I have never met in my life someone that is so responsible and professional while being equally relaxed and always in such a good humor, aka James Edmondson is very chill. I am proud to be able to work with him, but most importantly, to have him as a good friend. Please welcome the chili-skine type, James Edmondson. All right, let's get into it. 1958, Roger X-Graphon's Calypso. Come on, amazing stuff here. A landmark work in type design history, 100% black, 100% white, pushed firmly into the third dimension by curving these planes and utilizing halftone dots to kind of bring these letters to the third dimension. It's an amazing thing in 1958. A little while later, Herb Le Ballon, working with his incredible team of lettering artists in New York, the best of the best. We're just doing crazy stuff. And this is another area where my father's interests overlap with the sound of music because I like the logo and he likes the movie. A little while later, Ken Barber worked for House Industries. The guy I think is the best American lettering artist going today. This is an insane lototype when you think about how long it is, but when you just take a glance everything feels perfect and amazingly consistent while all this proportional balance is happening. So look at like the first lowercase o versus the lowercase s. It's like half the height, but if you just take a glance at it, you can take it all in at once and it feels completely effortless. And now today, all over the world, young designers are kind of following suit, respecting the hundreds of years of tradition that makes letter forms readable while simultaneously breathing new life into letters, the same old skeleton. So here, French type designer, this is her typeface, infamy of this crazy literature interlock style. There's a normal style as well. So there's clearly a lot to be excited about. There's just so much good stuff happening right now. And as someone with an innate attraction to letter forms, a lot of people ask me sometimes what's your relationship to the terrible stuff that surrounds you all the time? Like when you're walking down the street and you see poor type setting or the upside down end or the backwards s and these sort of things that could be kind of annoying, does that bring me any suffering at all? And the answer is absolutely not. First of all, I'd be pissed off all the time if it did. And secondly, I kind of find it charming and I like to think about what's going on in the mind of that kind of amateur designer that's just trying to solve some problems with type.  The last few years have given way to a resurgence in the popularity of the geometric sands in identity work for particularly for technology companies. And so I'm talking about technology companies because this is San Francisco and perhaps you work at them. Perhaps you even work at one of these companies. I want to say I don't have a bias against the geometric sands as a genre.  It's like people that say I don't like country music. It's like you're totally lying. I'm sure you like Johnny Cash at least. So I don't have a bias against that, but I do have a bias against a homogeneous design culture. I think that's a really dangerous thing. And I want to do my best to make sure we steer clear of that as much as possible. So we see a lot of stuff that looks like this, but sometimes people are brave enough to go all caps. And this is just companies that start with s. So there's a whole other world out there. Anyways, the last couple of years, these companies that have had some typographic originality in their branding have generally just kind of fallen into line with their redesign. So Google with cattle by Gustav Yeager, Airbnb with Bello by underwear, the great Foundry underwear, and Spotify, I don't know, it's some weird slab, but they basically followed suit. And now all these three different companies look like sub-brands of the same company in a way. It's kind of bizarre to me how similar they all ended up. So the irony, I think, is twofold. First of all, the products themselves are just graphic interfaces. They're purely type, pretty much. These companies should be employing the foremost typographic experts in the world. Secondly, the industry is preaching being disruptive while being completely conformist in their visual identities. So don't tell me you're being disruptive.  When major players are gravitating towards the same thing, people think that they are the same. And by falling into line with the typographic treatment du jour, they're saying there's nothing special or unique about us or favorable. We just exist now. We're just current. And I think we could aspire to something so much more meaningful than that. I don't think I'd be going out on a limb here to say that diversity of all kinds enriches every field. I mean, we're in San Francisco, a city that has been known to embrace that idea. But think of what amazing art and music has come as a result of the cross-pollinization of culture. External influences lead to better solutions. And better solutions are basically what good design is all about. Variety is the spice of life.  You can lead people to developing their own tastes and preferences, and then later on down the line, more good work will come as a result of that. So why am I, that's like the first part. We'll just shelve that for now. And we'll talk about why I'm here. First and foremost, I'm trying to get Kansen marker paper at cost. This is very important. I spend a lot of money on Kansen marker paper. If you know anyone at that paper company, get in touch, please. Secondly, I'm looking for more followers for my vertical storage pinboard on Pinterest. I'm very passionate about vertical storage so much so that I made up a slogan for it. I hear Molly say, oh my God. This is our family. This is me from a very young age, clearly dreaming about fonts. Early lettering work using construction paper and tape and knocking off some sort of whitewash graffiti styles. But this is kind of where the graphic design thing began for me. My brother was running this online directory of real estate agents, and I was working as an ice cream stupor at the time. And he said, if I could make him a graphic like that, then he'd pay me 10 bucks. And that was a life changing moment for me. So nothing, nothing really incredible about the graphic design itself. So I didn't make just one of these, I made a whole bunch of these things. What I lovingly refer to as the bowels of graphic design. I went to California College of the Arts, used to any CCA people in the house tonight a little bit. Love this school, have a very emotional connection to this school. It used to be called California College of the Arts and Crafts. And then later, I guess Angie says because they didn't want to make it seem like they were teaching people how to do scrapbooking stuff, they nitched the crafts. But I still think of what I learned there very much as a craft. And I like the craft aspect of it. And I hope it doesn't get lost as time goes on. But a number of things that teachers stress there is basically Angie Wayne's typography one class was a huge deal for me because it forced us to research typefaces and typeface designers and think about the original reasons the typefaces were designed in the first place. Secondly, they made us do all our own photography and illustrations for whatever project or thing we were doing at that time. We had to generate all of our own content and writing. That was an amazing thing. That seems like it would make it harder, but it actually made things a lot more liberating and the work a lot more personal.  This is the sort of lettering work that I was doing at that time, which is if you think this is bad, which it is, it's about to get worse. Like I had ideas for fonts. I get in like five characters and say, nope, not doing that anymore. Yeah, real, real bad stuff. And I knew it was bad. And I didn't know how to fix it or how to improve anything. But I was just trying to not be super judgmental about it because I knew that if I was going to do that, then I would pretty much hate it and not have any fun at all. So I think for people that are at this stage, like just take your time.  And Bob Offish is graphic design for class. This was another big game changer for me. We had an assignment where we had to do a 50 part poster series. So that's an insane amount of work. And it's very daunting just to look at it from the beginning, where we take a book and abstract the themes from the book and then do 50 posters. So I somehow ended up with a book of bad advice with wood letters on a wood background called the Woods of Wisdom. I outsourced the advice creation from my friends. This is Clive Hacker. Tip, baby, save marriages. Pretty bad advice. Happiness is rare, learn to settle. I've now come full circle on this one. I think it's good advice again. At the end of the project, as a way of thanking the people that were involved in it, I made this into a digital typeface and sent it out. Around that time, lost type, which is a pay what you want font distributor. They were just getting started and I asked them if they were interested in hosting it. And they were. And that was amazing because then I started getting money for things that I was doing. It was like crazy. It's hilarious how quickly you can get used to money coming in to. It's like immediately I just quit my day job and I thought that I was like a type designer full time from that point on. So I made a bunch more typefaces in college, continued to put them out on lost type and continued to live my life $5-ish at a time. And it was fun to see this stuff get used. This is John Sveta with some exhibition work using Edmund Sands, aesthetic apparatus, a Ross dress for less in Las Vegas, which is definitely a place I want to hang out. We got some dildo stuff. I love the word pleasureville. It's just like a great word, I think. This is rum packaging from stranger and stranger. Some condom stuff, urban outfitters, Toyota and Disneyland. It was really fun to see this stuff come through. But then what wasn't fun was to see this stuff. Yeah, perfect reaction. It's like, oh, God, if I could just, if I could turn back time, you know, but if you're considering getting a tattoo and you're thinking about the typographic options there and consider hand lettering and trying to avoid fonts if you can, work with a tattoo artist that knows how to letter stuff. I guess it's kind of rare, but they're out there. Spin a little coin on it if you have to.  Just don't do lorem ipsum tattoo. After I got the undergrad at California College of the Arts, I went to the type media program in the Hague where Tanya and some others went as well. And that was a real game changer. It was like just boot camp, just like working all the time. Everyone was like, oh, did you like party in Europe and stuff? And I mean, like we partied like a little bit, but mostly we were just working constantly. And an amazing school, though, and a whole other roster of teachers that they're just the heavy weights, I think, in the type design scene. After coming back from that, I started Ono type company. I think if I was just doing type design full time and only working on fonts, you know, 40 hours a week or whatever, I would run the risk of getting a little burnt out on it. But because I have the company, there's a lot of responsibilities that come with that in marketing and just graphic design in general and website stuff and customer support and bookkeeping. And I really enjoy wearing a lot of different hats. I also like the opportunity to draw as many logos for myself as I care to. You can't do that at like whatever job. I like to have the lettering projects coming in, kind of going alongside type design projects. Type design is just, it takes so long and you're looking at the same stuff for so long. It's kind of tough sometimes, but a lettering project can be like a day and these things are very fun and very gratifying in the context of more time consuming work. I like experimental typeface families. This is something that's particularly interesting to me. This is one I did in school called microwave that answers the age old question, what happens when you put type in a microwave? Start with a frozen style then things generally get a little bit warmer and more connected and the idea is that as things would get burnt and inedible, things get illegible basically. And then finally it explodes of course, but I'm interested in how these typefaces can work together instead of just varying things on weight and width all the time. We have four typefaces with Ono right now. This is Victor Strip, the collaboration with Erik Morinovic. Hobo, the Art Nouveau classic from 1905. Hobo, Rococo. These both make no money at all. And Wolf Mono is the most recent one. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. I'm a nut for logotype. I'm a big logotype kind of guy. If you're interested in getting some logotype work done, if I can't help you out with it, I can definitely talk to you about it. I think it's so much fun. There's so many great opportunities in the logotype world. But I'm drawn to type, I think just to kind of break it down because it's really this efficient way of communicating. You're doing two things at once. You're doing this cool trick where you can read it. It's saying words. But it's also putting out an emotion that you can kind of just latch onto as a human being. It's a very human thing. Robots can't interpret what fonts mean. So just like a classic type 101 example of that, I'm so much more interested to what's going on on the left side. I mean partially because I like Hobo. But also because if you're going to say luxurious in a typeface that looks luxurious, you're kind of like wasting a chance to say something different. And Hobo's great because I don't even really know what it's trying to say. Or it's like somewhat elastic what the meaning of it is. So Hobo wins, of course. I don't think I would be alone in saying that we're in the golden age of type design. There's a couple of things allowing that to happen at the moment. First of all, the tools are better than they ever have been. Where before we had to carve type out of metal, we, I didn't do it, but people did hundreds of years ago and it sounds really hard. Now we can do everything on computers with really great software. Even the software has gotten a lot better in the last couple of years. Education, all these programs like Type of Cooper and graduate programs elsewhere that are just popping up all over the world in different countries are excellent and workshops and stuff like that, too. And the communication. So the internet is kind of allowing people to get feedback and collaborate on things. And it's also giving independent designers a means to distribute their own work. Like it's so cool to own your own work and to put out your own work. This is amazing. These deals where distributors are taking like 70% like it seems such a bomber to me because you could own that. You could have it all and you wouldn't have to be answering to anybody. That's kind of the dream. Other things that are helping out at the moment. Stephen Cole's in the house. I mean, fonts and use is a great resource for graphic designers and type designers. It's an archive of graphic design that I think the common thread in all the work that is featured there is that they're all succeeding partly because of the typeface choice. So it's a really interesting collection of work on there. I particularly like the album cover part of the site. I dig through there and find all these old things that are kind of like forgotten typefaces. But I love these so much they're so expressive and we see them and interact with them but we kind of forget that they have names and that they had designers because no one's really using them these days. Or few people are. Another excellent resource just for looking at the sheer number of foundries people creating type and distributing it worldwide is the type foundry archive. I mean, 331 foundries in 45 countries. That's amazing. That's such a good showing, I think. Typographica also among other things it compiles a yearly list of kind of the favorite typefaces of that year or whatever. 2015 is out right now. 2016 is coming soon-ish. Okay, yeah. Well, it's like when you're depending on a bunch of different people to write a bunch of different articles, I would assume that, yeah, people start lagging on that stuff. Typographica is a great resource. So the question of who's doing cool stuff, this is the part of the talk where I'll kind of just mention some people that I think are doing really exquisite work these days. This particular typeface is overdone by Elmer Stafan of the Pied Foundry. And the guy is absolutely nuts. In 2016 he did a display typeface for every week of the year. 52 different typefaces that are pretty rooted in wood type inspiration. And he kind of used a modular system of creating type so he could copy and paste components between letters to expedite the process. But amazing that when the technology gets so good and you can utilize the internet to distribute stuff, you can release a display typeface every week. Adam Katye with this custom typeface for the Laszlo Maholi Nagi Design Grant. I'm really blown away by people that can continue to breathe new life into sands stuff. He kind of developed his own custom version of calligraphy here that kind of informed the process. People say all the time like, oh it works at big and small sizes.  But this I think really does. The illustrator Daniel Klaus, as far as illustrators go. So like we're removing ourselves now from type design and lettering and graphic design and getting into other areas for inspiration. His lettering is totally top notch and compliments the illustration style well. And he's kind of leveraging all these old styles from a fairly tight time period. But it really gives an incredible cohesiveness to his body of work. And he's always doing different stuff too. He doesn't rely too heavily on the same things. The artist Barry McGee. So getting further away from just graphic design, his signature lettering style will probably not win him any calligraphy awards. But it's interesting how it plays with exaggerated proportions and sort of the DIY production techniques. That's kind of his signature style and compliments the rest of his thing. So take a look at how he's playing with exaggerated proportions on the tiny ears on that portrait. Like just the littlest tiny ears and then the tiny periods in the lettering. The young Dutch lettering artist Bart Vollebrecht. This guy is nuts and he's kind of famous for pushing legibility. But he seems to have an incredible amount of control over how illegible these things are. Can you guys read the top left one out of curiosity? Immortals. Yeah. That's so dope. Antidote. Crazy.  And I look at this stuff all the time. So many lettering people are doing like pretty much the same thing these days so that when you see this stuff it's like, oh my God, thank you so much. Like such a great breath of fresh air. The skateboard illustrator Matt Cantrell. It's kind of disappointing to me how little I knew about other areas of graphic design that are kind of the more blue collar areas basically.  Some days it'll be like a Jim Parkinson rip off on the far right. And then other times they're going to only reference monster truck graphics, you know, and they kind of got to be able to do it all.  Julian Priet, a booty paper on Instagram if you want to check his stuff out. Crazy. I think a lot of lettering artists and just designers in general look to this century or the last hundred years for inspiration most of the time. And I know I'm guilty of that myself. So it's kind of startling to see reference from, you know, 300 years ago or whatever, when someone's looking to like the true master penman like Aurigi and whoever else. I mean, I love how easy to read this is. This is like, this says the alphabet somehow, and it's a connected reverse contrast kind of black letter caps. I don't know. It's nuts. And I love it. Keep going. Eric Marinovic with this work for Almanac. So this is actually a scan, not a computer generated image. It seems like this guy has just thousands of styles. And every time he gets famous for one, he'll like ditch it and go find something else to play with. So this is kind of saying like the words are just describing the beer and kind of technically what it is.  Like hold on to your butts. I think it's kind of lame to mention Quentin Tarantino, but talk about a guy who understands the power of what's going on here. You know, when the film is five minutes of just titles and he's not even leaning on any like effects or animation. Again, it's saying something like it's just saying the actor's names.  Jennifer Hennessy is in the house tonight. I love how Jen Hen plays with type here. She's kind of using historical contrast models and fairly traditional type as a skeleton on which she plays her game with color and shape. And then totally deconstructing and reconstructing with avant-garde to create this poster for the sculpture program. So like, I think there's such a distinction between treating type as like clip art and just dropping it in and going with default settings and then treating it like a raw material, like treating type like wood or like paint. Some really interesting stuff happens there. And pushing eligibility. So this is her poster. The top actually says elastic limit. And I think you can make it out once someone tells you it says elastic limit, but it also says it below. But does it need to be read? No, not really. It just needs to capture your attention and then make you read. Cyrus Highsmith back into type design kind of melds illustration and all these different disciplines along with his type design. Kind of create a consistency among his body of work. And in a similar way, my old classmate from type media, Mark Fromberg, wanted to typeface to compliment his illustration style, but not necessarily Ape it or be exactly the same. So he's using contrast as a variable letter by letter and really playing with things a great deal. But the overall impression is a very, very even paragraph. And I think this lady dancing and breaking the paragraph is probably the most genius bit of type setting I've seen. So now we're back to the boring stuff. Hold on. Let me see where I'm at because we were talking for a little while here. I was just really going for it. Okay. So why in the context of so much excellent contemporary work and historical influence, do we again see the rise of the neutral sands? Well, I think there's a lot of things going on right here. First of all, they want to represent really technical, incredibly complicated systems with something very simple and easy to use. So that kind of makes sense. They want to be the search service and the email service and the mapping service. So maybe there's a certain generic quality that kind of helps here. Maybe mass appeal is their only goal. But when industry leaders make a decision, they kind of set the convention and now smaller companies that are taking huge risks that are a tiny fraction of the size with their business are sort of adopting the same visual language that just falls into line. And this is kind of a bummer to me. So this is the problem that we're talking about. Snapchat or Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, doesn't really have to do so much to stand out among that crowd. So just by going with the tightly spaced serif thing, they're clearly differentiating themselves from everything else. So the good news is things move so fast. And these bigger companies are always looking to the little guys, I think, to kind of set the trends. Like the bigger guys are probably a lot more scared and the little guys are a lot more willing to take a lot of risks. So the other thing people talk about all the time is readability. And they say, well, it has to be really readable. I think it's amazing what our brains are capable of reading. I mean, Carlisle Rococo, Paul Carlisle for photo lettering back in the 70s. This is clearly pushing or nateness and embellishment to the max, still totally legible. Fit, recent release by David Jonathan Ross. Okay, we're getting pretty tough to read here. But he's just using these consistent channels of native space to define the letter. And that's it. The goal being to get each letter occupying as much of the rectangle as possible. And back to Calypso. I mean, I don't think we give enough credit to our brains. Research tells us that words don't even need to have letters that are in the correct order for us to read them. So like, if spelling is kind of overrated, what else is overrated, you know, like, we can see that it says what it says. So I'll leave that stuff for now. And talk more about custom type design work. Eric Spiekermann said something like, I think I'm paraphrasing, but he said like identity design is simple, you make a custom type face, use it on everything, identity done. And I'm sure that there's more to it, you know, identities kind of have a lot of elements. It's not just the typeface. But the way we interact with companies and brands is, you know, so rooted in their Lodo, and then all the messaging that they write. What typeface that is is totally up to them. So the tone is clearly their call. And I think there's a huge opportunity for not just businesses, but any sort of organization to think about custom type. And obviously I'm incredibly biased, but I would love it if more people got involved with that and thought of it as a possibility. One day I was just minding my own business, waiting for emails to come through. And like Tonya mentioned, I'm obsessed with this band Wolfpack. And then the lead guy from Wolfpack emails me and asked me to make him a custom typeface. So this was probably the best day of my life. And I was jumping up and down in my apartment, but I was very surprised to see that there's a lot of weird things happening in here. First of all, it's like a musician, you know, someone removed from graphic design in general. And he's talking about all these details he wants in his custom typeface. One weight bold, he wants it monospace.  He's been talking about lacryma and pitch, which are sort of contemporary releases probably the last five, 10 years. And then oh, no, Wolf collab. I mean, come on, man, music to my ears. He was referencing a typeface on the IBM Celetric italic. The IBM Celetric was this typewriter that was tremendously popular, partly because it was one of the first typefaces where you could type faster than the mechanism could actually print. So it had a sort of memory. And secondly, because you could change out those little golf ball look in things and alter the typeface with which the typewriter wrote. It's amazing to see this little golf ball in action and there's slow mo footage of it on the internet. And it's just like such a technological achievement. So it came with the normal stuff that you would probably expect to see on typewriter fonts, letter gothic, that kind of thing. But also came with this kind of one off design, this thing called light italic with these huge ball terminals. And he wanted to reference that for his funk band. And that seemed like such a weird choice for me that I was totally hooked. I was absolutely interested. So immediately you start sketching all the things that you kind of expect it to be, first of all. And I started with the Lodo. But I know to be a good boy and do my explorations and push weight and width as much as possible to make sure I'm leaving no stone unturned. But then we kind of came back to the Lodo. And then he's like, ooh, that initial Lodo was it. Go with that. So I probably wasted a lot of time. But I don't think of it as wasted time. I think there's always discoveries to be made. It's very important to sketch a lot. Then when we started fitting vectors over these shapes, I wanted to be careful to not make it feel too computerized and too stale and boring. So instead of just like normal squares, I would give things just a little bit of give. Can you see the difference between that? We could zoom in. The difference between that and that. You know what I'm saying? And you might be thinking, you dumbass, that's a huge waste of time. It's a very minor change. I think all of these curves, there's thousands and thousands of curves in a tight face. And when you make one small decision like that, it kind of snowballs and tends to have an effect on the paragraph. The way you would space a normal typeface, a proportional typeface, not a monospace, would be to begin with something like a lowercase n, put a couple ns next to each other and measure the interior and spaces between them. So you're looking for like a kind of one to one relationship between the counter shape and the letter space. Once you got that going on, you can lop off the top and the bottom. You just see a little picket fence happening. So that's a great place to start. Then you can make decisions from there. Once you've got the n spaced, all of these other letters kind of fall into line because these are the sort of rule following letters for the most part. The problem is, and yeah, you can see the picket fence happening there as well. The problem is these rule breaker letters that kind of comprise a lot more than half of the alphabet have to be spaced as well. So you can put them between a pair or two pair of ns. That'll start giving you an idea of the rhythm. Maybe Sn is a little tight there. K, Z, all these weirdos. In monospace land, it's kind of inverted. So instead of fitting space around the letter, you're fitting the letter around the available space. It's quite a challenge to design with because these really narrow letters like I and L have to occupy the same horizontal distance as M and W. But after a little while, we had some kind of a lowercase going on. It was wonky and bizarre, but he was digging it and I was having fun and I got to email my hero. I got to have these things show up in my inbox that were him saying, ooh, looks good. It was always one word, too. I was really hoping to get in some long conversations with him about type and stuff, but I guess he's a pretty busy guy. Go figure. After that, he just wanted the bold italic, but I was like, ah, you know, let's do a Roman and see what happens. But then you kind of got to do uppercase and stuff, too. But after just a little bit, you can kind of get something where you can test the typeface and see what the texture is looking like. It's individual letters are really only telling you such a small fraction of what's going on and kind of got to zoom out a little bit and start looking at paragraphs. But after a little while, I wanted to explore some weights because, again, he didn't ask me to, but I was like, I bet this would be really dope in a light style and a really bold style. And I was totally right. It was super dope. But these aren't things that you have to design all of them. It's not really so much labor-intensive drawing. You just draw one either side of the extremes and blend between them. The computer can kind of generate that stuff in the middle. Draw some punctuation, some figures and stuff like that. And you really got a true feeling for the typeface. The back end of the character set, this stuff can be kind of boring if you let it. But I always try and have as much fun as I possibly can with it. No one ever uses it. I've never seen like any of these things in use anywhere. But they're there if you need them. And because this band was particularly musical, I mean, they're total music nerds. I included a set of things for them to kind of treat these notes like clip art. It's not really a typeface meant for setting real music, but just to kind of play with like emoji. And in four weights, of course, particularly fond of the treble clef in the bold weight. This is, again, never will see the light of day, but it's there. And then you kind of have something to play with and start building some specimens and stuff and put it online and try and get people to buy it, which is the hardest part for sure. So it's out now. And the fun thing to see is that the band uses it all the time. They're doing stuff with this like constantly. It's new merch and music videos and tour dates. And I just get such a kick out of seeing like my favorite band use stuff that I've created, even if our email relationship didn't really take off the way I was hoping it would. I of course belong to the Facebook group of Wolfpack fans. And someone the other day posted like, Oh, the wolf logo isn't really a perfect circle. It's kind of like slightly squarish. What's up with that? And I chimed in. I was like, Well, guys, just so you know, type designers often make circles slightly more square and make vertical slightly thicker than horizontals and do all these optical compensations. So they look pleasing to our eye, but they're not geometrically perfect. And he was like, Cool, that was boring. Like, I'm not interested anymore. But there were some people on that thread that were like, Okay, that's some information that's kind of interesting. And I never would have gotten exposed to it had I not done this typeface for Wolfpack. So I like that the people that are using it are and buying it are mostly fans like they're just super fans. I want to have like every piece of merchandise. So I like to kind of break out of the graphic design market when I can. I think that's fun. It's also being used alongside some hobo in interfaces. So these are audio plugins, basically like filters for sound. These are coming out soon from the company, Good Hurts, any audio people in here familiar with Good Hurts? Dude, the dopest plugins. What's up, Bo? How's it going? All right. So all I'm saying is just get into whatever you're into as much as possible and dig and make sure you find the dopest stuff that you possibly can. It's a really fun part of it. And I know you're probably doing a good job of that already. I want to thank everyone whose work I featured in here. And my dad is included, of course. Thank you also to Sadie, who did the laundry yesterday. So I could work on the presentation. And thank you to you all for coming. It is so nice to have like a really good crowd in the library. Thank you so much.


Hybrid electric vehicles, HEVs, have become increasingly popular due to their ability to reduce emissions and improve fuel economy. Researchers have focused on developing control strategies to optimize energy management and torque distribution while maintaining driving performance and battery life. This review summarizes the current state of the art in this area, providing a comprehensive overview of the literature and serving as a valuable resource for those interested in HEV development, control, and optimization.


The history of Islam in India is as old as Islam itself. A stretch of the ocean separates India's western coastline from Arabia. Trade between the two coasts predates Islam by a millennia. It therefore stands to reason that Muslim traders came to Kerala from Arabia even during the lifetime of the Prophet in search of spices, particularly pepper, the black gold. They married locally and soon produced a community which came to be known as Mafila. The customs and lifestyle of the Mafilas that evolved down the centuries reflects a synthesis with the local Hindu ethos. While the Kerala Muslims had come as merchants, those that rode in through the northwest passes were conquerors and rulers. The Delhi Sultanate was set up as an independent political unit in 1206, but it was under the Mughals that Muslim rule reached its peak. By the 16th and 17th centuries, the Mughal emperors had unified practically the whole of North India and much of the Deccan under one unified rule. But it were the Sufis and not the Muslim rulers who carried Islam to the masses. These mystics who settled in different parts of the country carried a simple message. Belief in one God and the equality of all men. A message that attracted many converts from the underprivileged sections of Indian society. The Sufis of Karnataka wrote in Dakhni, a newly evolving language. Hwaja Aminuddin was one of the earliest writers in this literature. His Dargah stands outside Bijafur, the capital of the Adil Shahi kingdom and one of the earliest Sufi settlements in the south. The Sufi contribution to literature can be gauged by the fact that over a hundred verses by the Sufi from Punjab, Baba Farid, are found in the Adi Granth, the holiest book of the Sikhs. Sheikh Muhammad, a Sufi who settled in Sri Gunda in Maharashtra, wrote the Yog Sangram, a landmark in Marathi literature. He drew parallels between Sufism and the Vedanta and freely combined the diction of Hindu and Muslim scriptures. His Dargah today is a major attraction for Hindus as well as Muslims. There are also some examples of Sufis forging links with Hindu saints. In Kashmir, for instance, a completely indigenous Sufi order was founded by Sheikh Nuruddin Wali. His followers call themselves Rishis, the Sanskrit word for ascetic. Sheikh Nuruddin, popularly known as Nund Rishi, drew inspiration from a Hindu Bhakti saint, Laleshri. It is this tradition of Hindu-Muslim fusion in the Kashmir valley that allows a part of a Dargah or a Muslim shrine to be used as a Hindu temple. Few people know that the Amarnath cave, one of the holiest pilgrimages for any Hindu, was discovered by a Muslim shepherd named Adam Malik. Even today, every pilgrim is helped and looked after by Muslims all along this arduous journey to the 14,000 feet high snow-covered cave. If Amarnath is among the holiest pilgrimages in the north, Sabarimala in the southernmost state of Kerala is undoubtedly the most popular in the south. Every pilgrim who visits the temple of Ayyappa also prays at the grave of Vavarswamy where a Muslim priest offers them holy ash and vibhuti. This pilgrim center, set among the beautiful woods of the Sabarimala hills and the Pampareva, is a living testimony of the two faiths coexisting for centuries. Indian Muslims have been influenced as much by the local Hindu ethos as by Islamic tenets.


This is by far the easiest cold email tactic I've ever used to get a response. I call it the stealth outreach method. It's actually a part of one of my paid programs, but I'm going to give it to you free on this video. Now, the way it works is you get clear on who it is you're reaching out to and what they want. If we think about a dentist, for example, which is a niche that I used to work with, they want more Invisalign patients, for example. So when I'm reaching out to this dentist, all I'm going to do is ask them if they want more of the thing that they want. So an example cold email to a dentist might read, Hey, Dr. Sean, are you looking for more Invisalign patients? Now, what Dr. Sean's going to do is respond if they want more Invisalign patients, they'll respond with yes. And now you have an open conversation, which is the hardest part about cold email. So if you're sending cold emails or you're trying to get clients through cold email, try this out. You can also use it on social media. Find out what the person you're reaching out to wants and just ask them if they want more of that.