Julius: The Cards

Chloe Weil on updating historic cards designed by her father, Julius Weil:

For my dad’s 30th anniversary in the United States, he designed and printed trading cards of our family’s history in Romania and his life in the States. Decades later, I’ve adapted these trading cards into a story for the web.

The adaptation included a typeface of recent design:

Longevity was the guiding design principle that informed all of my technical decisions, whereas many of my design decisions were allegorical. For example, Spinoza, the typeface, was chosen because it shares a name with Baruch Spinoza, a Jewish-born philosopher who did some work in optics, particularly on instrumentation and the design of lenses for telescopes (can see far into the past) and microscopes (very introspective). Very heavy-handed, no?

The choice is both obvious and peculiar. Baruch had both been given cherem (an excommunication of sorts) and renounced his religion. Does it fit the content? Absolutely.

But something else is peculiar here:

The flash of unstyled text, while wince-worthy (for some reason? Like I’m ashamed for people to know that resources are loading?), is collateral for knowing that my work isn’t beholden to the whims of the Typekit CDN.

If longevity is an issue, why not opt for self-hosting FontFont’s webfont? No flash of unstyled text, no subscription to maintain, and the opportunity to harness the OpenType features this otherwise beautiful design calls for (oldstyle proportional figures, namely).

Update: Since this article the Weils have purchased Spinoza and now self host.