Finalist is an iOS planner rooted in paper. Originally an index card system, it grew into a love letter to paper planners. You know the kind, leather folders with colored tabs and translucent dividers.

Unlike those old binders, Finalist fills itself with your calendars, reminders and weather forecast. Minimalist? Maybe not, but it’s become a UI playground designed to inspire, and looks great on iPad and Mac too.

Like the gorgeous new Year Planner for roughing in plans with the Highlighter (“intention paintbrush”).

iOS has tons of cool productivity apps. Finalist is a different take, and it might just end up in your dock.

One more from Matthew Butterick, from his Typography for Lawyers, and a good pairing with Mark Simonson’s “The Scourge of Arial”:

Yet it’s an open question whether its longevity is attributable to its quality or merely its ubiquity. Helvetica still inspires enough affection to have been the subject of a 2007 documentary feature. Times New Roman, meanwhile, has not attracted similar acts of homage.

Why not? Fame has a dark side. When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.

As Simonson mentions in “The Scourge of Arial”, regarding Helvetica’s enduring popularity:

As it spread into the mainstream in the ’70s, many designers tired of it and moved on to other typographic fashions, but by then it had become a staple of everyday design and printing. So in the early ’80s when Adobe developed the PostScript page description language, it was no surprise that they chose Helvetica as one of the basic four fonts to be included with every PostScript interpreter they licensed (along with Times, Courier, and Symbol). Adobe licensed its fonts from the original foundries, demonstrating their respect and appreciation for the integrity of type, type foundries and designers. They perhaps realized that if they had used knock-offs of popular typefaces, the professional graphic arts industry — a key market — would not accept them.

To my mind, Helvetica, Times, and Courier are the three canonical “default” fonts. One modern sans, one modern serif, and one for “typewriter”/code. (When I see Courier in print, at display sizes, my mind immediately wonders if the printer was missing the font that the designer specified in the document file.)

The Symbol font is a different story. It existed and was included with PostScript as one of just four defaults because the 8-bit character encodings of the time only had space for 255 characters. You needed a special font like Symbol to access “exotic” characters like Greek letters, math symbols (e.g. × or ÷), or arrows (↑ ↓ ← →). So there were really only three regular “fonts”, for prose, included with PostScript: Helvetica, Courier, and Times.

Courier and Times were eventually superseded in popular use by rivals that Microsoft licensed for inclusion in Windows: Courier New and Times New Roman, respectively. Times was from Linotype, Times New Roman from Monotype. Both versions of Times are legitimate digital interpretations of the 1929 hot metal design of Times Roman, and their differences are minor. Courier New, on the other hand, is so ugly — anemically thin and weak — that it hurts my teeth whenever I encounter it.

Typographer Mark Simonson, all the way back in 2001:

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the world.

Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

This is the exegesis on Arial. There’s also an exemplary illustrated sidebar, “How to Spot Arial”, which shows in detail how to tell the fucking bastard from Helvetica. If you want to be like me, cursed to notice Arial each time it appears in life, study that, and take note how every single way that it’s different from Helvetica is in the direction of making it uglier.

I’ve referenced “The Scourge of Arial” a few times over the years here at DF, but the recent contretemps over Times New Roman’s return at the US State Department has the general topic of “default fonts” at top of mind. For me, at least.

One of the old posts in which I linked to “The Scourge of Arial” was this gem from September 2007: “Hacking the iPhone Notes App for the Admittedly Nit-Picky Purpose of Changing the Text Font to Helvetica”. This was so early in the iPhone era — just three months after the original iPhone shipped — that we were calling its operating system “mobile OS X”, and none of it was protected in any way, so you could do what I did and delete the Marker Felt font (Merlin Mann: “Comic Sans with a shave and a breath mint”) and then use a hex editor to modify the Mobile Notes app so it would fall back to Helvetica instead of cursed Arial after Marker Felt was deleted. Good times.

Back on November 28, I bought a new cap from New Era’s web store. They offered a discount of some sort if I gave them a phone number and permitted them to send me marketing messages. That got me curious about what they’d do with my number, and it was a $50-some dollar cap, so I took the discount and gave them my Google Voice number. That was 17 days ago. They sent me 19 SMS marketing messages since then, before I’d seen enough today and called it quits on this experiment. (Or called “STOP”, perhaps, which was the magic word to opt out.) They didn’t send a text every day, and on some days, they sent more than one. But the overall effect was relentlessly annoying.

I’m sure some of the people who sign up for these texts in exchange for a discount code wind up clicking at least one of the offers sent via SMS and buying more stuff, and the marketing team running this points to those sales as proof that it “works”. You can measure that. It shows up as a number. Some people in business only like arguments that can be backed by numbers. 3 is more than 2. That is indeed a fact.

But there are an infinite number of things in life that cannot be assigned numeric values. Many of these things matter too. Like the fact that in my mind, after experiencing this, the New Era company smells like a sweaty hustler in a cheap polyester suit. If their brand were a man, I’d check my pants pocket for my wallet after interacting with him.

Todd Spangler, reporting last week for Variety:

As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement in its AI systems. [...]

According to the letter, which Variety has reviewed, Disney alleges that Google’s AI systems and services infringe Disney characters including those from “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Moana,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Deadpool,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Toy Story,” “Brave,” “Ratatouille,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Lilo & Stich,” “Inside Out” and franchises such as Star Wars, the Simpsons, and Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man. In its letter, Disney included examples of images it claims were generated by text prompts in Google’s AI apps, including of Darth Vader (pictured above).

It’s very Disney-esque to embrace a new medium. Alone among the major movie studios in the 1950s, Disney embraced television. TV was a threat to the cinema, but it was also an enormous opportunity. The other studios only saw the threat. Walt Disney focused on the opportunity. But Disney did this not by giving their content to television on the cheap or for free. They did it by getting paid. That’s what they’re doing with generative AI.

Here’s the Gemini-generated Darth Vader image. Note the blood splatter — which was un-Star Wars-like even before Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm. Also, even worse, his lightsaber is totally wrong.