Hey! I’m Brendan and I’m the language lover behind Diacritical Mass.

I’ve always had a special interest in words, from writing poetry and hip-hop lyrics to collecting interesting fonts to reading books about translation. Some time ago I discovered Unicode, the massively comprehensive standard format for encoding all manner of textual characters into computer form. I took a tumble down the rabbit hole, and spent an entire afternoon scanning the thousands upon thousands of characters, and making note of ones that caught my eye.

After refining this list of my favorite characters, I got to thinking that it would be fun to be able to wear them, too! That itch, paired with the fact that I like experimenting with ecommerce and web design, gave life to this site.

This site is in beta mode for the time being. I have a good list of other characters under consideration for future products, and I’d also love to hear your suggestions! Please send me a note if there’s a particular character you’d like to wear.

For more about Unicode, see this post I wrote: The Unbelievable Universe of Unicode