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You’ve seen the same boilerplate emails come into your inbox which you immediately archive for being wrong, out-of-date, or simply forgetting the merge tag (F you people that leave $FNAME). When it came to my first time sending out a batch email, it was only to a dozen or so people about booking user research time. However, I had a major sticking point thinking I was sending out a spammy email. Luckily I had met the team behind Streak and knew the power of mail merge to make something a little more individual and helpful. We’re going to continue using my real life example email, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Here’s the actual email template I sent out: Hey there $FNAME, Wanted to reach out about $COMPANY becoming a Hack Design partner. Since 2012, we've helped hundreds of thousands take their first steps in learning design. We're looking to partner with a handful of companies in order to offset server costs and support producing new lessons in 2018. Partnership perks: * Logo placement with link on the home page. * Text link in our footer, 30,000+ page views per month. * Text link in every email, 200,000+ which go out every month. * Free posting on our job board, set to release by the end of the year. As of right now, we have 245,000+ subscribers. It's likely that with new lessons going out next year, you'll see these numbers easily double. Because of that, our sponsorship tier costs $XXX per month. If you're able to commit to sponsoring before October 1st, I will grandfather you in to the super early bird pricing of $YYY per month through the end of 2018. If you have any questions or are ready to sponsor, please hit reply. $POSTSCRIPT Thank you so much, Alex Baldwin My emails aren’t very long, encourage replying as the primary action, and I hope use variables in a tasteful way. Make each email personal You may have noticed the odd $POSTSCRIPT variable in my template. The P.S. at the end of the message is super easy for readers to skip to and it’s almost guaranteed that it’ll be read. That’s the key to the whole thing. Almost every recipient I know personally or have done research on. It would be a huge missed opportunity to not acknowledge that personal connection. For speed purposes, it’s easiest to do this part in Google Sheets. Add another column called Postscript to your Google Sheet. For each recipient write a custom note that will go at the end of your email, i.e. “P.S. It was super nice meeting you at SXSW 2017, still waiting for you to come visit San Francisco.” If you don’t know them personally already, at least make the effort to do your research and make a connection. It’s easy enough to comment on some of their work you admire, I’m talking to you recruiters who never look at my portfolio. Export your Google Sheet to a CSV. Import your CSV into Streak Thankfully since we’ve been working in Google Sheets, we’ll be able to straight import into Streak without any fuss. Install Streak for your browser and open Gmail. Go through the authentication flow for Streak. From the Gmail sidebar, hit Pipelines +New. Pick any of the types, I usually do Business Development and then quickly rename it to my project name. Optionally, invite anyone else to collaborate on this pipeline. On your pipeline page, press the gray more icon. Click Import boxes from Google Sheets. Follow yet another authentication process. Go through the steps to finish your import by mapping your columns to Streak data. They have a lot of options, for those with more data feel free to connect it all up. You’ll see everything from Google Sheets, now nicely organized in your Streak pipeline as a Lead. You can now track as someone goes through your funnel to Closed - Won, it’s the big time sales process for the little guy. Send out that hand-crafted email with Streak After all that prep work, we’re finally ready to put the pieces together. Getting used to the interface and finding the small links or buttons can be quite a chore. Streak is a tool meant for sending much larger batches for sales professionals. We can lay low under the quotas with basic features and get a ton out of it. When I was doing marketing for commercial real estate, we used to use Excel and Microsoft Word to send out massive mailing campaigns. The mail merge feature for Streak works just like it’s offline Microsoft counterpart except with much better tracking and ability to follow up. Put it all together and get ready to hit send Hit Compose in Gmail. Click the link Mail merge. Select your Streak pipeline as the recipients. Write your beautiful email template and use the Customize with Template link at the bottom to sprinkle in customizations. When you’re subject line is perfect and your template customized hit Send, releasing your artisanal emails to their proper recipients. More coming soon Next up we’ll wrap by tracking and following up with our small batch of recipients. This article is part two of a three part series, released weekly. You can read part one here. Subscribe to get access first.
For press releases, advertiser requests, or similar sales campaigns you’re sending a small batch of, usually cold, emails out with a specific ask. Finding potential recipients, writing an email that’s helpful, and tracking the results doesn’t need to take all day or be painful. I’ve watched my fellow product people struggle with the pitfalls of outbound; spend all day trying to find emails, copy and pasting boring boilerplate copy, and then never following up. By stringing together Clearbit Connect, Google Sheets, and Streak, you can knock out these outbound projects super quickly, personalize them, and track progress through a funnel. I’ll walk you through exactly how it works using my most recent campaign, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Researching for the right audience First up, you’re looking for the most likely people to be interested. For a press launch, that may be who frequently cover products in that space. In our example, Hack Design’s sponsor list, I was quickly able to look at who else was sponsoring comparable websites. For me, that meant researching the advertisers on Offscreen, Sidebar, Dribbble, recent design conferences and podcasts. It’s super simple to save your research and move on to finding the right people at those companies. Add companies to your list Start a Google Sheet with the column name Company. Research the companies most relevant to your outbound campaign. Great places to look are Angel List, Product Hunt, job boards (to see who is hiring in a space), Crunchbase, etc. Anywhere that let’s your group and filter through relevant companies. Add the company name to your list. Finding anyone’s email in seconds Now that you have a list of potential companies, let’s find the emails for the best people to talk to there. For my Hack Design list, I was lucky and had about a dozen sponsors from previous years. However, since we haven’t accepted sponsorship in over a year, a lot of my contacts at those companies were out of date. This process made it trivial to find the new people in those roles and be able to reach out. Get the right contacts from Clearbit Connect Add the column names Email and Full Name to your Google Sheet. Install Clearbit Connect if you haven’t already. This is the secret sauce that will allow you to find anyone’s email, for free. Connect does have a limit but for small batches, you shouldn’t have any problems. Disclosure: I’m a small-time investor in Clearbit. In Gmail, hit the Clearbit button in the top nav and then press Find email. Yep, it’s really that easy. You must start with the company and then narrow down by name or title. Copy and paste that into your Google Sheet. More coming soon Next up we’ll write our email and learn how to quickly customize every single one of them. This article is part one of a three part series, released weekly. Subscribe to get access first.
The hanging-punctuation property aims at giving web web designers a finer grained control over typography on the web. The idea behind hanging punctuation is to put some punctuation characters from start (or to a lesser extend at the end) of text elements “outside” of the box in order to preserve the reading flow. blockquote p { hanging-punctuation: first; } Since it only applies to quote marks, you can avoid single purpose classes and trust that your quotes will hang everywhere. Chrome hasn’t yet implemented the hanging-punctuation property, but it works perfectly in Safari. Typeset.js is an HTML pre-processor that adds a lot more functionality and will allow you to get cross browser compatibility.
Full-screen gif mayhem. Worked on this one day last year with CH Albach in order to show it off for a Halloween party. Since the domain is expiring, I’d prefer it live on in the lab. It was truly ahead of it’s time, but now Cochlea and Giphy GJ have surpassed it’s meager feature list. Let me know if you have any feature requests.
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Contributed by Nick Sherman Source: fontsinuse.com Nick Sherman. License: All Rights Reserved. Black Sabbath’s first four studio albums – Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, and Vol 4, released in rapid succession between 1970 and 1972 – laid much of the groundwork for the heavy metal movement. While there were other bands playing heavy blues-inspired hard rock at the time, the gloomy, doom-laden stylings of Black Sabbath helped fuel their early success as one of the first – and most influential – heavy metal acts ever. Sabbath’s dark aesthetic was established from the start with help from the visuals on their records. Their first four albums were released through the Vertigo record label in London and, as such, involved Vertigo’s in-house designer at the time, Keith Stuart Macmillan. Macmillan studied photography at Royal College of Art but has worked in various roles related to the visual side of music – from design to directing music videos. Early in his career he signed with the moniker Marcus Keef (or simply “Keef”) to avoid confusion with photographer Keith Lionel McMillan who likewise worked with rock musicians at the time. In addition to his stylized photography, Keef also contributed design work to those first four albums, which – along with designs from the Bloomsbury Group – include now-iconic titling graphics. At least for the first two releases, he entrusted a fellow student from the Royal College of Art with the typography: it was Sandy Field who designed the titling for Black Sabbath and Paranoid. Despite the ubiquity of those albums and the many design imitations they’ve inspired, the sources of their letterforms have been largely undocumented and obscured by the passage of time. Some of the albums’ titling has often, mistakenly, been assumed to be totally hand-lettered. Even when a typeface was suspected as a starting point, exact sources have proven elusive. This situation is not surprising when you consider those first four Sabbath covers were all designed using uncommon sources from the era of phototype and dry transfer lettering – a relatively short period after the peak of letterpress printing but before the digital revolution. Type styles from larger companies of that era, like Photo-Lettering and Letraset, have been documented fairly well in subsequent years. But there were also smaller companies and publications at the time whose designs are still much less known today, partly because the original reference materials are so scarce. All four of the first Black Sabbath records got their titling styles from exactly those kinds of niche sources. Black Sabbath (1970) Source: fontsinuse.com Neil Priddey. License: All Rights Reserved. Though it is multiple generations removed, the titling style of the first, self-titled Black Sabbath album has its origins in an ornamented typeface from the Central Type Foundry called Harper, first released in 1882. The curly design was part of a wave of type styles from that era that tried to evoke a sense of exoticism through unusual forms. Source: archive.org Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved. 1892 Central Type Foundry specimen of Harper. Source: archive.org Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved. 1889 Franklin Type Foundry specimen of Harper. Source: fontsinuse.com License: All Rights Reserved. Harper Rimmed Initials as shown in the 1897 catalog of Day & Collins, a wood type manufacturer in Fann Street, London. Harper included a set of outlined or “rimmed” initials which seem to have outlived the core design through adaptation by various other publishers over the years, for various other formats. One such adaptation was for fonts of wood type by the British company Day & Collins, who sold it as Harper Rimmed Initials. This adaptation, in turn, inspired many subsequent interpretations, especially during the era of phototype and dry transfer lettering. One particular take on that design wasn’t even a proper typeface in the traditional sense, but instead was published as a standalone alphabet in the Twelve Unusual Alphabets Compiled by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes portfolio (c.1970). This adaptation of Harper Rimmed Initials appears to be the one used by Field to compose the titling for the cover of Black Sabbath. Source: fontsinuse.com Patrick Concannon. License: All Rights Reserved. Sheet 9 from Twelve Unusual Alphabets Compiled by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes. London: Mears, Caldwell, Hacker, n.d. [1970] Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved. A lineage of adaptations of Harper Rimmed, from top to bottom: 1970 Black Sabbath cover detail feat. the Unusual Alphabet #9 by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes, c.1970. Harper with rimmed initials by Gustav F. Schroeder for Central Type Foundry, 1882. Eminence by Photo-Lettering, Inc., 1962. Manuscript Capitals by Bob Newman for Letraset, 1972. Fancy Letter by Walter Haettenschweiler. Allegedly from 1957. However, the earliest known showing is in the 5th revised edition of Lettera 2 from 1976. Abbey Scroll, shown by Formatt in 1974. Daisy Rimmed, shown by Solotype in 1992. Coincidentally, the Harper Rimmed Initials seem to have also influenced the design of the logo for Orange amplifiers around the same time. Black Sabbath weren’t regular Orange users but they were famously seen playing them for their 1970 performances on the West German Beat-Club television show. Source: www.preservationsound.com Preservation Sound. License: All Rights Reserved. The Orange amplifier logo as seen on an item in their circa 1970 catalog, seemingly based on some adaptation of the Harper typeface. Source: www.youtube.com Beat-Club. License: All Rights Reserved. Tony Iommi playing guitar through an Orange amplifier, from the famous Beat-Club performance in 1970. Paranoid (1971) Source: fontsinuse.com Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved. Following the success of their debut, the pressure was on for Black Sabbath to quickly release a follow-up album. Keef again handled the photography and design. The photography for the cover was prepared with the idea that the album would be titled War Pigs (after the song), however the title was changed to Paranoid at the last minute and the short turnaround meant there was no time to prepare new photography, resulting in an unintended mismatch of imagery and text. Despite this mix-up, the album was a hit, furthering Sabbath’s heavy metal influence. As with the first album, Field’s title design for Paranoid made use of a fairly recent, somewhat obscure adaptation of an earlier letter style. This time, though, instead of using an alphabet from a book based on a typeface, it was a typeface based on an alphabet from a book. Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA. Book jacket for Lettera 2 (left), “a standard book of fine lettering” edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler and published by Niggli in 1961. One of the included alphabets is Lettre coupé. The showing on page 53 (right) is caps only and omits the letter L. In 1961, the Lettera 2 book was released as the second entry in the Lettera series of alphabet sourcebooks, published by Arthur Niggli Ltd. The book, edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler, included a collection of various alphabet designs – some taken directly from typefaces, others from original lettering samples. One of the samples was an original alphabet, titled Lettre Coupé, designed by Haettenschweiler with a hand-cut appearance. Some designers adapted the alphabet for album artwork, sometimes modifying glyphs, altering the proportions, and/or improvising characters that weren’t included in the original sample. By 1969, the alphabet had been adapted into a proper typeface by the Lettergraphics phototype company, offered under the name Black Casual. The typeface added new counterforms to A, B, and P, as well as a few new characters (L, comma, ?, and &). Black Casual appears to be what Field used to compose the titling for Paranoid. Given the Black name, the use might be considered a partial LTypI. Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA. Californian phototype provider Lettergraphics turned Haettenschweiler’s lettering into a proper typeface. Their adaptation called Black Casual can here be seen in a catalog dated 1969. It adds the missing L alongside some punctuation glyphs (comma, question mark, ampersand) and also introduces counters in A B and P. Perhaps inspired by the dark vibes of Paranoid, Lettre Coupé was adapted in 1973 for the title sequence of blaxploitation horror film Scream Blacula Scream. Source: www.artofthetitle.com Art of the Title. License: All Rights Reserved. Title frame from the opening sequence of Scream Blacula Scream (1973). Master of Reality (1971) Source: fontsinuse.com Scanned by Nick Sherman. License: All Rights Reserved. The cover of Sabbath’s third album dropped photography entirely and went all-in on a text-only treatment, with large, bold, in-your-face, typography – twisted and warped as if being shaken by high-amplitude vibrations, or distorted by altered perception. While the photography of the first two Sabbath records gave them a dark, otherworldly feeling, the Master of Reality cover also puts an emphasis on HEAVINESS. The darkness wasn’t abandoned though. Below the purple band name, the album’s title for the first pressings was only distinguished from the black background via embossing, resulting in raised letterforms that are equally as tactile as they are visual. If the question is “How much more black could this be?”, the answer is: “None. None more black.” Eventually the record companies releasing new editions of the album decided that “none more black” was too black and/or embossing was too expensive, so the cover has seen many variants over the years with the title alternately colored gray, white, orange, green, pink, black with white outline, and more. Some releases have also colored the band’s name in alternating rainbow colors. Source: www.discogs.com Discogs. License: CC BY-NC-SA. A sampling of the various colorways that have been used for Master of Reality over the years. Despite the text-only cover, Keef’s stylized photography still made an appearance on a poster included as an insert with the original release. The design for the album is credited to Bloomsbury Group, a British firm active in the 1970s (apparently named after the early-1900s intellectual collective of the same name), with art direction by Mike Stanford. The typeface on the cover is, yet again, an obscure phototype interpretation of an existing design. In this case, the ancestral type is Rudolf Koch’s Kabel which originated in the late 1920s. The reimagined adaptation used for Master of Reality is Lodwick Kabel, which pushes the weight of Kabel beyond any of its previous incarnations, and even heavier than ITC or Letraset would later take their interpretations in 1975 and 1980, respectively. Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA. A comparison of the heaviest interpretations of Kabel as offered variously in phototype, dry transfer lettering, and digital type. Samples scaled to approximately matching cap heights. Lodwick Kabel was available by 1970 from the Photoscript phototype company, and presented as an “Exclusive Royalty face”. The name suggests a possible connection to Hardy/Lodwick (a.k.a. Hardy/Escasany/Lodwick), a studio that was active in London in the 1970s – but that connection is unconfirmed. Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA. London-based typesetting company Photoscript showed Lodwick Kabel in their List of Typefaces 1970, as “Exclusive Royalty face” and in two widths. Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved. Lodwick Kabel as shown in a 1990 specimen book from the TypoBach typesetting company. Since its release, the Master of Reality cover has been imitated many times, perhaps most prominently by British rock group Arctic Monkeys. Even Black Sabbath themselves have rehashed the warped sans-serif effect for a Black Lives Matter benefit T-shirt. Vol 4 (1972) Source: fontsinuse.com Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved. The cover for Sabbath’s fourth album, appropriately titled Vol 4, continues the theme of extra-large, extra-bold type from Master of Reality. As with the precursor, the design is attributed to Bloomsbury Group with photography by Keef – this time credited by his real name, Keith Macmillan. For this release, Keef’s photography was brought back onto the cover, showing Ozzy with arms raised, giving his signature gesture of victorious peace signs ✌️ (not to be confused with the devil horns 🤘 popularized later by Ozzy’s successor, Ronnie James Dio). The image is treated more as a graphic element than a photograph, with a high-contrast monochrome effect, framed compactly on three sides with tightly-spaced, extra-heavy, geometric, sans-serif type. As with the previous albums, the name of the band and the name of the album are set in the same size and face. Though there were plenty of heavy geometric sans-serif typefaces being used around that time with similar structural features, the style used for Vol 4 seems to be a primarily original design, and not a direct adaptation of some other existing face. The typeface in question is Gadget, available by 1971 from Alphabet Photosetting, who listed it as a copyrighted design. Dry transfer lettering sheets of a Lined variant of the face were produced by Zipatone, and they credit the design to Peter Bennett. Scanned by Nick Sherman. License: All Rights Reserved. Glyph set for Gadget with alternate forms for c e &, from an undated catalog by Alphabet Photosetting. License: All Rights Reserved. The striped variant, Gadget Lined, was also produced by Letraset competitor Zipatone for dry transfer lettering. This sheet from their Zipatone Designers Fonts (ZDF) range has caps in 84pt. Thanks to this adaptation, we know that Gadget is the design of Peter Bennett. Due to the obscure nature of Gadget, many people over the years have assumed the Vol 4 titling was a case of one-off lettering and not composed with a proper typeface. As such there have been multiple typefaces in more recent years using the iconic design as inspiration for creating new typefaces. It’s interesting to see how others extrapolate the letters from the cover into an entirely re-imagined set of glyphs – with some letters matching Gadget quite closely but others being taken to totally new and different places. Some examples include OZIK, Volume Dealers, and VolumeFour. The iconic nature of Vol 4’s cover also makes it a common subject for imitation and parody, especially with assistance from those newer digital fonts. The Vol 4 design came full circle recently when the digital VolumeFour typeface inspired by the album cover was used for promotional materials and on-stage graphics for Black Sabbath’s final show, “Back to the Beginning”, on July 5, 2025 – less than three weeks before the passing of Ozzy Osbourne. Source: www.jambase.com JamBase. License: All Rights Reserved. Though Black Sabbath went on to release plenty of other noteworthy albums, the first four seem especially foundational. They are also unique in their common use of obscure typefaces, and their involvement of Keef for visuals. Finding proper identifications for these typefaces has only been possible with the efforts of others, sometimes as a collaborative effort that unfolded over literal years in the comments of old Fonts In Use posts. Special thanks are due to Florian Hardwig, Daylight Fonts, Mark Simonson, Patrick Concannon, and Fontastique Faces. Additionally, Kory Grow’s interview with Keith Macmillan for Rolling Stone was extremely insightful, even though it didn’t discuss specifics of typography. Finally, investigative work for articles like this would be nearly impossible without Discogs and the Internet Archive. If you have any further information about these typefaces or their use on the Black Sabbath records, please leave a message in the comments below or on the separate entries for each album. Those entries include more details about supporting typefaces, with additional detailed images: Black Sabbath Paranoid Master of Reality Vol 4 ✌️ This post was originally published at Fonts In Use
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