The Cotswolds sit on beds of limestone, 170 million years in the making. Technology meanwhile measures its epochs in months. There’s something reassuring about writing from the former while thinking about the latter.
Deadline is a journal about the intersection of technology and humanity. The name carries a dual meaning: the pressing timelines that drive our digital world, and the craftsperson’s dedication to seeing work through to completion.
The typeface tells its own story. 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 — choosing destruction over compromise.
Nearly a century later, Robert Green began an extraordinary revival. After three years of research and drawing, he worked with the Port of London Authority’s diving team to recover original metal sorts from the riverbed. Those recovered pieces, along with archival research, informed his meticulous digital reconstruction; the 2022 revision you’re reading now.
Like those recovered sorts, pieced together through patience and determination, this journal tries to bridge gaps: between craft and tools, between principles and modern needs, between the ethnosphere we inherit and the one we’re building. The signature orange (#FF7900) warms the space; the typography is meant to stay out of your way.
Here I write about anthropology, technology, and the places where they meet — how cultures adapt to new tools, how old practices inform new ones, and how we might build systems that serve human needs rather than the reverse.
Technical details about the site’s construction are in the colophon.