This week, Alphabettes.org turned one. Blogs, they grow up so fast! We’re celebrating with cake.
We wanted a place on the internet to publish our own thoughts and writing, so we did what any self-respecting, overcommitted people do: we started a new side project. Within two weeks of registering the domain name, the site was live. Scrappy and minimal, the original design worked (through many late night, trans-Atlantic sessions of reckless-intermediate theme editing), but we quickly began feeling some growing pains. One year later, the site boasts around 145 posts (and 25 headers), most of which feature previously unpublished content.
We’d like to think what makes the blog work is the general lack of hierarchy, internal structure, or editorial control. And not taking ourselves too seriously. Leaving our egos at the door and making decisions via lazy consensus, we set out to create something that is spontaneous, topical and leverages the network’s superpowers.
Everyone has something to say and the blog encourages new voices, new ideas and new ways of thinking and making that are a reflection of our geographic and cultural diversity. Liron has published seven in-depth interviews that feel like you’re having a great conversation with a close friend. Pooja’s news round ups keep you up-to-date on new releases, talks, awards, and other horn-tooting accolades by women in the industry. The four completed series (Our Favorite Typefaces of 1915, The Love Letters, My 2¢ and Greetings from) are lessons in the power of collaboration and healthy doses of peer pressure. We hope to publish more series, as well as one-off articles on current and historical topics. Want to contribute an article or header to the blog? Great, here’s how.
The Mentorship Program, led by Bianca with help from Liron, Isabel and Eleni, is a true labor of love. It just takes a few people, who enjoy spreadsheets and community building, to run a program that has matched over 40 mentorship pairs, in less than six months. Want to get involved? Wonderful, here’s more info.
If you’re reading this right around our 1st birthday, then you will probably notice some new features, including:
– a search bar
– a navigation menu that more clearly aligns with the content
– a footer that includes selected Featured Posts and information about the current and past headers
– a masonry view for each category from the main menu, to (hopefully?) facilitate exploration of previous content
We’re still working out some kinks and details, please bear with us. None of this would have been possible without the work of Nicole, who slays databases and php like a boss.
You’ll also notice we’re bidding farewell to Sibylle Hagmann’s Elido and saying hello to Elena by Nicole Dotin for the body text and Bely Display by Roxane Gataud for the headlines. We do plan to continue showing off more typefaces on a frequent basis.
Thanks for reading and thanks for giving us the encouragement to continue this adventure in collective publishing. We don’t know what the next year will bring but we can guarantee this: it will be full of surprises, letterforms, and probably some cake.
Thanks to Tiffany for the collage of celebratory photos.