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I’ve seen some crazy web tool sites in the past, but this one takes the cake. Fontstruct is everything that’s good about competitive design constraints, and none of the scary pricing which plagues most of the font world (with the exception of dafont). Let me put this in bold: Fonts have never been this exciting.
- Fonts are creative commons by default. The site is already designed for you to clone someone else’s font, make additions or changes, and resubmit it as your own.
- The font building tool is impressively good for making contemporary typefaces. Really creative people have even made contemporary twists on traditional fonts as a byproduct of the strange building tools provided with excitingly fresh results.
- Once you’re done building, FontStruct generates high-quality TrueType fonts, ready to use in any Mac or Windows application.
For most graphics programs in the Adobe suite the operating system’s color picker goes unused. Flash, still holding on to a lot of its Macromedia-isms still has a button to pick colors in this old fashioned way. Normally, particularly on windows, this would be a bad thing. But oh, what’s this? That ugly color spectrum can be replaced with another image?!
this menu lets you import a 198x184 image as your color palette
Yep. That’s pretty cool, and I can already think of a few (im)practical uses! I’d be interested in seeing anyone else trying this. Attach a screenshot with Command+Shift+4
Actionscript 3 is nearly three years old now, and though CS4 hasn’t done much to help the fact that code and art are still very strictly separated, it hasn’t seemed to stop crafty multimedia artists from taking the language by the horns. Papervision has blossomed in to a respectable 3D engine and every day more sites are using it meaning that plenty of artists are willing to take the dive in to hard core programming to keep up. In other words, so should you, and the department too. Actionscript 3 isn’t going to wait around for anyone, and before you know it, it will be 4.0
Compared to your Playstation, these graphics might seem familiar, or not even that impressive, but considering that 3D in flash is nothing but a huge open source hack, and that documentation is terribly verbose and online tutorials a few and far between, it’s pretty amazing that it’s come this far in the past few years. As with any cheap technological upgrade, corporate websites have already jumped on to the bleeding Flash edge, meaning that design firms are too, meaning that coming out college … you get the idea.
Oh, and I’ll have to think up something snazzy for the 4th.
VisualPV3D is nothing but an swf file, and a few folders of XML and Actionscript 3. What it can do is pretty unheard of. Just as you’d think from the picture below, it does full 3D modeling and texturing, but what’s crazier is it’s output. Not only are the visuals within VPV3D running in Papervision, but it’s a 1-to-1 editor for Papervision files. Essentially, a bunch of Actionscript 3 that writes Actionscript 3. Or to put it another way: Flash 3D, done in Flash.
2009 is going to be the year when camcorders finally shed themselves of magnetic tape, of interlacing, and of NTSC colorspace. Video artists have been pained by these outdated technologies for long enough. Just this quarter, JVC, Panasonic, and Sony, have all released hand-sized, less-than-a-pound HD camcorders that are capable of the true 1080 progressive scan resolution.
1080p for $200
If you’re willing to buy one without a hard drive the price tags even drop closer to $500 or in sony’s case in the picture above $200, as apposed to the $5,000 pricetags seen for 1080p HD cameras nearly a year ago. Case in point, digital is meeting the mark of film. Especially with 4k on the way, which is rather scary.
So what makes a big huge camera so much better still when the technology is obviously decreasing its size and portability? I can tell you it’s no fun carrying around a seven pound camera all day long. especially with a tripod.
Remember me?
The answer isn’t the 3 CCD technology. As I stated above, smaller CCDs are proving to leap ahead of older CCDs. It’s not the microphone because typically when you check out this bohemuth you also get an external mic. It’s not the menus and options because they’re just as clumsy as any video camera. Arguably small consumer cameras have more user-friendly interfaces and touchscreens, and *gasp* LCD panels which my Canon XL-1s does NOT sport.
The reason you want a big camera is because it has a longer lens, and “better glass”.
So just imagine what happens when you buy a lens for a 35mm camera and stick it to a little HD camera. You get something that feels less like a camera and a bit more like a video bazooka. But check out the stuff below, and maybe you’ll think about taking up some of your summer to build an adapter. The results certainly are rewarding.
What you see in the video above is not any kind of filter. It’s raw footage. Some of that magic is explained below with what I leave you with: a medley of the best introductory videos I know of.
4 Minute Film School covers the 35mm adapter
Strongly contrasting my obsession with color the past few months, UK artist “mc bess” has a real talent for, well, practically everything. How often does the lead of a small band make a music video that’s MTV-worthy? A good way to kick off your week-end. Watch this, and if you have to check out his website, hit on all the links. Every facet is filled to the brim.
Matthieu is getting upwards of 10,300+ hits on this video a day right now due to it getting picked up on a number of popular surf-club websites and it’s likely on digg too. In the case that the embedded video is not HD by the time you reach the link, it’s because he ran out of off-vimeo-HD (which costs money). Just so you know, it is HD, and you should watch it on a nice screen with speakers.
Highly recommended in FULLSCREEN mode (F11 on PC / Fn+F11 on Mac)
Skimming through pages and pages of Dorothy Gambrell’s blog called Very Small Array is like a trip through an extremely funny and lengthy powerpoint where you’re not expected to learn anything. Ironically, you get the sense that you’re learning SO MUCH about people ability to turn a corner; and that’s perhaps why the graphs and charts never seem to stop. Gambrell was and still is a comic artist; she makes a living that way. Very Small Array was built to let her purge everything else in her life visually. While a course like MMAS 101 might teach you a lot about “the grid”, the graph is a wild beast untamed. Making a good graph mostly has to do with having to thinking about what sort of graph is going to best represent your data. That data could be anything aparently. After a quick browse through Visual Complexity, you can get bombarded with all sorts of messy lines, bars, wheels, colors, and so on.
A few quick links to my favourites. Missed connections from Craig’s List, #1 Hit Songs from 1950-1959, 1960-1969, 1970-1979, 1980-1989, 1990-1999, and the amazingly huge Year in Review pictured on the side.
Try doing what my friend Philihp did, and make a graph about something going on in your life, for no reason, with tons of pointless detail. I’m curious if anyone else has a graph fetish because I have lots more links just like this one.
Likely more interesting if you’re about to take Cloninger’s History of Graphic Design course, The History of Visual Communication website is good to run through chronologically while not really reading and just glancing at all the pictures.
It’s been the subject of much discussion, some suggesting that it is misleading enough that it should be rethought entirely, but the color wheel remains the most common and convenient method for visually understanding and comparing the relationships of different hues.
