Insomnia, fractals, and typography

July 4, 2025

Last night I woke up for no particularly good reason, and couldn’t get back to sleep. When this happens, I usually turn to Wikipedia and read for a bit. This time, I went down rabbit hole about fractals and ended up with typeface envy.

Warning: this is a bit of a shaggy-dog story.

Growing up, I was fascinated with fractals and the idea of chaos theory. At the time, I had just about zero ability to understand the math involved with these systems, and I mostly just played around with a DOS program called Fractint. One type of fractal that I was obsessed with at the time was the Lorenz attractor. I was drawn to it for a few reasons. The math behind it was relatively straightforward, and I had a book with a pseudocode example that I was able to implement crudely. It also had a direct tie to chaos theory, which I thought was rad but only could pretend to understand in an annoyingly teenaged way.

3:30 in the morning is not the best time to try and better understand an obsession from my youth, but apparently that didn’t stop me. Happily, I ended up drifted off before too long (though not before bonking myself on the head with my iPad). Before getting back to sleep, I landed on the page for a paper titled The fractal property of the Lorenz attractor. Realizing I didn’t currently have the brains to read it, I added it to GoodLinks and went back to sleep.

This morning I looked up the paper again and was immediately struck by the quality of its typeface. This was a good outcome because the page only contained an abstract, intro, and some snippets. At this point I decided to start being distracted by typography instead of strange attractors.

Looking at the page source, I saw the font-family listed as “ElsevierGulliver-Regular”. I’m always on the lookout for interesting typefaces for the web, and I didn’t think I’d seen this one around before. The face is called Gulliver, and Elsevier is the name of the company behind ScienceDirect.

A search lead me to Gerard Unger’s Wikipedia page. Apparently the face was used mostly in print, and designed in 1993. Wondering if it was available for license, I found Unger’s profile on Fonts in Use. It turns out that this particular typeface was licensed very selectively.

To guarantee Gulliver’s exclusivity, no more than 100 licences will be issued worldwide.

Oh well.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this was some typographical envy. I spent a bit of time this morning wondering if I should try out another font on this blog. This is something that happens every few years, but I never act on. The same was true this time. After being intrigued by Libre Baskerville, EB Garamond, and IBM Plex Serif for a bit, I stopped myself. Any one of them would have tripled the download size of any page on this website.

Instead, I spent a bit of time fiddling with my site’s layout. I’ve increased the body size slightly, and fiddled with how I render links, ¹ but I stuck with my old favourite default web typeface, Georgia. Happily, it is available for license to more than 100 people ever.

One critique of this site’s design has been that the links were a bit eye-searing. My Nope to Sidebar post contains links to some previous design tweak screenshots. Hopefully this new link style works better for others, because I’m quite happy with it. ↩