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Archive: 2006 June
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Don’t Yellow and Blue Make Green?
Bias: it’s not just found in opinions, it’s also found in your paint
Traditional RYB Color Wheel (courtesy Wikipedia)Red-Yellow-Blue; primary-secondary-tertiary. Most everyone who’s in any phase of design has probably had thier run-in with mixing colors, either with light or with paint, and most of us can, no doubt, remember the fine feeling of subtle panic which which we approach mixing colors when we do illustration.
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Freeware Friday: Technorati Magical Sheep Bookmarklet for Firefox
Making Technorati tags irritating? Drag this to your bookmarks.
Though I’m fairly technically savvy I’ve been a rotten script student. Oh, one time I had programming down pretty cold. These days, as a confirmed end-user, I learn as much as I have to to get by.
Read more on Freeware Friday: Technorati Magical Sheep Bookmarklet for Firefox…
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Freeware Friday: Desktopple
Desktop, Desktop, wherefore art thou, Desktop? With Desktopple from FoggyNoggin Software, you can clear your desktop fast!
My desktop is messy. I admit it. That’s where files are downloaded to, it’s where I put stuff so I don’t lose it until I have time to attend to it, and that’s where I throw stuff I will be “filing tomorrowâ€. Sometimes tomorrow just doesn’t show up.
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Collector Chronicles Berlin Through The Years
Amateur mounts personal exhibition of Berlin in maps, from 1738 through 1989
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Yahoo! Maps Goes Hi-Rez In Some Global Markets
New, sharper satellite imagery available for a handful of cities worldwide, with list to grow
When the new Yahoo! Maps beta debute, in the offing was promised new high-resolution satellite images in addition to thier current offering of Landsat images. In this posting on the Yahoo! Local Maps blog, Michael Lawless, Yahoo! Maps’ Product Manager, has announced the first cities offered.
Read more on Yahoo! Maps Goes Hi-Rez In Some Global Markets…
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British Publisher Faces Big Fines Over Unlicensed Fonts
Health and financial publisher Campden faces large penalty for having over 11,000 fonts out-of-rights
Frequently the digital font user and designer hears of the possible effects of using font files and programs they don’t actually have a license to. As highlighted by Microsoft Typography and reported by IT/e-commerce news site out-law.com here, A British publshing firm specializing in the spheres of finance and medicine, Campden Publishing, has just found out the bill: GBP 80,000 (nearly USD 145,500).
Read more on British Publisher Faces Big Fines Over Unlicensed Fonts…
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A Powerful Suite of Free GIS
GIS Librarian Blogger provides links of free, powerful utilities
GIS can be a sprawiling subject, and systems can run very expensive–usually at the government/enterprise level. But a lot of map addicts would like to play with, experiment with, and get GIS experience.
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OpenType Trend: Monotype Reports Demand Up By Almost Half
Typefounder suggests OT fonts getting ever more popular
As we move foreward into the typographic future it would seem that the OpenType format is going over well.
In a survey distruibuted to 7,000 customers, data gathered from 1st quarter 2004 through 1st quarter 2005 and again from 4th quarter 2005 through 1st quarter 2006, that asked the question “which format do you prefer?”, showed an increase of 49%, and cited figures showing an increase of 168% on OpenType sales through fonts.com.
Read more on OpenType Trend: Monotype Reports Demand Up By Almost Half…
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Typography Word of the Day: Stress
Refers to the thick-thin tendency of the strokes–an indication of typographic legacy
Stress, of course, can be good or bad. This sort is a good sort.
A word drawn in Uncial. This is highly-stressed, at about 45 degress, due to the slant of the pen-tip used to draw it. (courtesy Wikipedia) -
Cartography Word of the Day: Plat
They work “behind the scenes” to provide precise property plans
The map that is our Word-of-The Day this week, plat, is a map you won’t see without having to go to the local city or planning office, but it’s one that works behind the scenes to determine who owns what, and where everything from your fences to your streets go.
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Forbes Smiley Pleads Guilty to Map Thefts
Established rare-map dealer admits to stealing more than $3Mil worth of antique maps from Yale University library; sentencing due 21 Sept.
As reported by the Hartford Courant today, E. Forbes Smiley, an established antique map dealer from Martha’s Vineyard, MA, pled guilty in federal court to one count of stealing an antique map from Yale University’s library, and admittted to stealing almost 100 antique maps from various libraries, including the New York and Boston Public Libraries, Harvard University’s library, and the British Library. Some maps dated back as far as the 16th Century.
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The Basics on Technorati Tags
“Tagging” posts is one of the hottest current ways to be connected to other content and to be noticed. But you don’t have to have an application to tag posts for Technorati: here’s how you can do it ‘by hand’.”
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Use Photoshop’s Script Events Manager
Do you use scripts to improve your Photoshop workflow? Do you wish you could, but don’t know a thing about scripting? Adobe has made it painfully easy for you to do so, and the Script Events Manager automates the whole process.
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Altering Photoshop’s Unalterable Image Size Presets
This little trick allows one to edit the presets that appear in Photoshop’s New dialog box. If you’ve ever wanted to change Letter size from 8.5 x 11″ to 7.5 x 10″, you can do it with this. Macintosh users only, AFAIK.
Read more on Altering Photoshop’s Unalterable Image Size Presets…
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New introductory text by Ilene Strizver combines clear, accessable writing with solid design, well-chosen illustrations, and tips and tricks for an apt into for the designing typographer
Ilene Strizver has an impressive résumé; creative director at U&lc, director of typeface development at ITC, worked with Eric Speikermann and Sumner Stone, amongst others, studied type under Benguiat. If ever anyone wondered what sort of introductory text that such a type student would produce, we have the answer in the book Type Rules! The Designer’s Guide to Professional Typography, whose second edition was recently released by Wiley.
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Printer’s Spread, Definition of
To save on costs and speed up the printing process, books, flyers and so on are printed on parent sheets. Because of this pages cannot be printed on the sheet following the same sequence of the acual page order, that is, page 1 is usually not printed next to page 2, even though the finished book will result in those two pages being next to each other.
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Reader’s Spread, Definition of
When you open a magazine you see all pages in order, from first to last. The pages that are next to each other are called spread, also known as “reader’s spread” in printing terms. That kind of spread, as the name says, it’s that which the reader sees, i.e., page 2 next to page 3 and so on.
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High Logic Releases Font Creator 5.5 for Windows
High-Logic, a worldwide leader in font editing and font management software, is furthering its commitment to the typography community by announcing the release of FontCreatorâ„¢ 5.5.
Press Release:
De Bilt, Utrecht–(www.high-logic.com)–May 30, 2006–High-Logic, a worldwide leader in font editing and font management software, is furthering its commitment to the typography community by announcing the release of FontCreator™ 5.5.
FontCreator is a full-featured font editor that lets you easily select and modify the entire character set of any TrueType® font and fonts based on OpenType® font technology. Features include the ability to convert (scanned) images to outlines, thus enabling you to create fonts with your own signature, logo and handwriting.
The new drawing tools greatly simplify and speed up the design process. Other new features include Align and Distribute operations, to ensure precise positioning. The enhanced validation features enable customers to improve the quality of their fonts. The improved Complete Composites feature quickly adds diacritical marks to incomplete glyphs. This powerful feature can complete over a thousand characters within a few seconds.
Whether you’re a typographer or graphic designer who needs a font creation powerhouse, or a hobbyist who wants to have fun creating new fonts, FontCreator has the tools you need.Read more on High Logic Releases Font Creator 5.5 for Windows…
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Ways to save tab design
As I see it, there are three ways to do good tab design if you’re a newspaper and want to leave the broadsheet behind.
There may be more ways to do good tab design. I just haven’t thought of them.
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Hoefler & Frere-Jones Introduces Verlag
New font with 30 weights recalls the Guggenheim, Mid 20-C modernism, and the Bauhaus
Samples of Verlag (copyright H&FJDigital Typefounders Hoefler & Frere-Jones has just released Verlag, a new OpenType font in 30 weights. Inspired by a six-font range developed for the Guggenheim museum, Verlag, as H&FJ has it, “brings a welcome eloquence to the can-do sensibility of pre-war Modernism.”
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Freeware Friday: Barry’s Clip-Art Server
Do ya need some? Barry has all you’ll want.
In this article a couple of weeks back I philosophied on the use of clip-art in logo design. In doing so, I exhibited a few samples from a site called Barry’s Clip-Art Server.
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Some Blacks Are “Blacker” Than Others
When is black a rich black? When do you use it? Lyn Eggleston expains it
Rich black is a mixture of all four of the process colours, particularly extra cyan for a ‘cool’ rich black or extra magenta for a ‘warm’ rich black – or both – as well as 100%K. Different commercial printers usually have their own preference for what is rich black, based on knowledge of their presses, their inks and the paper being used etc. I googled rich black to see whether there was any consensus, and in one discussion I found the following suggestions for the CMYK mix: 40/40/0/100, 60/40/40/100, 65/65/50/100, 40/30/30/100, 25/25/25/100 all in in one thread. In other words, there is no one ratio for rich black. It’s usually a matter of trial and error (expensive process) which is why if it is being commercially printed, you should find out from the printer what he prefers.
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Freeware Friday: MorgueFile
Need a photo fast? Try MorgueFile.com and have thousands of high resolution images at your fingertips.
MorgueFile.com is one of the best places for free and royalty free photos. The term “Morgue File” comes from the newspaper business–it’s a repository for past issues of a newspaper–but this morgue file is a repository for an astounding number of high resolution photos perfect for use by graphic designers. -
Lightroom Beta 3 Now Available
Adobe’s Lightroom, the company’s answer to Apple’s Aperture, is in its third beta release. Download it here.
On Wednesday, June 14 Adobe Systems announced the third beta release of its Lightroom pro photography application. The first beta was announced back in January and the second beta only a month after that, but the third beta seems to be that much closer to a final build. Here’s the list of new features that was in the e-mail I received:
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Readers have been asking me me how to edit the Flash web galleries that come out of Photoshop’s Web Photo Gallery feature. It takes some coding, but it’s pretty easy to do if you know where to look and it doesn’t require the Flash application.
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