Patience helped. 😅
I recently set a quarterly goal to share more on Twitter — specifically work stuff, from my @typesetting account. I thought I’d break the ice by paraphrasing bits of Flexible Typesetting as threads, so that’s what I started doing. It felt so good to share! I could see that people were appreciating and saving the information.
Then a weird thing happened: I started losing followers. Each day I would check on the threads, sometimes bumping specific tweets for extra attention, and my follower count would go down by another one or two integers.
I started to think all kinds of thoughts. Keep in mind that I set this quarterly goal because it had felt like a long time since I tried to be active and helpful on Twitter. What if my thoughts were not very helpful? What if people didn’t like threads (a format I tend to enjoy)? Am I being insensitive for sharing about typesetting with so much difficulty going on in the world? … All kinds of thoughts.
But, having posted about choosing an anchor typeface, sizing fonts, and determining measure, I thought I’d finish up by sharing thoughts about dynamic line spacing. Font, size, measure, and leading — the balanced text block.
So I posted another thread yesterday about line spacing, and today I woke up to kind words and a dozen new followers! It made me happy. And it made me remember that, for me, chance, patience, and showing up have always been key to success.
I recently set a quarterly goal to share more on Twitter — specifically work stuff, from my @typesetting account. I thought I’d break the ice by paraphrasing bits of Flexible Typesetting as threads, so that’s what I started doing. It felt so good to share! I could see that people were appreciating and saving the information.
Then a weird thing happened: I started losing followers. Each day I would check on the threads, sometimes bumping specific tweets for extra attention, and my follower count would go down by another one or two integers.
I started to think all kinds of thoughts. Keep in mind that I set this quarterly goal because it had felt like a long time since I tried to be active and helpful on Twitter. What if my thoughts were not very helpful? What if people didn’t like threads (a format I tend to enjoy)? Am I being insensitive for sharing about typesetting with so much difficulty going on in the world? … All kinds of thoughts.
But, having posted about choosing an anchor typeface, sizing fonts, and determining measure, I thought I’d finish up by sharing thoughts about dynamic line spacing. Font, size, measure, and leading — the balanced text block.
So I posted another thread yesterday about line spacing, and today I woke up to kind words and a dozen new followers! It made me happy. And it made me remember that, for me, chance, patience, and showing up have always been key to success.