TikTok is horrible, and TikTok can be great. The same goes for the typography, mostly in the form of subtitles. Over a year ago I was wondering (German post) where all those “retro fonts” come from, as in: How do you even manage to render text without proper umlauts or accents in 2025?

The weird font engines that choke on characters that are not in plain ASCII and render them as alien moon glyphs are still around, but the trend in professional font usage is growing! At least in my feed there’s more and more instances with a proper capital sharp S being used for German:

I love this character in particular, so this makes me as happy as a video of a puppy befriending a horse, the sloppy vectorized HBO logo being expertly called out, or a cover version of “No surprises” performed by a professional harpist.

A piglet befriending a century-old turtle is fine, too. Errm, where was I? :)