Albert, Blackletter, and Piss
And some white powder, too
Ho Ho Hello again, happy December! 🎄
Here are the projects, tools, and visual delights that my eyes and ears enjoyed over the last month 👇
Even more wibbles
Corridor Digital drew my attention to WAVE, a wonderful experimental film that goes wobble. A great example of using AI as a tool, as the motion was created by hand and fed into the image generation to produce the distortion effects. The moments where the generation breaks down into a noisy intersecting mess are especially striking.
Medieval cryptocurrency 🏰
Ragged Edge won a Brand Impact Award for their rebrand of Solflare. Blackletter is a tough aesthetic to pull off in tech, but it serves as a bold differentiator to the techy or unserious meme culture look you’ll see elsewhere in crypto.
Dome, Sweet Dome 🎶
The Royal Albert Hall (that’s our Carnegie Hall, for readers in the USA) rolled out a fun rebrand from Brandpie. I love the archway/dome imagery in the new masthead, with that interesting Victorian/Art Nouveau feel that firmly shouts the strongest part of the brand — the internationally recognisable name.
G’bye, Adobe 👋
I barely use Creative Cloud outside work, but when Adobe hiked my subscription earlier this year, cancelling meant losing those occasional Illustrator or Photoshop sessions. Until Affinity came along last month.
The first release combines Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign into one app… and it’s free. It covers most of what a casual user needs, so I’ll gleefully tell Adobe to piss off.
Touch Grass 🌱
The meme’s a little stale now, but someone made a screen time app that forces you to physically touch some real grass to unlock your doomscrolling apps. Heh heh heh.
Finally, white powder 🌨️
I mentioned Festivitas last year, a small app for your Mac that adds fairy lights to your dock/desktop. Of course, the solo dev behind the project has added beautiful customisable falling snow for 2025. Kitsch, cringe, and I love it.
Thanks for reading.
Crikey — that’s it from me for 2025. Thank you for being one of the people that opens and reads these emails. I hope you’ve had a year with some brilliant things to be grateful for amidst the chaos, and I’ll see you in January… probably.
Until then,
Tom 🐢
Love all of this! I think WAVE is one of the only uses of AI that's made me jealous and inspired!