If you, like me, need some last minutes gifts or just want to make some sweet treats for the dark times, we have collected some traditional regional recipes to celebrate winter solstice.

Discussion starter was this curious apparatus I once bought in the Czech Republic but never got around to try to use. Veronika Burian was able to identify them as the iconic Vosí Hnízda – Czech rum beehives – she knew and helped with translation of the recipe: “1 žloutek = 1 egg yolk. The last 4 things are for the filling, and 240 gr of crumbled biscuits, not flour. They are super lecker!”
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Ho Ho Holler type friends,
The holidays are fast approaching and we ’bettes wanted to give you some gift inspiration for the festive season.

I (Nicole Arnett Phillips) am particularly enamored with this amazing new project by Aussie letterer Jess Cruickshank, her Christmas Calligraphy Drive is an effort to raise funds for the Asylum Seeker Resource Center. Through this website, you can order gift tags personalized with names written in beautiful calligraphy. This lovely penmanship is for a great cause, 100% of gift tag sales will be donated. But shipping is in Australia only (unfortunate for those of use further afield)!

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Self-promotion can feel somewhat gross but who doesn’t love touting the accomplishments of others? The past several months have seen a bevy of new typeface releases by many talented folks, but perhaps you haven’t heard about all of them yet? In no particular order, let the horn-tooting begin. Drumroll, please!

Pigeonette (Future Fonts)
by Ro Hernández

Pigeonette “combines the sketchiness of handwriting with the open spacing and charmingly awkward proportions of typewriters in a not-quite-monospaced design with a comfortable reading texture.” Started as Hernández’s graduation project, it’s now getting its wings on Future Fonts. Throw it some bread while support for central European languages and Cyrillic is still in the works.

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Since it’s World Emoji Day and we here at Alphabettes 💚 emoji, I want to share a few things I learned at Emojicon, a day long celebration of all things emoji, in Brooklyn, New York on Saturday, July 14. Emojicon is organized by the fine folks at Emojination, a grassroots effort to help democratize the arcane and cryptic emoji approval process. You can also thank them for the dumpling, the hijab, and the broccoli, among other emoji success stories.

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These are eight of the many highlights and corresponding notes made by me—a typographer, mostly for print—upon reading Laura Kalbag’s book Accessibility for Everyone released last fall by A Book Apart.

1. “…everyone uses the web quite differently.”

Perhaps obvious. But we all know about what happens when we assume and assumptions are at the root of problems related to accessibility.

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Living in Australia is awesome but one of the toughest moments during the year is when the “type conference season” starts. If you — like me — suffer of major FOMO and don’t even want to open Twitter for weeks, maybe now is a good time to schedule a trip overseas and make it coincide with your favourite Type Conference! Some of them are listed below:

ISType Mono – Istanbul, TR
February 22, 2018

Typo Day – Mumbai, IN
March 1–3, 2018

Robothon – The Hague, NL
March 8–9, 2018

Type Drives Culture – New York City, US
March 23, 2018
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