In the heart of the Cotswolds, where ancient limestone has stood witness to centuries of human craft and innovation, Deadline takes shape as a journal exploring the intersection of technology and humanity. The name itself carries dual meaning: both pressing timelines that drive our digital world, and the craftsperson’s dedication to seeing work through to completion.
The story of our typeface mirrors our mission. In 1900, at Hammersmith’s Doves Press, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker commissioned a unique typeface that would become legendary not just for its beauty, but for its fate. Between 1913 and 1917, in a series of nighttime visits to Hammersmith Bridge, Cobden-Sanderson threw every piece of the type into the Thames – an act of typographic sacrifice choosing destruction over compromise.
Nearly a century later, Robert Green began an extraordinary revival project. After three years of initial research and drawing, in 2014 he worked with the Port of London Authority’s diving team to recover original metal sorts from the riverbed. Those recovered pieces, along with extensive archival research, informed his meticulous digital reconstruction, culminating in the 2022 revision we use today.
Like those recovered metal sorts, pieced together through patience, technology, and human determination, this journal attempts to bridge gaps between craft and tools, between principles and modern needs. Our articles explore how technology shapes our lives, our work, and our understanding of what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world, while smaller works are rooted in the technical minutia that power the ethnosphere we find ourselves in. This philosophy extends to the journal itself: our signature orange (#FF7900) warms the digital space through drop caps and links, while careful typography and considered interaction design ensure that every element serves both function and form.
In an age of rapid technological change, we believe in taking time to reflect and to craft things that endure. Each article, like each commit to the repository, represents another step in an ongoing conversation about how we shape our tools, and how they, in turn, shape us.
Here, we explore anthropology, technology, and the spaces where they meet. We examine how human culture adapts to and adopts new tools, how ancient practices inform modern innovations, and how we might build technology that better serves human needs and values.
Technical details about this site’s construction can be found in our colophon.