Jim Rimmer in Vancouver, BC has done something that no one else has done before:
He’s the first person to release a font both digitally and in metal at the same time, which is quite a feat. Since all of the metal typefounders are old, they don’t typically get into the whole “computer” thing. And vice-versa.
Here’s a video produced by Richard Kegler of the P22 Type Foundry:
I never posted this before, but I figure it’s never too late. This typeface comes from the handwriting of Juan de Yciar of Spain, circa 1600 C.E. The book that these scans came from is in the Library of Congress, and it is easily one of the greatest looking pieces of handwriting I have ever seen.
Over 80+ pages of this scribal penmanship, beautifully illuminated and decorated, with gilt images and touches of flair throughout. It would seem to be appropriate for a great Spanish love story, but it’s actually quite mundane 
Since it is Spanish, there were quite a few letters that didn’t exist, such as the maguscule and miniscule K, which is a sound that it taken care of by the letter Q in that language. (And look at that Q! That’s the non-swash variant!)
Overall, there are something like 400+ glyphs, including a tremendous amount of ligatures and swashes that are all coded in Opentype. I’m still working on just the basic latin character set and the spacing before I can unleash it into the wild.
Here’s a little putt putt minigolf outing of my friends and me at *Wonderland* in Spokane, Wa. It’s the first time I’ve ever edited a video digitally and uploaded to Youtube. It was fun!
I just watched Sigur Rós’ new video Heima at a friend’s house. It was awesome! I was on the list from the band’s management to be at the screening here in Seattle, but I missed it. I’ve been waiting for this movie ever since I saw a preview for it a few months back.
I’ve been listening to the double album that they released at the end of ‘07, and I’ve been in anticipation for a while. Luckily, my friend had a projector and a killer sound system to watch and listen to it.
It gets a touch, shall we say, slow at points, and sometimes I wish they wouldn’t cut from the music so much, but it was still great. (And I haven’t seen the 2nd disc yet, which has full versions of all of the songs!) It was nice seeing the country of Iceland too. Lots and lots of nothing.
I’m now officially Sigur Róssed-out.
Since moving to Spokane, I’ve seen more movies than I have seen in two or three years living in Spokane. I’m starting to figure out why I never watched too many movies before: Most of them were stupid. A lot of the newest movies I’ve seen confirmed that point for me: stupid.
But not Wall-E.
That movie was awesome. The graphics were awesome, the characters were awesome, and most importantly, the story was awesome. In typical Pixar fashion, the story is not compromised by the desire to have “flashy graphics” (ahem, here’s lookin’ at you Star Wars Ep I and II).
I love this movie to death. I never thought I could love a little trash compactor so much! The humanization of the robots in the story is spot-on perfect, so much so that you forget that you’re watching a completely CG character. Which, in my opinion, is the only viable option if you want me to actually like the movie.
Bring your kids, because it’s fun for the whole familia, without the unnecessary perversity and crudeness that plagues even kids movies these days.
Well, I wish I could take credit for their video, but I can’t. Here’s a great new song from Thomas Thorp and co.
I’ve recently been working on a font similar to Trajan, based off of the letterforms found on the cover of Joy Division’s Closer album. What I thought would be fun would be to add Greek uppercase letters to match, and eventually Cyrillic.
This is not about that font.
But in my research, I came across a super cool Greek inscription that, to my eyes, is heavy metal before metal was heavy (Did that make sense?) I thought that it would be fun to start digitizing this example as well.
I don’t know how many letters I’ll need to build from scratch, but it shouldn’t be too hard, as everything is built out of similar parts. Look for it sometime, uh, whenever.
So it’s the end of 2007. Huzzah! The Seahawks are in the playoffs again. I’m working, if only temporarily, at the Seattle Times, and things are looking good.
My friend Jonathan sat down with me to work on a new budget to help me reach my financial goals, so starting Jan 1 I’ll have to start being more fiscally responsible. Eh.
In any case, it’s time to roll out a new design for the ol’ webpage. Looks like I spoke too soon. Serious CSS errors have been found! I was looking over at wpdesigner’s website (I actually wrote a few articles for him a few months back) and I came across a nice new tutorial that he had put together. It’s called How to Code a Wordpress Theme, and it is much better than his former tutorials.
I followed it all the way through during a sleepless night, and what you behold now is the results. Pretty snazzy, eh? I customized it quite a bit, although you can still see the remnants of his Wrath wordpress theme that he used in his tutorial.
As you can see from the screenshot, it actually started as a theme I wanted to design for our website Geek-vs-Life.com, but I ran into some difficulties along the way. It works great for my needs though. I’ll be continually tweaking it as I go along, (It’s busted!) and eventually I guess I should release it, if Small Potato is cool with it. We’ll see.
<h5>editt</h5>
Serious stinking css errors have delayed the emergence of my new theme. Drats!
My old roomate Thomas has an awesome acoustic band down in New Mexico that had an awful myspace page. So Thomas gave the the go-ahead to kick it’s butt, in good old-fashioned design style. Since I had just managed to do the same thing with my page, it was as easy as busting out the ole’ template and fixxin’ her up.
The tunes are good, and they put them all up for free to download, so check’em out!
