Christian Robertson's blog
Aperture [working title] beta posted
I just posted a beta of a new geometric I have been playing with. For now I’m calling it Aperture, but I’m open to suggestions. Also, keep in mind that this is an early beta so it’s still pretty rough; I only started the thing three days ago.
Rounded corner python script for FontLab
People ask about corner rounding scripts from time to time here at Typophile. I have heard about several people writing these scripts, but I couldn’t find any that were publicly available, so I wrote one for some projects I was working on last year. I dusted it off recently, cleaned it up a little and thought I’d put it out there. It’s pretty simple – only 90 lines of python - but it can be easily hacked to support a variety of projects. For example, I modified it to curve the same point across several masters.
It seems like corner rounding is a common enough operation in type design that it is a good candidate for a new tool in FontLab.
New font beta
I just posted a beta of a serif face I’ve been working on lately at http://betatype.com/node/35.
I wouldn’t recommend using them for big projects, as they are definitely beta quality at this point. However, the design ideas are there, and in the hands of a skilled typographer could produce some interesting results, as the family is pretty complete.
I’m mostly interested in hearing any feedback/feature requests anyone might have.
Note: These beta cuts probably won’t be up for long, as I take them down before the official release.
Squashing Bugs til the Early Morn
After another long night, I think we’ve got the load averages on the server back to normal.
Some interesting statistics about Typophile
Top 30 thread creators in the history of Typophile (includes wiki pages):
| 490 | paul d hunt
| 378 | Miss Tiffany
| 349 | Jared Benson
| 261 | dan_reynolds
| 259 | hrant
| 228 | Joe Pemberton
| 152 | Stephen Coles
| 149 | sii
| 144 | Bald Condensed
| 137 | evan
| 130 | dezcom
| 121 | misalion
| 109 | kris
| 108 | pablohoney77
| 106 | Hildebrant
| 106 | union
| 105 | adriano
| 102 | Dan Weaver
| 100 | Miguel Sousa
| 95 | bjharvey
| 88 | julia
| 86 | Eric_West
| 85 | designalchemy
| 82 | Eben Sorkin
| 80 | signs79
| 77 | John Hudson
| 76 | James Grieshaber
Betatype.com Updated
So I finally updated Betatype.com. For the time being I’m using it as a project log. I find I’m more motivated to make fonts when I share my progress. Feel free to stop by and take a look at what I’ve been working on.
Thread RSS
So I got tired of checking the type battles every five minutes, so I added rss to the individual threads. Look for the link at the bottom of the topic post.
Update for those of you who prefer www.typophile.com over typophile.com
For those of you who think that all web sites should be hosted on the www sub-domain, but have been unceremoniously logged out of Typophile while doing so: the problem has been fixed. All you need to do is clear your cookies from typophile.com and www.typophile.com. The new session cookies will be from .typophile.com which will keep you logged in on any sub-domain of Typophile. In fact, you can look at Typophile on nearly any sub-domain you can think of, switching willy-nilly from one page to another.
A Blog API Tutorial for Uppercase Members
If you think that browsers are good for reading blog entries, but lousy for writing, raise your hand. Just what I thought. We're all in agreement here. The good news is that there is a better way. There are a number of email-like clients for writing blogs out there, and it just so happens that they will work with the Uppercase blogs. You can also use them to submit news stories. I'm going to quickly walk through the set-up process on one of the better clients I've found.
The one I'm going to use for this tutorial is Ecto. It's cross platform, and it's the best I've found so far.
Good Things
Some good things are going on here with the Typophile codebase, not the least of which is inline image uploads. Only a few more things/bugs to check off our list before we can take the beta stripe off. To use the new image upload features you will need the Flash 8 player. Once you have it installed you will see an “Insert image” link on the post form. It’s got a progress bar, no pop-ups, and no page reloads! Trust me, that’s cool. On the downside, I’m sure we’ll have to hear some whining about flash. Oh well. For Uppercase members, you might try editing your blog with ecto or any number of other blogging clients. More on this later.
