One time I dreamt I had gone for a bike ride at the park, met my friend (also a designer) by the gates and asked her if she thought my serifs were too sharp.

TrueType hinting produces strange dreams, but it also invades your waking hours. Laurence Penney described walking down the street after several days of hinting, and seeing a tree as a pixel pattern. Immediately his brain started working out the most efficient way to move one of the branches further away from another to improve the image.

Kristin: Imagine how horrible that must be! oh my God...

A few years ago I went to Blackpool with a couple of friends, we where tired from the trip and slightly drunk so we went to bed early, I woke up some time during the night, looked out the window of our B and B , saw Blackpool Tower with it's moving lights and concluded that someone had selected it. (In Photoshop.)

There is nothing worse than sitting in front of the computer all day, then going home at night and dreaming about sitting in front of the computer. I dreamt about pdf's and BBC's "the office" last night, it is so much worse than having nightmares!

I have incredibly vivid dreams and commonly remember the slightest of details, down to the size and specific color of objects in the distance.

Recently, I have had many dreams about navigating through various applications, usually InDesign or Photoshop, consisting primarily of opening and closing windows or browsing seemingly infinite glyph windows (now, those I like).

The last one I had was trying to maneuver InDesign with only key strokes.

While working on the Bitstream BTN project over the course of 90 days of glyph drawing and font making, I went to bed at around 6:00am and awoke around 1:00pm from a frightening dream of a futuristic scorpion morphing in and out of one of two glyph shapes.

Fortunately I was lucid dreaming and awoke to recall the shapes exactly and penned them down. After some searching on the internet at symbols, the closest we could surmise was that the shapes are similar to the alchemy symbol for Mercury.



Should any symbol experts have a different take, I'd love to hear it. The dream is still without meaning to me.

Stuart :D

>>When I was about 8 I used to have very frightening dreams about abstract shapes (actually , volumes) in conflict

Have you read Flatland, by Edwin Abbot?
Written, I think, around 1880, its about a 2D world populated by shapes, then a 3D volume appears from another dimension and shakes up the shapes' world.
Its heavy with Victorian social commentary. There's a strict hierarchy in Flatland (the more sides you have the higher up you are - but in a 2D world, the shapes can't see each other from above, so they have to judge the number of sides by finding a corner and checking the angles. Women are bottom of the pile, so they are, I think, just lines). I read it a very long time ago, for an undergrad essay I was writing, but I can't remember much of it (or even what f*cked up type of essay I was writing in which this wierd book could play a part).
If you're interested, its around $2 at most online bookstores, or there's an online version here http://www.alcyone.com/max/lit/flatland/, or there's also a Project Gutenberg version available at their website.
I've only read the .txt version with ASCII illustrations, the originals are supposed to be very nice, but I never got round to searching them out. Maybe I'll do that now...

Stuart, I checked Koch's "Book of Signs" but found nothing. Then I checked Liungman's comprehensive "Dictionary of Symbols" and saw that although your lefthand shape has parts of both Saturn and Antimony (a crucial component of metal type!), it's pretty much exactly the symbol (actually one of many) for Mercury (more the material than the planet). Your righthand shape didn't come up, but it looks a lot like a Courier rendition of the first... Were you working a lot on a sans/slab superfamily? :-)

Flatland sounds very interesting - I'll check it out - thanks.

Grant, funny!

hhp

Flatland is a must-read, especially since it's such a thin book there's no excuse not to. Various modern authors have written sequels to it, with varying degrees of success. Sadly, typography is an unknown art to Flatlanders, whose written language is necessarily one-dimensional.

Sounds like a typographic wet dream to me! ;-)

hhp

Generally benevolence in not in my nature but this thread illustrates clearly the damage digital typography has done to your little souls. I have heard your screams for help.

Here it is.

http://www.soulcenteredtherapy.com/textfiles/gestaltdreamwork.htm

I've done the Cmnd + Z thing while awake, but I don't think I've had a typography dream (yet).

BTW, I just remembered that I've been in somebody else's typo dream! Remember Armin's lavatorial adventures last year...

hhp

Since I've been designing on a computer every day for 14 years, my thinking has become irretrievably altered. Now my dreams "scroll" vertically, instead of moving left to right as I remember they used to do.

Lately, I was hand drawing a thumbnail on a piece of paper. Then off to the bottom left corner (as if it were the pasteboard), I drew a bit that I had every intention of moving over to the center. I actually stuck the pencil in the middle, held it down, and was momentarily surprised when my side scribble didn't click and drag.

Similarly, I've drawn thumbnails and gotten pissed that I couldn't "send to the back."

As I age and move into perimenopause, there are ever increasing numbers of floating pallets to deal with. That's a deadly combo to my brain cells. I started noticing this 5 versions of Freehand ago. Now I'm convinced InDesign is going to land me in a nursing home.

i've had letter forms come to me in dreams or while i was praying.. first time this happened to me i was in prayer and a letter A came to me with the name "Rivanna" at the same time, i musta been spending too much time at Nick's fonts at that time.

why, yes deb, it is--your amazing water balloon throwing partner. awesome to hear from you. hope things are well for you...

as a side note to hrant's and louann's mix-ups, donald norman refers to those mistakes as "description errors" in his book "the design of everyday things". he says it happens when "the intended action has much in common with others that are possible...the more the wrong and right objects have in common, the more likely errors are to occur." his book has lots of interesting info like that.

"Snap to Guides" -- that wouln't be very much fun

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Is it just me, or do the mountains (or any natural surroundings, clouds) sometimes look as if someone did too much "unsharp masking"?