Archives

Operating System developers should stick to developing operating systems.

Feb 03, '18

Apple and Microsoft make some of the most popular OS’s in the world: iOS, macOS, and Windows. As software goes, that’s about it. Everything else they force down the users’ throats is pure garbage. I’m talking about iTunes, Mail, MS Office, Photo software, and the list goes on. I honestly don’t know why this is. […]

Variable Width Fonts

Jan 30, '18

I know very little, way less than I should, about the new variable typography stuff that’s been gaining traction and was discussed in css-tricks’ most recent shop talk episode.  However, I’m having serious skepticism about how they can replace entire font families. There’s a lot of the discerning human eye in creating various weights (and […]

On Teaching

Jan 02, '18

This spring, I’ll be teaching my age-old 2D Graphics course. Every time I teach it, I spend waaaaay too much time wondering what I should include in the course content. I change it every year. Adobe is the go-to graphics software company, and that hasn’t changed since they bought Macromedia long ago. I started off […]

On light

Oct 12, '17

We see because of light reacting with our crazy eyes and ocular nerves and brains. But there’s a lot to learn about where that light’s coming from. It’s either being emitted or reflected. The primary point of emitted light, for most of our existence on this planet, has been very hard, even dangerous, to look […]

Multiple master icons

Just like fonts, icons can be designed in different weights. Here’s how it works in my current design, chubbicons:   These are all rendered at 32×32. The bold weight was designed with 1 pixel wide stroke on a 9×9 grid, while the light weight was 1 pixel on an 18×18 grid. The solid is just […]

A standard for user interface icon design

Sep 09, '17

Editing this article to discuss general icon design standards, which I believe are needed. Icons should down-rez gracefully to small sizes, with vertical and horizontal edges aligning to the pixel grid at sizes as small as 9 pixels. A 3×3 sub grid should be adhered to when designing icons. [codepen_embed height=”265″ theme_id=”1″ slug_hash=”EvqZQZ” default_tab=”html,result” user=”empireoflight”]See […]

Cooper Union

Aug 22, '17

As soon as I was considering life after high school, I had my heart set on Cooper Union. I wanted to make “cool looking shit”, I was good at it and CU was where the best in the world did it. Plus it was in Manhattan, my favorite place in the world and a 45 […]

In defense of “Code is Poetry”

Jun 17, '17

Just watched Boone Gorges break down the ubiquitous motto. If not poetry, what is code? Gorges suggested craftsmanship, architecture, bridge-building, collaboration, engineering. None of those is text. Each of those has associative materials that could connect a perceivably banal thing with beauty: wood is craft, steel is architecture, mathematics is bridge-building, software development is collaboration […]

Sketch

May 25, '17

I have the app, I’ve played with it, made some icons, and I still don’t get it. I think folks who use it a lot aren’t fluent html/css coders. For me, it’s a lot easier to do the things people say Sketch shines at directly in code. Do you use Sketch? Do you consider yourself a […]