thanks to Jaho Coffee Roaster for sponsoring last week at DF. Great coffee changes the day. Since 2005, Jaho’s family-owned roastery has taken the slow and careful approach, sourcing small-lot coffees, roasting in small batches and shipping every bag fresh. Award-winning coffee delivered to your home or office, shipped fresh nationwide.

Jaho was kind enough to send me a few bags of their beans, and I can vouch that they roast excellent coffee — the kind of tasty beans where, when I finish my last morning cup, I’m tempted to brew a little more even though I know I’m fully caffeinated.

Holiday gifts? Fresh coffee is a gift that never misses, easy to give, even better to receive. Give better coffee this season. Even better: DF readers get 20 percent off with code DF.

Deadline:

The bodies of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Reiner have been found in their Brentwood home, sources confirmed to Deadline.

It appears the acclaimed director and his wife were slain by knife wounds.

The LAPD are on the scene, but have not issued an official confirmation yet. A press conference is expected to take place tonight.

People:

Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed by their son, Nick, multiple sources confirm to People.

So it goes.

Marcus Mendes, 9to5Mac: Now, on the same day that F1 The Movie debuted at the top of Apple TV’s movie rankings, the company confirmed that Pluribus has reached another, even more impressive milestone: it is the most watched show in the service’s history. Busy day. [...] ...

From the LucasFonts account, in a comment on Hacker News: Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman — a typeface older than the current president — presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britai...

Peter Kafka, writing at Business Insider: And last: It’s possible that Middle Eastern countries are investing in an American media conglomerate solely for a financial return, and would have zero interest in the content that conglomerate makes and distributes. But that’s ...

This is very funny, but also a good indication of just how far away these things are from actual intelligence. First, a reasonable human being would never get caught in a loop like this. Second, only humans can not only recognize what’s going on here, but also see the humor in it.

Paris Buttfield-Addison: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I ha...

Six-minute segment from Amazon’s AWS re:Invent keynote last week: Payam Mirrashidi, VP, Cloud Systems & Platforms, Apple, explains how AWS Graviton helps improve developer velocity at scale. Hear Swift’s journey from the premier programming language for the Apple eco...

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always r...

Youki Terada, writing for Edutopia in 2022 (via Jens Kutílek): Under close scrutiny, the evidence for dyslexia-friendly fonts falls apart. In a 2017 study, for example, researchers tested whether OpenDyslexic, a popular font with thicker lines near the bottom of the lett...

Small follow-up point re: my post this week on iMessage’s delivery architecture being built atop the Apple Push Notification service: APNs can only relay messages up to 4 or 16 KB in size, depending on the iOS or iPadOS version. If the message text is too long or if an a...

OpenAI:

In ChatGPT, GPT‑5.2 Instant, Thinking, and Pro will begin rolling out today, starting with paid plans. In the API, they are available now to all developers.

Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.

5.1 was released just one month ago, but 5.2 delivers a slew of measurable improvements across the board. Where 5.1 was seemingly more about the feel of responses, the personality, 5.2 was clearly focused on tangible and benchmarkable gains.

Before anyone starts patting the Trump administration on its back for one good typographic decision, take a gander at the hard-to-believe-this-is-real new signage at (and alas, on) the White House. This is the sort of signage that typically spells “Business Center” across from the check-in desk at a Courtyard Marriott. The Biden State Department replacing Times New Roman with Calibri was a typographic misdemeanor. Festooning the White House with signage set in gold-plated Shelley Script ought to land Trump in The Hague.

(The idea that the Oval Office ought to be explicitly labeled “The Oval Office” — whatever the typeface or signage style — brings to mind this classic Far Side cartoon, which I think aptly illustrates the president’s mental faculties.)

The fifth of five rules in Matthew Butterick’s “Typography in Ten Minutes”:

And finally, font choice. The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts already loaded on your computer (known as system fonts) and the free fonts that inundate the internet. Instead, buy a professional font (like those found in font recommendations). A professional font gives you the benefit of a professional designer’s skills without having to hire one.

If that’s impossible, you can still make good typography with system fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy. Not by typographers. Not by you.

(Via Antonio Cavedoni.)

Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.

Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, reporting for The New York Times: While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility p...