Two tickets for Departure, please (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Today we’re joined by a dynamic duo, Helena Zhang & Tobias Fried, who team up on all sorts of digital passion projects. This includes the wildly popular Phosphor Icons plus their latest joint, Departure Mono, a monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi technical vibe… that both Adam & Jerod are pretty much in love with. We discuss their tastes & inspirations, how they collab, making money on passion projects like these, velvet ropes & so much more.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
• Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai.
• Wix Studio – Wix Sudio is for devs who build websites, sell apps, go headless, or manage clients. Integrate, extend and write custom scripts in a VS code-based IDE. Leverage zero set up dev, test and production environments. Ship faster with an AI code assistant. And work with Wix headless API’s on any tech stack.
• WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com

Featuring:

• Helena Zhang – LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Tobias Fried – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Project sites

• Departure Mono
• Phosphor Icons

Fonts mentioned

• Iosevka
• Berkeley Mono
• Commit Mono
• IBM Plex
• Unifont

Other cool stuff

• A great library of old PC fonts
• Somebody made the game from Severance!

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

章

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Fly.io (00:01:24)

https://fly.io/

3. Start the show! (00:03:53)

4. A perfect website (00:05:00)

https://departuremono.com/

5. Monospace magic (00:06:12)

6. Adam's font journey (00:08:56)

7. Gushing on the site (00:11:16)

8. Website deep cuts (00:12:13)

9. The sincerest form of... (00:14:59)

10. Retrofuturism (00:15:53)

11. Jerod's font journey (00:17:45)

12. Monospace font nerdery (00:19:57)

13. Font regression testing (00:24:02)

14. Iosevka! (00:26:57)

15. GNU Unifont! (00:28:13)

https://unifoundry.com/unifont/

16. Pixel font nerdery (00:29:38)

17. Adam reads the tea leaves (00:31:29)

18. Severance vibes (00:34:08)

https://lumon-industries.com

19. Movie trailers aside (00:35:13)

20. Severance no mono?! (00:36:19)

21. Public library terminals (00:37:13)

22. More website details (00:37:47)

23. Adam pokes Jerod (00:41:14)

24. Building the flight deck (00:42:04)

25. Sponsor: Timescale (00:42:49)

https://www.timescale.com

26. Sponsor: Wix Studio (00:45:02)

https://www.wix.com/studio

27. Open source? (00:45:56)

28. Donate buttons (00:46:47)

29. Money can ruin passion projects (00:49:11)

30. Font & icon maintenance costs (00:50:58)

31. Gushing on Phosphor's site (00:54:52)

https://phosphoricons.com/

32. Still using IBM Plex Mono? (00:58:28)

33. Making money (01:00:01)

34. Font Awesome (01:01:59)

35. People still buy/sell fonts? (01:04:15)

36. Adam stares down imposter syndrome (01:05:52)

37. Freedom in giving (01:07:08)

38. Sponsor: WorkOS (01:08:04)

https://workos.com

39. Intangible benefits (01:10:53)

40. Client services (01:13:36)

41. Client work challenges (01:17:30)

42. No gap in their flow (01:18:56)

43. The velvet rope (01:22:00)

44. One more idea (01:23:24)

45. Toby on open source compensation (01:25:16)

46. Patreon vs Buy Me a Coffee (01:32:33)

47. Iconography streamers (01:36:14)

48. Obligatory AI chapter (01:40:30)

49. Support your human creators (01:43:55)

50. Closing thoughts and stuff (01:45:15)