Ben Dunkle is a designer, artist and teacher in Buffalo, NY. He writes in this blog about design, software, his family, and…
This is so simple, and doable
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.
Once upon a time I was an arcade junkie. I would dump quarter upon quarter trying to understand the inner workings of the most beautiful machines I knew of, these arcade consoles. But I never had enough money.
My cousin Paul dinardo, apparently, did, as he pwned the high-score in tempest (the greatest video game ever) in Virginia Beach, circa 1980. He was also an amazing athlete, like the rest of the DiNardos.
You heard it here first, folks. The next big thing in cutting-edge design is hereby being dubbed “chubby” design.
What is chubby?
Bursting at the seams
Easy/inviting to touch/rub
The opposite of all this hyperthin helvetica apple rolled out with ios 7
Get the first unapologetic chubby design today – the chubbies icon font: https://github.com/field2/chubbies
So I think our DMA grads could be better suited to pursue IP law than any other program’s grads in the country.
A couple cool type stuffies I got at a yard sale.
WordPress is quickly becoming an essential skill for people in a wide variety of industries. Therefore, it’s imperative that educational institutions prepare graduates to manage, maintain, develop and design WordPress powered sites, blogs and apps. Soon we’ll see WP listed as a requirement on as many job listings as MS-Office, and students should confidently be including WordPress on their resumes.
Have to say this was my best WC yet. First the bad:
Now the good:
A few thoughts:
Maybe the most loaded topic was on WordPress as an app framework. WP as a foundation to build on is a controversial topic, and faces a ton of skepticism and criticism. WordPress will outgrow itself, it’s getting too big, it’s losing touch with the simplicity of just writing, etc. are all sentiments that seem to be all the rage these days, but it’s hard to go to one of these giant WordCamps and not feel confident that the WP world will always remain a truly user-focused, community-driven, open source, and free.
I’m researching plugins that will auto-post to FB and Twitter accounts. Most plugins force you to create facebook “apps” to do the FB thing, a process that I despise. This one is called “social”, and it apparently doesn’t require an app. I’ll report my findings at the next Buffalo WordPress Users meetup tomorrow evening. If you haven’t joined the meetup group yet, what are you waiting for? It’s free! http://www.meetup.com/Buffalo-Wordpress/
There is a huge need for something that would make it easy to design tutorials. As I see it, a tutorial is a step by step document leading the viewer toward completion of a goal, whether it be the design of a graphic, a game, some code, or any process realting to graphic and web design.
The system I envision would present the author with a series of nodes that could be text, image, or video. Text would be written instructions/links, Image would be drag and drop or upload from computer, Video would be screen capture-either a selected window or the entire screen.
The tool would allow authors to create tutorials as needed, store them, present them, password-protect them, even sell them.
The biggest issue with tutorials is that they are difficult to make and wildly inconsistent-two tutorials on the same subject can contain a completely different structure. This tool would make it easy and establish a framework for tutorials.
Watch a video explaining my process for making hand drawn fonts with Adobe Illustrator CS6, Glyphs Mini and my bamboo tablet:
The finished product:
You can download the font here:
https://github.com/field2/quickworms
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:
You can download the glyphs file, AI source file, and .otf here. Stay tuned for a video post.
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:
Then I created a new font in Fontlab 5, with metrics set like this:
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…
