Font Designs
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Typing Test
This month, I’m trying this thing where I challenge myself to take the typing tests found at:
Instead of just spamming my own site with test results each day, I collected the results in one big table, the table can be found here:
Even more modular
Yet another font is in the works, right now it feels a bit like I’m working in a “pipeline” fashion making multiple fonts concurrently. My script font is basically finished (with some spacing and kerning issues to be addressed if it isn’t accepted on DaFont) and a link will be posted when it’s available on all the sites.
Kerning
I’ve been working on a script font for some time now, I finally got around to making the majuscules, numbers and punctuation, but I have to redo the kerning table.
THIS is why I prefer designing monospace fonts.
At least I’m gaining some experience in kerning and spacing.
Serifs
I’ve been working on a new font the past few days, it’s going to be yet another geometric font, this time it’ll have tall letters, serifs and a fairly rigid composition.
The majuscules, minuscules and numbers are pretty much done, but I’m having a bit of trouble getting started with the non-alphanumeric characters. As always, the ampersand and the at sign remain to be the most difficult of the special characters, I’m considering borrowing some from my earlier high stress font “High Society”.
Modum
Another font of mine is up on DaFont and CreativeFabrica.
It’s called “modum” and it’s a monospaced modular font.
You can download it on DaFont here.
Or purchase it for commercial use on CreativeFabrica here.
Dinner Shot
Yesterday I thought I’d have a go at some food photography and practice some more lighting.
With sips and the inpainting brush in Affinity Photo I could easily edit multiple images and make them ready for uploading to Shutterstock fast and effieciently. What I really like about this site is the fact that I can upload files over ftp, and batch processing of titles and keywords made it even more convenient.
On top of that, I had a 100% acceptance rate.
The images can be found on my Shutterstock portfolio here.
Sips is a lifesaver!
I just recently found out that macOS comes with a terminal-based batch processing application called sips, the scriptable image processing system.
One thing I found out I can do is write:
for i in *.NEF; do sips -s format jpeg $i --out "${i%.*}.jpg"; done
And convert all files in a directory from Nikon Raw files to jpeg.
Another useful option is
sips -Z 1000 *.jpg
This changes the size of all the images in a directory so that the longest size is 1000px at maximum, note that this will overwrite the files with the new resized files, so be sure to work on a copy of the directory and not the original.
What week is this?
Today I was a bit impulsive and registered the domain name weeknum.org.
Then I made a little php-application showing the day of the week, with the background color calculated using the week number, month and day to create a hex code.
I might even try out some AJAX and jQuery on this page and see if I can make it a little more stylish and interactive.
If you want to check start and end dates of another week number, just add the suffix /[week number] to the URL.
For example, if you want to find information about week number 42, then go to weeknum.org/42.
Getting started with QuarkXPress
For far too long I’ve been doing layout work in Illustrator and Affinity Designer.
It’s not that it’s bad to do so, vector graphics applications have all the tools to create a single page poster, business card or some other things for print, but lately I’ve found I do work that spans over multiple pages where I need a consistent design – what I need are stylesheets and master pages.
So now that I do most of my design work on my mac and my Adobe CS5 package for Windows is getting a bit dated anyway I thought I’d learn the other “industry standard” application for desktop publishing: QuarkXPress.
Compared to other professional grade software and the fact that they have a few good offers I’m really pleased with getting a full fledged DTP-program. I tried the Open Source Scribus first, but it couldn’t do something so basic as to have master page elements in front of the background.
Now I’m using it to design menu items for websites and will probably use it for my résumé.
Shutterstock
Today I was accepted as a contributor to Shutterstock, let’s see if I can manage to get more views and downloads there than I do at Getty (iStockphoto.com)
Click on the above link or the image to visit my Shuttestock portfolio.
