Sunday
morning
Studio 3 reopened on Sunday 7 June 2026 — having closed its primary session on 2 June with the Episode 5 notes and the Studio 3 handoff document already written. What followed was a second opening, beginning at 06:17 in Oxton, that produced the most visible change to the practice's public face since the Library was built.
The markcharmer.com home page was redesigned. The Postcards banner — previously a photograph with a Spectral wordmark — became a four-block hymn board. The Mark Charmer wordmark moved from Spectral to DM Mono weight 300. Two further pages were updated to match. The colophon gained its first colour dots. And a conversation about the nature of the practice — its relationship to the attention economy, the geometry shift, the service as a weekly ritual — ran alongside the build work throughout the morning.
board
https://markcharmer.com/hirez.html?photo=55278999982
The hymn board concept was sparked by an observation at Rosedale Abbey church, North Yorkshire, a few weekends earlier — the church hymn board as a modular system: fixed frame, interchangeable content, immediately readable, maintained by hand. The banner is now four equal columns, each a door into a distinct area of the practice. Navy #1e2d4a for Another Time, Another Place. CFH amber #C4743A for The Gardeners of Speke. Mural purple oklch(0.42 0.13 305) for rhodi.ai. Reina pink oklch(0.74 0.17 5) for Reina Studio Anchors.
Each block carries DM Mono caption text at the base — tag and title — in the block's lighter tone. Machine lean applied visually: the blocks read first as colour, then as navigation, then as content. The wordmark colour is precisely #f7f4ee — the Library paper tone. On mobile, the four blocks scroll horizontally rather than collapsing, treating the banner as a designed object rather than a responsive layout problem.
The hymn board is interchangeable — not a permanent fixture but a curated selection for the week's service. The intention is to rotate it on a loosely regular basis, most probably on a Sunday morning. The first service ran on 7 June 2026.
contact.html and about.html were updated to carry the DM Mono wordmark. The Karl Benjamin colour block patterns on both pages were retained. The colophon gained small colour square dots before each section label — one colour, one function, no drift. Amber for Emil, pink for Reina, slate green for Mac/, yellow for Patty, dark for internal memos.
Tuesday
morning
The studio reopened on Tuesday 9 June 2026 at 07:01, with intense light breaking through storm cloud over the Pennines into the sitting room bay window at Oxton. Mark had purchased a vintage Apple keyboard and mouse on eBay. The purpose: to boot a 2009 27-inch iMac from the Bermondsey studio, last active in the mid 2010s, now sitting in Oxton. The iMac booted. The inbox opened.
Inside: three PDF presentation decks, dated 2010-05-06a. The Gino Lee font makeover.
2010
Gino Lee — type designer, close friend and mentor, whose name is embedded in Zapfino, who largely conceived Creating Killer Web Sites — called over Skype from San Francisco to London in 2010. Mark was running the Movement Design Bureau. Gino had opinions about the typeface. He hated the Gill Sans. Too British.
The first deck presents seven options for a new body and display typeface system, each demonstrated on a grey ground with a carefully chosen quotation. Interstate Regular. Akzidenz Grotesk BE Regular. Trade Gothic Medium. News Gothic MT Regular. Kievit Book. Clarendon BT Roman. Gill Sans Regular — saved for last, the existing face, so the alternatives could be assessed with fresh eyes before returning to the baseline.
The quotations are a document of Gino's sensibility. Orwell on intellectual liberty for Interstate. The Goethe — Everything we encounter leaves traces behind. Everything contributes imperceptibly to our education — for Trade Gothic. The Beecham for Clarendon. Anonymous for News Gothic: If you hold your dreams too tightly, you'll crush their little ribs.
The second deck is a single slide. The combination chosen. Clarendon BT Roman for display titles, in yellow. Akzidenz Grotesk BE Regular for body text. Demonstrated with Proust: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The third deck refines the chosen combination further.
confirmed
The surname Akzidenz — carried by the editorial intelligence of this Library — is not an accident. It was Gino's recommendation, given in 2010, confirmed in 2026 on a machine that had been holding the evidence for fifteen years. The jobbing type, the workhorse, the incidental made deliberate. Gino chose it for the Movement Design Bureau. Mark named an AI instance after it for the Rhodia1 Library. The lineage runs without interruption.
A box-out tracing the full history of the typeface — from 1896 through Helvetica, Space:1999, the 2006 Next redesign, the 2022 Monotype acquisition, and this morning — was written during the session and is held in the studio outputs. It closes: The second slide of the first deck: Akzidenz Grotesk BE Regular. Confirmed.
The Akzidenz-Grotesk Next family, the contemporary redrawing by Bernd Möllenstädt and Dieter Hofrichter, is available via Adobe Fonts under Mark's existing subscription. It is the legitimate continuation of the same lineage — not the exact BE cut Gino sent, but the face made whole and consistent in ways the original 1896 assembly never was. The practice will use it.
I think what is important to remember with this is that it was long before standardised templates would churn out these quotes for people who didn't understand their meaning, to present to other people who wouldn't understand their meaning either. He understood the meaning and, on reflection sixteen years on, so do I — fully.
built