Ben Dunkle

Blog

  • Old Count Chocula vs New Count Chocula

    Old Count Chocula vs New Count Chocula

    I saw a group on facebook devoted to this cereal, and I’ll join, but I hate that Chocula followed the path of most good cereals-over design. Here’s how it works:

    chocula

  • WP Icon font

    WP Icon font

    I made a font out of the icons I’m proposing for future versions of WordPress. Here’s how I did it:

    Designed them in AI CS6. Preferences set like this:

    File handling preferences in AI
    Note the copy as settings; apparently you need this so you can copy/paste into fontlab…
    AI preferences
    Gridline every 10px, w/10 subdivisions. Icons are based on a 10×10 grid. I made the color black so they’re easy to see.

     

    snap settings
    Make sure snap to grid and snap to point are turned on, and that you can see the grid.
    Close up of a couple icons
    Note the extra strokeless/fill-less 20x20px box around the icons. You need this to copy/paste into fontlab and not have them get scaled up.

     

    Then I created a new font in Fontlab 5, with metrics set like this:

    fontlab metrics Screen Shot 2013-02-06 at 9.02.30 AM

    I copy/pasted each icon-the shape and the invisible bounding box- into a separate  glyph in fontlab. I tried to make it intuitive; “a” is appearance, “d” for dashboard. “p” was problematic; posts, pages both have p.

    After I generated the otf file, I used @font-face to embed it on a test page. I set a base size to 62.5% and set the icons to 2.0em; effectively rendering them at their native 20×20 pixels. The key thing is the -webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased property in the css. Without it, they look like garbage. They pretty much look like garbage anyway in firefox/opera, and I have no clue how to get them in IE. But in webkit it’s gold.

    I’m trying to get the whole thing on github since I guess that’s what you’re supposed to do, so stay tuned…

     

     

  • June

    Best month of the year. Each day is wide open. Seems like this June stretches on forever.

  • Purchase days

    Purchase days

    ben_dunkle_purchase

  • On "Where the Wild Things Are"

    Too much music. Not enough Sea Monster.

  • Sabbatical

    So, for my sabbatical rundown of things to do:

    1. Design the icons for the project.
    2. Keep learning wordpress.
    3. Organize the attic, especially all the artwork
    4. ??

  • Game idea

    This is so simple, and doable

    • You control a node
    • You can move that node around in a fixed 2d space
    • If you collide with another node, you fight by clicking as fast as you can
    • If you click faster than that node, you grow
    • Clickrate is modified by your size
    • The bigger you are, the slower you have to click to win the fight
    • goal: destroy/absorb every other node