AreslunaMarcin Wichary
Designer/Writer/Typographer

You might know me from...

• My book about keyboards
• Finding a magical typewriter museum in Spain
• My photo essay about a font called Gorton
• A thread about 300 design details in Japan
• A talk about pixel fonts
• Putting Pac-Man on Google's homepage
• Perfecting link underlines on Medium

Tech and design history

• The hardest working font in Manhattan A 150-year-old font you have never heard of - and one you probably saw earlier today
• Frame of preference A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators
• Charles Babbage's mouse pointer A tour of some early user interfaces one never hears about
• Fav tech museums A photo essay of 20-something best tech museums I've been to... and three bad ones
• Hypertalking Mac collection A photo essay of checking out a cool Apple Macintosh collection
• Berlin Videogame Museum A report from a surprisingly great museum
• The Clock In the 1980s, the dead space between our television programs was filled with... a clock
• Dutch computer museums Photos from three very different computer museums in the Netherlands
• GUIdebook My old site about the history of graphical user interfaces
• The curious life and the prolonged death of IBM AN/FSQ-7 A quick Ignite talk about a fascinating Cold War computer
• When screens were expensive On early computers that couldn't afford all the pixels
• 6 more

Keyboards

• Shift Happens A site for my book about keyboards, filled with minigames
• Typewriter simulator Get to know a manual typewriter and all its forgotten nooks and crannies
• The abridged history of having fun with keyboards A talk about creative uses of keyboards across the ages
• The primitive tortureboard Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY
• 50 keyboards from my collection The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
• Cover stories A little game/explainer for the cover of the book
• Shift Happens book thread A five-year-long thread of making of my first book
• The day Return became Enter A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard
• Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the first great war for your thumbs On some brilliant, idiosyncratic, and often ill-fated gambits to transform computer input
• Shift + Shift On motor memories and actual memories
• The modifiers and the keepers Searching for the largest keyboard ever made
• The soul of an old solenoid On a surprising connection between keyboards and pinball machines
• 7 more

Typography / Essays & talks

• The hardest working font in Manhattan A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of - and one you probably saw earlier today
• In defense of an old pixel On the surprising beauty and surprising relevance of pixel fonts
• I pressed B. You wouldn't believe what happened next On what happens when you try to bold some text
• When fonts fall Everything you ever wanted to know about font fallback
• Getting to the bottom of line height in Figma Investigating the nature of web's leading
• A hack named Typit A fascinating scheme to get more letters on your keyboard
• System shock A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance
• An ode to OpenType A love letter to OpenType features in fonts
• Perfecting link underlines on Medium How hard could it be to draw a horizontal line on the screen?
• Typography is impossible The practical guide to why laying out type never quite does what you want
• 5 more

Typography / Interactive

• text.makeup A tool to debug strings and learn about Unicode
• Segmented type appreciation corner A little playground to mess with segmented fonts
• Typewriter simulator Get to know a manual typewriter and all its forgotten nooks and crannies
• Pixel fonts experiment A little pixel-to-vector font plaything / More explanation

Bug & detective stories

• A hacker's guide to bending the universe If you're going to conquer the world, you can't let a broken CRT monitor stand in your way
• System shock A story of a 25-year-old font coming back with a vengeance
• Dear Cynthia Chasing an author of a great photograph
• This is a story of a Figma bug that wasn't a bug at all One keyboard decision backfiring decades later
• The curious case of the disappearing Polish S One keyboard bug three decades in the making
• To save a keyboard, pt. 1 Trying to confirm an existence of a rare 19th-century typewriter with a strange key
• I pressed B. You wouldn't believe what happened next On dealing with a bug that ended up being very different than expected
• 2 more

Travelogues

• Toy company, my ass Trying to find a distinctive location from my favourite movie
• In the footsteps of Robert Moses Roadtripping across the bridges, highways, and parks of America's most controversial urban planner
• Fav tech museums A photo essay of 20-something best tech museums I've been to... and three bad ones
• Japan design details A long thread about 300 design niceties and nuances in Japan
• Something magical happened to me today A serendipitous discovery of a mindblowing typewriter museum
• The best laid tracks Stories of ghost train stations in San Francisco
• A time machine behind the cypress trees On finding a place with all the keyboards
• Seesaws for giants Chasing Chicago's movable bridges
• 3 more

UX design

• Designing Selection Colors Building and testing a little Figma feature I feel rather proud of
• Everyday design The usual and unusual challenges of designing the license support for Medium
• Charles Babbage's mouse pointer A tour of some early user interfaces one never hears about
• Dark theme in a day Using a bunch of modern CSS to create a night mode for an app
• Figma's new finger tips Redesigning Figma's keyboard panel with inspiration from Doug Engelbart
• You're a street designer (you just don't know it yet) The design principles behind Streetmix
• 2 more

Urbanism

• Mr. Phelan's building A deep dive into San Francisco's most impressive flatiron
• Streetmix I was a founding designer of a fun little app to make street design available for everyone
• The other Golden Gate Bridges What The Golden Gate Bridge could've been
• Click that 'hood A little neighborhood-guessing game I wrote while at Code For America

Public speaking experiments

• Monochromatic An Ignite talk that changed room colors
• In defense of an old pixel A talk with audience participation
• The making of Four Laps I went mad during COVID lockdown and made a looping video about looping videos
• To walk among keyboard magicians Building an invisible remote and putting it... you won't ever guess where
• The wild presentation network for the Computer History Museum talk On creating a system to make the slides read off presenter's minds
• The cheapest invisible UI On creating a system to make the slides read off audience's minds
• The secrets of Google Pac-Man A web-based gameshow about Pac-Man
• Follow along and up A talk that follows up with you and sends more info about stuff you care about
• 3 more

Print

• Moire no more Discovering a magical ancient algorithm to fix scanned photos
• Cover story, pt. 1 A beautiful almost-encounter with Donald Knuth
• How I learned to hate InDesign Putting InDesign to work and suffering
• One more prototype A story of Shift Happens in 11 prototypes
• The trip to Spain: The bad parts Losing an SSD drive and messing up my entire book in the most subtle of ways
• My experiences printing a small batch of books Comparing various online printing services
• 3 more

Art & personal stuff

• "Alternatywy 4" in America Bringing a TV show from my old home to my new one
• The last interview "I have cancer. It's pretty bad. I can send you some stuff, but you will get it after I'm gone."
• 1,110 notes On playing piano on repeat
• Party Where We Read Things Bring writing you like and read it
• Collateral A shooting in my apartment building
• Two syllables, or three On surrendering a sick cat
• Larry's Quest A pixellated meditation on life's nature
• 4 more

Stanislaw Lem

• One hundred and thirty-seven seconds My translation of a short story by my favourite writer
• Memoirs of a train traveller The day I stalked Stanislaw Lem
• Stanislaw Lem on Google's homepage I coded and project-managed a unique doodle to celebrate Lem's work

"Sneakers"

• Toy company, my ass Trying to find a distinctive location from my favourite movie
• Fake trailer A "modernized" Sneakers trailer based on Auralnauts's blockbuster trailer
• Press kit floppy I preserved a unique floppy disk that was attached to the "Sneakers" press kit

Appreciation

• The cursed universes of Dana Sibera On the creator of machines you've never seen
• To save a keyboard, pt. 3 On my love for the Computer History Museum
• The William Langewiesche aviation reader Links to writing by one of my favourite non-fiction writers
• Books that are influencing my book From famous volumes to little quirky indie releases