Ben Dunkle

Blog

  • Digital

    You truly are a digital artist when you understand what a point is. I still don’t.

  • Futura vs. Verdana

    OK all you typography snobs out there, up in arms over Ikea’s recent switch to Verdana (google ikea verdana), ask yourselves: If you had one store to shop for all of your furniture, what would it be? Ikea, right.
    If you had one font to use on everything you designed, what would it be? Well, you basically have to choose a web-safe, sans-serif font to maximize utility, so here are your choices:
    Arial
    Tahoma
    Verdana
    Trebuchet MS
    Lucida

    Personally, I’da gone with Lucida, but Verdana’s as good as any.

  • The future of media

    I see a singularity in media, and it comes in the form of a special combo visor/glove.

    Parts of visor can be activated, or it can completely take over your visual space. It acts as your phone, home theater, gaming system, tv screen, etc. This way the visor can enhance the real world or replace it entirely. It’s interface is managed by the glove, with endless combinations of finger movements. Audio is transmitted through the visor’s earpieces.

    I can’t see us going in any other direction. When people talk about mobile media, I get a little queasy thinking about the tiny screens. I think about David Lynch’s iPhone rant. I imagine the sore neck/eyes/back/hand I’ll have from staring at a tiny thing in my hand. I also think about wireless data charges running wild, $1000 monthly bills for all the news, video, music, and movies I’ve watched, but that’s another issue I guess…

    Anyways, here’s a sketch with my idea for how this all works:

    vgcomputing.png

    anyway I’m sure it’s been thought of so I can’t wait for my visor!

  • 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…

     

     

  • The extra icons

    The extra icons

    I did a ton of icons for the project icon contest, here’s a chart of ones that didn’t make the cut:

    the losers
    the losers
  • The BBPress icons

    The BBPress icons

    Here’s some recent icons done for BBPress:

    bbpress_icons_32

  • Sf moma

    At the
    Okeefe /Adams special exhibit. Pretty stuff, unfortunately though okeefe spawned hoards of lousy imitators. Can’t wait to see the general collection.