Owning the Archive

I’ve been writing a semi-weekly newsletter called Adventures in Typography for a couple of years now and it has always bothered me that I didn’t own the archive of all that writing. I don’t like the idea that I’m dependent on anyone else, or a third party service—especially when there’s a few pieces I’ve written that I look back on quite fondly.

And so the other day I spent some time making a permanent space for the newsletter. You can now visit the archive! You can read things about maps! Or about the four kinds of typographic space! Or a disastrous two week trip to Berlin! It’s a collection of basically every typographic thought I’ve had since I moved to San Francisco.

To make things easier on myself I probably should’ve done this by hitting the Buttondown API, requesting that data every week via a Netlify function and then transforming all that Markdown with Eleventy. But for now I’m doing it all manually by downloading a zip from Buttondown itself, which is fine for now.

Anyway! This is mostly for my own entertainment and anxiety and I’ll be sure to polish things as time passes. It could all do with some design attention for sure.