On wanting to keep making it

I really agree with the last couple of paragraphs of Jim Nielsen’s Make Money to Make More Websites. He’s talking about starting with something you want to make, and finding a way for money to let you keep doing it. I’d like to see a lot more of that in the things we build. KK Sans is a fairly good example of why this matters to me. I wanted to understand type better, and making a typeface gave me a reason to spend time with it. Then I put it on this site, and suddenly the letters were in things I actually read. A shape that looked fine in Glyphs could turn up in a heading and bother me every time I opened the page. I’ve rebuilt the lowercase a, adjusted joins and reworked kerning. There are plenty of perfectly good fonts I could have used here. Making my own meant I got to understand why those things looked wrong, then find out whether I could make them feel better. I’m quite happy for that to be a worthwhile use of my time. And using it gives me a fairly clear idea of what to do…