Further Fabulous Fonts for Free
17/April/2008
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Typography
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The Folks at
Free Geekery, sent an e-mail to
alert me to the fact that they have a mighty list
of 101 type faces for Designers. These are all
free type faces, although several ask for credit
or permission if the font is used commercially.
Grunge
Handwriting
Familiar
Tech
Unique
Fancy
Bold
Clean and Simple
Simple with a twist
Oddly, Free Geekery, is the blog page for a "[Reward]
Credit Card eduction" website.
Roy Lichtenstein
I've been a fan of Roy Lichtenstein's comic book pop
art for years. I always wondered how many of his
paintings were taken from comic books and did he copy
the comic panels directly or make changes to them to
improve the composition? Well now there are some
answers, thanks to David Barsalou and his
Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein
project. Originally an exibit at the Springfield
Massachusetts Gallery, he now has a flickr site
that contains a ton of the source material. It's
an interesting deconstruction of the wonderful
work Lichtenstein created.
A really interesting read is the
Great Bazooka Bubble Gum Wrapper
Myth of 1961, A look into the controversy over
whether Lichtenstein stole Andy Warhol's idea.
Neat.
"... So, I went home and called Andy - no, I think,
I went right over to Andy's house... and so, I said,
'Prepare yourself for a shock.' And he said, 'What?' I
said, 'Castelli has a closet full of comic paintings.'
And he said, 'You're kidding?!' And he said, 'Who did
them?' And I said, 'Somebody by the name of
Lichtenstein.' Well, Andy turned white. He said, 'Roy
Lichtenstein.' He said, 'Roy Lichtenstein used to... '
- as I remember, he used to be a sign painter for
Bonwit Teller, and here's where I'm a little bit
confused because Andy... couldn't get anybody to show
his early cartoon paintings, so he went to Gene Moore
and Gene Moore said, 'Well I can put the paintings in
the windows...' He put them in the 57th Street
window... As I remember, the implication was: Andy felt
that Lichtenstein had seen the paintings in the window
and gave him the idea to do his
paintings..."
Your Petro-Dollars at work
Okay, not strictly graphic art/illustration, unless you
consider the fact that these are conceptual
architectural drawings. Take a look at these really
interesting
building renderings of buildings in
Dubai.
Designing with CSS
27/February/2008
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Web Design
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See the amazing changes one can make to a website using
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
CSS Zen Garden, is a project that
has been running for a few years now. website
designers can download the page code and create
and apply their own Style Sheet to change how the
information is presented. It's really inspiring to
see what graphic designers have done. Read the
page then click on a design in the right hand
column, and be ready to blow an hour or more
looking at some really nice design - okay, some is
a bit cooky, but there's a lot of tremendous stuff
there.
Finding Typefaces/Fonts
27/February/2008
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Typography
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Still With the San Serif Typefaces
21/February/2008
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Typography
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In my continuing search to find what I would consider
the ultimate (widely usable and visually pleasing) san
serif, I think I've come to a conclusion. Over the
years I've spent looking, I've settled for a while on
Frutiger light. A lovely face sure, but a few years
later I discovered Myriad and fell in love with the
fluid, clean lines of Myriad Pro Light. Lighter than
Frutiger and more lyrical when set, with those
exquisite, almost imperceptible caligraphy-like
thinning in area's like the shoulder of the n, p, r, q
etc... I've tried Vectora Light, Lucida Sans (too
square) of course Helvetica light and several others,
but I keep coming back to Myriad. I realize that what I
want is Myriad, with a double-story, lowercase g that
has a loop and link like the one in Agenda and Freight
(below), and a little more "swing" in the lower case
a's tail, also like like Agenda. Know of any faces that
might fit the bill?
Phoenica
20/February/2008
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Typography
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So my favorite go to san serif is
Myriad Pro (especially the light
face). I love it's clean lines, it legible
characters and it almost melodic flow - especially
compared with the standard of san serif fonts,
Helvetica. There's another face that I think is
also fascinating, simpler and more modern looking
than Myriad:
Phoenica designed by Ingo Preuss.
Arguably, because it's more simplified, it's not
as legible as Myriad, for instance the lower-case
a has no tail the lower case g has no ear etc...
But the face maintains a lovely, albeit, subtile,
rhythm. I'm looking for a project to use this
face.
What's Your Favorite Kuler?
18/February/2008
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Graphic Art
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Ever struggle to work up a unique color scheme for a
new project? If you don't have a deep creative feel for
color you can use Kuler, an online color-scheme
developing tool from Adobe. Make sure you have the
latest version of Flash, then have a look. You can
choose already made schemes (at last look there were
29,267 of them) from other users, or, after setting
up an account with Adobe, make your own, or modify
someone else's. All these schemes can then be
downloaded as .ASE files and imported into
Illustrator (Open your swatches pallet. Click on the
fly-out menu from the top right corner, then down
near the bottom, choose "Open Swatch Library."
Choose "Other Library" and navigate to where you
downloaded the .ASE file.) They also work in
Photoshop (Swatch pallet > Load Swatches) and
InDesign (Swatch pallet > Load Swatches). I've
used it on several illustration projects and often
when designing a publication to create a pallet to
work with. I even used it to choose colors for my
studio. Try it, it's fun.
Tabbed Finder Windows
13/February/2008
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Apple
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So yesterday I made sure I had my latest Time
Machine update, the downloaded the huge 10.5.2 System
update from Apple. All went well and everything seems
to be running just fine as before. But I have a gripe.
Why can't we have tabbed finder windows? Is it really
hard to engineer? Does it break the UI? What's the
deal? I know, I could install Cocoatechs really neat
finder-replacement, Path Finder, but I've tried it
(See below) and it's not for me. If you want loads
of customization and uber-control over the finder,
you should try it, it's great. All I want is some
tabs so I can keep all my windows together and neat.
What will it take to get them to allow the finder to
catch up to Safari? (Yes I play Kitty Spangles
Solitaire. What about it?)
Corel Painter Essentials 4
12/February/2008
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Illustraton
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I just saw this today. A paired down version of
Painter that let's you get to
the point without all the bells and whistles of
the full version. At $80, it seems like a great
way to get into Painter and decide if it's worth
the additional $300 for the full version. David
Biedny has a short review at
Mac Life.
Painter
Essentials 4’s uncluttered interface makes it easy to
focus on painting instead of finding menu functions.
What the Font?
11/February/2008
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Typography
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I had a job the other day that used a typeface I
thought I recognized, but for the life of me I couldn't
place it. I remembered that
MyFonts has this handy little tool
called "What the font" that can help you figure
out what font you're looking at. All I had to do
was take a screen shot (Command-3) open it in
Preview and crop the just to the words I wanted
(You need to keep the image - jpg is best - to
only a few items so the scanning software can pick
out the letters easily). Then I uploaded my jpg to
What the font, and it scanned the image, split it
into separate letters and then asked me to
identify the letters. Click Search, and in just
seconds, I got my result. A really neat tool.
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