There’s so much great music out there, but I can’t really find any. Problem is, the times in my life when I really discovered music were when I had a little peer pressure – high school, college, working in an office – and the people around me would play stuff, make me listen to stuff, that at first sounded like dirt but after a few listens and seeing how enthusiastic the proponents were, I’d get into it and start listening on my own. Nowadays, there’s no impetus to listen to a new song more than once, even if someone suggests it on Facebook or Spotify. I need a music pusher.
Blog
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Perfection and lazy day
2 hockey games done with, now we’re reading counterpane fairy and playing perfection.
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Designing Dashicons
The dashicons font created for the mp6 plugin has pretty much taken up all of my time the last few weeks. This even with help from Mel Choyce, Joen Asmussen and the rest of the WP design team.
There are quite a few resources on how to do this, but most of the ones I’ve read, although I’m sure worked for some, went against a few of my own design principals. So I set out to find the perfect workflow for me, and here it is.
When I design icons in Photoshop (AP), the end goal is a png sprite. Using a split window, I can zoom in on one window and see the actual size icon in the other. I can click on an anchor point and nudge it with the arrow keys, getting sub-pixel placement just right and having absolute control over the end product.
The move to vector as the final source has been really weird and challenging. In Illustrator, vectors don’t anti-alias the same was as they do in Photoshop. That is, if you draw a rectangle with the edges half-way between the edges of a pixel, in Photoshop, you might get a different grey value than if you did that in Illustrator (AI). And pixel snapping is inconsistent. I would copy/paste a shape from AP to AI, and my perfectly sharp edges would become fuzzy, even though the paths were exactly in the same place. If I click/dragged an anchor over a pixel, then dragged it back, it would become sharp again. Very weird.
The tutorials I read through, https://github.com/blog/1135-the-making-of-octicons and http://glyphsapp.com/blog/importing-from-illustrator/ were really helpful, but as I said earlier, there are fundamental flaws with those workflows, at least as far as I’m able to incorporate them into mine. For some reason, 16×16 is this imposing number that icon designers hold sacred. It’s a good target, but it really does overly constrain design. I decided 20×20 was a much easier canvas to work within, and as long as I left a pixel or two breathing room around the icons, they look great in a 16×16 space-not too big, but not leaving out important details in the name of absolute limits. I also got nervous when scanning through the article at all the weird numbers: 2048, 2052, -17something. Do we really need all those complex numbers? As for the glyphsapp.com article, while trying to draw directly in Glyphs may be the best way, it’s gonna be tough to put aside my AI experience to learn a new method for drawing vectors until I have lots of time on my hands.
After trying all sorts of settings, I came to the conclusion that 20x20pixel icons should be designed in a 2000×2000 upm font. The glyphs article points out that 1 ai point=1 glyphs unit. So I worked in points.
Another oddity was the Glyphs vs Glyphs Mini (GM) inconstancies. Joen Asmussen, who I can’t thank enough for all his help on this, designed the icon font you see at WordPress.com, using GM and following the octicons article pretty closely. I had a trial version of Glyphs, but decided to spring for GM for the sake of consistency. Although I started the font in Glyphs, bringing it into GM was an eye opener. The major issue was that GM doesn’t allow you to change the font’s UPM settings; so when I opened the .glyphs file I created in Glyphs, I was stuck with the 1000 upm I was originally working with. When I decided to try 2000 upm, so that it mapped more (theoretically) naturally with the 20pt x 20pt AI designs, my glyphs all got cut to 50% of their size. Resizing in glyphs was not something I wanted to learn how to do, so I returned my workflow to Glyphs.
Screenshots:
New AI file, 20pt x 20pt with points as units 
Keyboard increment set to 1/8th of a point, so I can nudge vectors between pixel edges as needed. 
Gridline every 10pt, with 10 subdivisions 
Snap to grid as needed 
Select all your glyphs in Glyphs mini, set widths to 2000 upm 
Choose font info in glyphs mini 
Ascender/caps height to 2000, giving you a perfect square for each glyph 
Icon drawn in AI, with a 20pt by 20pt box drawn around it as a bounding box 
Scale it up to 2000x 2000, note the little chain lock ensuring proportional scaling 
Copy the icon, Double-click a glyph in Glyphs Mini, Paste into the glyph window. Make sure the x/y/w/h are exactly as shown 
Double-click on the “bounding box” and delete it. You can download the glyphs file, AI source file, and .otf here. Stay tuned for a video post.
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Content ownership
How do we prove we are the owners of our content? It’s trickier than you might think.
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Inside out learning
I’m going to be talking a lot about a concept that’s been brewing in my head lately: “Inside out learning”…stay tuned…
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TV Shows
Vikings is one of my favorite shows. Great characters.
I’ve especially liked scenes with Harbard lately. He’s an amazing, intriguing character that embodies the mythology and superstition that were rampant in that time.
My favorite line of his came during the last show, “Possession is the opposite of love”. Can’t stop thinking about how true that is. Harbard loves all the women in the village, who are lonely as their husbands are off raiding. Alyssa, one of these women, gets irate, and that’s when Harbard tells her the quote.
I also watch the entertaining “Girls” on HBO. It’s basically an NC-17 version of “Friends”. All they do is try to possess everything–the city, their lifestyles, eachother. The show portrays a sense of this amazing friendship they share, and these idyllic lives they lead, but I can’t relate. First of all, no one lives like that. Shows like “Girls” and “Friends” celebrate possession. Characters that live like that are never happy in real life. They embrace the opposite of love, as Harbard says.
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Mystery Meat Icons
Icons are everywhere. As the contexts within which we interpret content become more unpredictable, so does our reliance on iconography to communicate ideas and messages. The use of iconography has exploded as dissemination of information must reach a multitude of user contexts. Icons can summarize universal ideas and complex actions with a few shapes.
Icons undergo intense scrutiny. They clearly “work” or “don’t work”. If someone is confused by a message, icons are often to blame. An icon which is not understood may be assigned the undesirable label of “mystery meat”; the stuff found in the lore of public institutions tasked with filling countless sandwiches to feed cretinous populations.
What we are experiencing is the construction of a new, universal language. But instead of taking millennia to evolve, it’s happening as you read this post. Symbols that best express universal messages are hotly debated, not only regarding what index they carry (see Meggs’ History of Graphic Design), but on whether the style they carry is appropriate (google skeuomorphic design for more on this).
My question is, who has the loudest voice as this language is constructed? The answer may carry insights about who determines what, as well as how, we communicate.