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Articles by Samuel John Klein (Page 8)
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Photoshop 9.0.1 Update Now Available
Update to CS2 offers range of fixes
An update to Photoshop CS2, updating it to version 9.0.1, has been mounted to the Adobe downloads website today, and is available now.
According to Adobe, it cites the following issues as significant fixes:
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A Unique Estimation Tutorial
It won’t give you the numbers but it will give you the concepts
Estmating a design job–it’s one thing that causes the new independent designer to quail. Brave men quail, stern women’s insides turn to ice, sirens wail, the heavens torn asunder, the oceans rise, empires fall..
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Typography Word of the Day: Aesc
It’s the “AE” in AEsop, amongst other things.
The ‘aesc’”The glyph you see in the illustration is one you’ve likely met before but never caught its name. Allow us to introduce you to the aesc (pronounced, quite counter-intuitively, “ash”). You’ve seen it in the past in words such as Æsop, you once saw it in words like anaesthesia (anæsthesia) and aesthetic (æthetic), and it is no loger seen in the word medieval (which used to be spelled mediæval)
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Word of the Day: Township
A six-mile-by-six-mile square of land upon the surface of the earth–mostly.
The word township has two main meanings:
- In the case of surveying and mapping, a township is a standard six-mile-by-six-mile surveyed regular quadrilateral in the Public Lands Survey System, and is also a east-west tier in that system. This system is used in most, but not all, of the United States.
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Tinting/Shading Colors in Illustrator
A quick power tip that will help you keep your mixes mixed the way you want them
One of the things I find myself doing quite often in Adobe Illustrator is playing with colors. No non-digital artist ever had a palette like this; colors don’t go all over the place, paint doesn’t slop around in places. Truly it’s wonderful.
Read more on Tinting/Shading Colors in Illustrator…
A Look At Scribus
Scribus 1.3.3.1 “Printemps” is in the wild, the most polished version of the FOSS page layout engine yet. Is it good enough to base your workflow on?
The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement seems to be all about giving the public at large alternatives. So far there are alternatives to commonly available operating systems (the multplicitous Linuxen), Inkscape for vector drawing, The GIMP for image editing, and OpenOffice.org for office productivity, the majority of which can be had for free (or nearly so).
Eight new T26 treats, including an amazing pixel-based Fraktur
Another month comes, and that means a selection of new stuff from the folks at T26. This time around there’s a bumper corp of sans-serif and display fonts: September, Plastizia, Tivoli, and Tonic; some audacious hard-lined display fonts: Poison, Labelo, and Copenhagen.
- Indiana Univ. To Close Map Library?
Proposal to close University branch libraries generate criticism, controversy
The Indiana Daily Student recently reported that budget concerns have caused them to evaluate closure of Indiana University’s specialized branch libraries. At risk are four such libraries, including the Map and Geography Library. The administration kept tabs on certain statistics that were believed to monitor use, such as gate count, circulation, and computer use.
- CCA’s “Cartography” Celebrates First Birthday
Quality General-interest blog/news site notches its first
A year ago, 28 April, Paul Heersink of the Canadian Carographic Association started a blog, Cartography:It started inauspiciously enough and was meant to be another forum for members of the Canadian Cartographic Association to communicate with each other and keep abreast of new ideas and technologies in the field
- Small PDA Type Hurts Eyes
PDA fonts take toll on eyes; digital typefounders search for solutions
Surely the end of the world is nigh. The Wall Street Journal:
“I have 30-year-olds coming in for reading glasses so they can focus on their BlackBerry,” says Alli Rossi, an optician in Los Angeles.
- Early Minnesota Maps Online
Historical Society makes original public survey documents available to all
The Minnesota Historical Society has scanned and mounted a collection of maps from the days of early European settlement. The collection, housed virtually at http://www.mnhs.org/...igitalmaps/index.htm, allows searching by county, township and range, or provides keyword searches of plat books and old atlases.
- Your World In Monospace: ASCIIMaps.com
Unique Google mashup is goofy fun
In the days of yore, when USENET and ASCII-email were all there was to the net, a great tradition developed over using the 255 characaters of the ASCII character-set towards the goal of art. Many were the small maps of Australia, made of dashes, underscores, and back-and-foreslashes, with Perth so carefully picked out with an asterisk and a greater-than symbol.
- The Fall and Rise of Luc Devroye’s Link Site
Well-known online resource is down, then back up again.
On 26 April 2006, user Altan Orhon posted the followning message to the discussion boards on the Typophile.com website:
Luc Devroye’s site is now closed. He is still alive and kicking, but on April 24, 2006, censorship and political correctness won against academic freedom. To the students who are counting on my course notes: sorry. To the researchers who are trying to download my work: sorry. To the conference participants of AofA 2006: sorry. To the readers of my daily social commentary: sorry. To the mathematical community: sorry. To the funding agencies of Canada who generously supported my work: sorry. We may be up again one day after purgatory
- Berthold Releases Akzidenz-Grotesk in Open Type
Famous typeface released in both Standard and Pro Versions
Press Release:
Chicago, IL.–(MICROSOFT TYPOGRAPHY)–2 May 2006–Berthold announces the release of Akzidenz-Grotesk in OpenType format in both Pro and Standard versions.
Akzidenz-Grotesk Pro offers extended language support for Central European, Baltic and Turkish as well as Welsh, archaic Danish and Esperanto and is available in CFF PostScript flavored OpenType.
Read more on Berthold Releases Akzidenz-Grotesk in Open Type…
- Freeware Friday: Blue Highway/Expressway Free
Great for Illos. Maps, Making your own signs: Five free faces!
Fonts are a very good thing; free is a very good price; fonts that are fun to play with are the trifecta. Blue Highway is first past the post.
Blue Highway is a True-Type font created by typefounder Larabie Fonts, a font house with a reputation of coming up with cool bits and then giving them away (their site is here); they do their distribution through MyFonts.com. Blue Highway is perhaps their best-known (or most-seen) font and five examples of it, insipred by the commonly seen font on freeway signs and more than a few street blades.
Blue Highway is TTF, so it may not be approriate for all uses. However, the uses it’s best for-headlines, subheads, pictures–lend themselves well to conversion to outlines as part of the workflow. So, actually, the design possiblities are nearly endless, and it does look good.
The Blue Highway font freebie is currently mounted by DaFont.com, and you can get your five free fonts here.
As Typodermic
In 2001 Ray Larabie started his commerical foundry Typodermic, where he crafts fonts for sale. Blue Highway has made the translation over to Typodermic where it is now known as Expressway; MyFonts has a single variety of Expressway for free (go this way for it) but it is available as both Mac and Win, TTF and PS.
- A New Atlas for the Motorcylist
Just released, the Rand McNally Atlas is designed to appeal to the Harley rider
This week, Rand McNally announced the release of a new publication, the Harley-Davidson Ride Atlas of North America.
- The Map Book
Beautiful new coffee-table book connects the development of maps to historical cirucmstances
We’ve recently noted what we hope is a trend toward truly deep and thoughtful books on cartography for the masses–books that not only make an inventory of historically important or notable maps but also that attempt to connect them, with enlightened and witty commentary, into the history of its time. One such recent book is 100 Maps, which we mentioned in this posting here.
- Cartography Word of the Day: Isoline
The wavy lines on weather maps, topo maps, and others.
A temperature and pressure map depicting isobars (lines of equal barometric pressure) and isotherms (which are the boundaries of the colored areas depicting temperatures). From this map we can infor the structure of the weather systems over the United States at the time the map was generated. (Map courtesy NOAA) (click image to enlarge)- Typography Word of the Day: Italic
That slanted script–don’t fake it!
A comparison between true italic and “fake” italic, or oblique, typeset in QuarkXPressItalics are a style of glyph that slant at around 15-20 degrees from the vertical, and are more cursive than roman but less roman than script.
- An Obsession With The Book
Everything’s In PDF format or can be downloaded these days. So what is the compulsion to go to the bookstore? A personal reflection.
I hold in my hands a slate-gray volume that was published by Rockport and I bought today. The title? 100 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers, written and designed by Plazm. Bought at Powell’s Books, the legendary bookstore here in my hometown of Portland, Oregon.
- Paragraph Style Sheets in QuarkXPress 6.5
The ins and out of a layout artist’s right-hand power tool; a paradigm defined.
The concept of a style sheet has become a bedrock of textual presentation, and it’s obvious why; style sheets allow quick and consistent specification, facilitates fast revision, and establishes standard treatment for modes of text (headlines, body copy, captions, et.al.) in a document.
Read more on Paragraph Style Sheets in QuarkXPress 6.5…
- Freeware Friday: Wizz RSS Reader 2.1.2 for Firefox
Handy free RSS reader gives Firefox what it should have in a convenient sidebar or free-floating format
RSS, even though the jury may be out on it, is mad popular right now, and if it be a work in progress, it’s a wicked useful one.
Read more on Freeware Friday: Wizz RSS Reader 2.1.2 for Firefox…
- Map Keys 2006-04-21
This edition: Online Map Wars!; Yahoo Maps has Satellite Views.
My May Can Beat Up Your Map
Perhaps it needn’t be said that online mapping services (Yahoo, Mapquest, Google) have gone over big amongst net users. CCAer observes that this article in Forbes magazine notes that online map use overall is up 20%, and the big winner, despite the earlier arrival of the other two, that Mapquest is still king, drawing 46.4 million users–more than Google (19.1 million) and Yahoo! (20 million) combined.
- Type Slugs 2006-04-21
This edition: MyFonts’ Latest–Making it even easier for Wintel users to get fonts; The LinoLetter 2006-04;
My Fonts Latest-Just Point And Shoot
MyFonts has nominated thier Rising Stars for this month, with three very intriguing offerings.
- Scribus Team Announces 1.3.3.1 “Printemps”
Minor bugfix edition available for free download now
On 10 April the team developing the free/open source page layout application Scribus (http://www.scribus.net) announced the release and availablilty of version 1.3.3.1.
Codenamed “Printemps”, this succedes version 1.3.3 “Egalité” and is intended as a bugfix release for it. According to the Scribus team:
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