Blog

  • 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
  • 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…

     

     

  • Buffalo Wintertime bonuses

    Hot tub 104, and its 14 out

    Sleeping in a 50° room piled under blankets

    Dead silence when you want it

    Sweater collection

    Boot collection

  • Frottage

    This was one of the first techniques I learned when I began art school, back in fall ’89.

    It was eye-opening. For the first time, I wasn’t responsible for every nuance that came along. The surface dictated what marks were left. Suddenly, I felt a sense of freedom from that burden of decision in art; micromanaging every line, discrediting hours of work based on unsound logic, those things were no longer mandatory.

    I never recognized the role this technique played in my development as an image maker. Maybe the school I attended (SUNY Buffalo) was enamored with stuff built with frottage, or maybe it was the current “flavor of the day” in the academic art world. I never stopped using it, though.

  • Context Queries in CSS

    Media queries are firmly established methods for serving custom experiences based on the media being used to access content.

    However, there’s no way to an experience based on the context being used. How crazy would it be would it be if this were possible?

    Imagine some code that went like:

    @context (currently-traveling:yes AND role:driver) 
    { * {display:none;} } /* hide app from a distracted driver }
    
    

    That’s some scary stuff, privacy-wise, but you know if it were possible people’d be writing it. But just think of what you could do with

    environment:outdoors
    or
    noise-level:loud

  • Sample icon file for wordpress plugins

    icon_effect.zip

    You can download this file and use it as a starting point when designing plugin icons, so that they resemble the default set in WordPress’ admin area. Copy and paste the effect applied to the rounded rectangle shape to your own vector shape in Photoshop.

  • Code

    I wish < and > were keys on the keyboard.