Someone Else’s Manifesto

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash One of the odder effects of the internet is that it’s possible to become semi-obsessed with someone else’s obsessions. I’ve been reading pieces by Marcin Wichary for a couple of years now. His day job, as far as I can tell, is as a software designer and is particularly concerned with user interfaces. It’s not a huge leap conceptually from there to his extraordinarily-detailed[1] interest in keyboards. It’s also not much of a leap from there to an interest in typography, which led him to write the best essay on the history of technology that I’ve read in a very long time, about a ubiquitous, little-known, and slowly-dying typeface. In any case, I read his blog, usually a bunch of posts at one time in a clump. Yesterday I read his post discussing his “Goals and Principles” for the blog, and it struck a chord for me. Three of his goals, for example: Help expand what craft means: highlight relations between things, show connections between history and…