The GAB

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.

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..."

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.

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.

A friend asked me the other day where he could find some fonts that would not cost an arm and a leg. There are many free font websites, most of them with limited and terrible collections but here are a few that are worth a look next time you need something different on a low budget:



Then there are also free, but quality fonts as in these collections (If you use them commercially, give them a donation):

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?

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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.