The Stackpile » James

Say Hello to Ambroise

James — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:08:43 +0000

Check out Ambroise, created by French type designer Jean François Porchez. Notable characters are the “g”, “y” and “K”, which are apparently close adaptations to the original 19th century Firmin Didot design. There are a lot of typefaces that fall into the Didot/Bodini category, but with Ambroise in particular, there is an incredible elegance to the characters (especially that “K”). It looks like it also has some tame alternate characters incase this “g” does not suit your needs.

FontShop is exclusively selling Porchez’s work in the US. Go here to check out some of his other excellent creations. FontShop of course did a nice write up on the new additions to their catalogue.

Fontself

James — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:56:12 +0000

Fontself is “a bitmap font and text engine”. Basically it looks like an application that dynamically generates raster characters using collections that can have any number of variants for each character. Try it here, and have a look at an example of it processing some news feeds here.

It also has downloadable PDF documentation. It’s in french, but the images and examples seem to speak for themselves.

Handmade

James — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:25:10 +0000

Since 2002, Blambot (creator of “comic fonts and lettering”) has been creating limited edition typefaces for the San Diego Comic-Con International. This year’s San Diego 2007 is a chunky departure from the previous years.

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the effect of using digital lettering in comics as opposed to hand lettering. Comic artist Jon Morris created this interesting two-part comic (part one, part two) about the topic that sums up a pretty strong argument of why digital lettering does not always work in a hand-drawn context.

I think this applies to design as well. It illustrates the importance of stepping away from your computer and working with your hands every now and then. Especially when creating something that is meant to have that handmade look.

Really Simple

James — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:28:44 +0000

It’s always nice to find a simple way to explain something. Lee LeFever does just that with this quick video explanation of RSS. Anyone who still doesn’t get RSS should watch this.

Step Right Up

James — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:15:17 +0000

Arial, Microsoft’s Helvetica substitute, is probably more familiar to the average computer user than the typeface it was aped from. But how well do you really know your friends? Derren Wilson’s online quiz begs the question, can you tell the difference?

Once you’ve failed the quiz, work off some of that Arial angst in the Helvetica vs Arial flash game.