An enthusiasm by

Richard Rutter

Hello. I’m Richard, a designer, author and speaker living by the sea in Brighton, UK. I’m co-founder of Clearleft, a digital design consultancy.

I love all things to do with human-centred design, typography, music and cycling. I occasionally write about them here.

New year, new typeface: switching to variable fonts

My website used to be set primarily in two very different typefaces: Ingeborg and Premiéra. This is story of how I switched to a fantastic single variable font which provided the same practical and stylistic benefits, only better.

7th February 2023
My experience of using ChatGPT AI

I had fun playing around with ChatGPT, but the implications of such a powerful tool are serious, good and bad.

11th January 2023
Avoiding groupthink: fine-tuning CSS specifications

Every now and then I’m asked to help out the CSS Working Group, especially when typography is involved. Invariably it’s also a chance to learn, not just about upcoming CSS, but also new methods of collaboration and group decision making.

21st November 2022
How to typeset a date range properly

During these 10 days of mourning following the death of the Queen, wherever you look – on websites, billboards and shop windows – we are presented with a badly typeset date range: 1926 – 2022. Here’s how to do it correctly.

18th September 2022
How to subset a variable font

Professional fonts can contain a lot characters you will never use, increasing file size uncessarily. These characters can be removed by subsetting a font. This post explains how to subset fonts from first principles on a Mac using fonttools.

2nd May 2022