A year ago, almost to the day, as I was searching for ways to procedurally make random street maps (of which I wrote a post here), I got wind of L-Systems which seemed like a good venture for Scriptographer. I found Aristid Lindenmeyer‘s, book – The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants – as a high quality PDF (available for download here). But somehow this whole undertaking slipped away from me and I ended up doing something else. When I finally got to it, I rewrote the whole thing in one sitting. As a matter of fact, I had very much help from an unexpected find and seemingly unrelated blog by Graham Bradley where he thoroughly explains how he made an Enigma cipher emulator in javascript.
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Yesterday I so happened to come up with the idea of combining some fonts and with a low opacity find out what the average letter would look like. Granted, this would be a rather tedious task to, by hand; type, align and adjust opacity for each letter so I wrote a quick script in Scriptographer [more…]
Yesterday I registered an account over at FontStruct. I haven’t had enough time to explore or construct my own font yet as my computer have lost its will to communicate with my keyboard and mouse (both wireless) thus turning itself into a very expensive paperweight.
Fontstruct, on the other hand, seems pretty useful as an online fontmaker where creativity and playfulness are the catchwords rather than focusing on the minutiae of legibility and kerning. Each glyph is constructed out of a variety of pre-made, primitive geometric symbols.
Fonts from above: Sentinel by qwertyacme, Forerunner Dingbats by Uberdraco, Glitch Bats 1 by sfour, Intrinsic + by K_a_M_i, Seschat by Gvon, Cirlat by vydd, Brickyard by per1993, TII i by unttld.
The workflow is actually very similar to one of my own Scriptographer tools, about which I’ve written a small post here. The number of primitives have been expanded recently as well as the addition of a new feature here and there. Although the fonts created will probably be best suited as display fonts, I think it’s a really nice tool where one can try out various ideas without much trouble. It’s also great fun to just browse the multitude of user submitted fonts for inspiration. I will definately try out some ideas once my computer is working properly again…
I’ve already mentioned Vectoraster in an earlier post but I like it so much that I will push for it yet again! It has been updated with bug fixes and some minor feature additions. Still cheap, buy it!
In my on-going quest of finding ways to make nice and interesting textures (one of the reason that I’m on the lookout for an old analog Xerox machine), I read a tutorial somewhere (I really should make more use of ⌘ + B) where the guy writing had a pretty neat trick to create his [more…]
