AreslunaMarcin Wichary
Designer/Writer/Typographer

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
Dutch computer museums Photos from three very different computer museums in the Netherlands
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 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
GUIdebook My old site about the history of graphical user interfaces

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
Cover stories A little game/explainer for the cover of the book
The abridged history of having fun with keyboards A talk about creative uses of keyboards across the ages
50 keyboards from my collection The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
Shift Happens book thread A five-year-long thread of making of my first book
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

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

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

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

Toy company, my ass Trying to find a distinctive location from one of my favourite movie
In the footsteps of Robert Moses Roadtripping across the bridges, highways, and parks of America’s most controversial urban planner
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

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

Moiré 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

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

“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

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 Stanisław Lem
Stanisław Lem on Google’s homepage I coded and project-managed a unique doodle to celebrate Lem’s work

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

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