Now, first off, I did get the feeling that this was a too simple an idea to not have been made earlier.Rightly so, Moritz Resl did the same just a few weeks ago but I still have a lingering feeling that I’ve seen some sort of variant of this even further back.

Anyway, Stephen Coles - Editor of Typographica - was not impressed, he had this to say (full post here):

“It’s the sort of project that most designers have seen many times before they are even out of school.”

Perhaps it is, Stephen, but why come down so hard on it? Moritz didn’t, to my knowledge, make any claims to pioneer the font industry with this piece. Most likely he just got an idea and felt compelled to try it out.

Sometimes it seems that typographers are a group of over-zealous and pretentious people who have lost their ability to have fun and would rather be governed by their own strict rules. That’s what I like so much about FontStruct, the pure joy of having a creative outlet with no crippling rules as to how things should be.

On the plus side, Stephen did post two interesting links. One of them was to W. Bradford Paley, showing me another take on the average font.

The other link was to Kai Bernau’s The Neutral Typeface. Kai has put a lot more effort into his font, well worth a look. Anyway, I should return to my own stuff. The script I made was very simple, I compiled a list of fonts to be used in a loop that cycles through a string of characters and prints the characters once for each font in the list.

I can set the level of opacity as I wish, but with each letter being composed of 28 layers of different fonts somewhere between 5-15% seems to work best.

On each row a different opacity value have been used, the letters was then imported into Photoshop, blurred and finally a threshold adjustment layer was applied with three different values. In the result below, I used an opacity of 5%, pasted the chars into a high resolution (600dpi) Photoshop document, applied a 1px Gaussian Blur and three different (96, 128, 192) threshold levels.

Hey, I just remembered! It was James Davies‘ tutorial over at PSDTuts+ and I was wrong, he scanned with the lid down. I however, scanned an empty bed with the lid open and got a completely different result. Especially when I inverted the colors.

The image was scanned at 600dpi so this copy is severely reduced in size and resolution but the details are pretty nice when observed close enough, as in the image below (click to enlarge).

Next I scanned my hand but held it an inch or two above the scanner to produce this blurry (due to both motion and being out of focus) image.

This was clearly at a time when I was listening to the Year Zero album by Nine Inch Nails.

There I’m sitting, at work, the time is 03:22am and for some reason I’m googling pictures of the old boardgame HeroQuest when one image catches my eye. It’s by this guy; Mattias Gustavsson, posted over at RetroGameDev, who has made a pixel shader for a project he’s working on. The shader makes your images look like tmhey are viewed on an old worn-out TV. As it happens, Mattias made an executable of his filter, but unfortunately, it’s for Windows only…

As I’m in love with (or, at least, very fond of) all things retro, this was right up my alley. Clearly, nostalgia is the proof of that you’re getting older.

The picture above is from the Amiga version of HeroQuest, borrowed – without permission – from Kim Lemon’s wonderful site LemonAmiga (also check out his Lemon64 site, if your old enough to remember that one). I ran this image through Mattias’ filter and merged the result with the original as a comparison. I find the latter, with its smoother appearance, much more pleasing to the eye. It’s also more how I remember it looked back in the day when I used to play this game on a crappy old 15″ TV. Not at all those crisp, but dead, pixels you get on a new LCD display.

I would love to have his pixel shader as a Photoshop Action so I could combine it with Philip “Pepto” Timmermann‘s C64 Palette for that full-on, ultra-high, retro feel of 8-bit games.

Above; first one is a guesstimated C64 palette, the second is rendered with the “real” C64 palette (mentioned above), the third one is the same as the second but have had Mattias Gustavsson’s filter applied to it. Now, if that doesn’t take you back, I don’t know what does!

I don’t know how he made it, but if I was to venture a guess, I would say that he first applied a layer of interlaced scanlines on both axis as the picture is twice the size afterwards. Then it seems that the picture is somewhat blured to imitate the not-so-sharp image of a CRT television as well as some color correction and/or color cast. Finally, there is a fair amount of RGB shifting by offsetting the three color channels in different directions. Then again, he could be doing something else entirely. It is, however, one of the more authentic looking effects I’ve seen in a while.

And, while we’re at the topic of old displays, check out Secret Geometry‘s beautiful terminal emulator made as a monochrome monitor. Very Pipboy-ish…

Apparently, ALL the Commodore 64 emulators out there are mapping the colors somewhat wrong. Philip ‘Pepto’ Timmermann, on the other hand, has made an incredible job to get the colors right. He has a very comprehensive page explaining his method of getting the ‘true colors’ of the c64 here.

A comparison between the emulated colors and the ‘true colors’, as seen below, shows that the latter is much more muted and dull but in fact closer to how the colors were actually processed.

Well, enough of the ol’ c64. There are a lot more swatches but they are much more straight forward so I won’t be going through them all. Here’s just a few.

Amstrad CPC system:

Apple II:

Nintendo 8-bit:

The idea is to limit one selfs creative process by using only the colors provided by each system.

Listed below are all these different systems that are included in my Retro Color Swatch Pack.

• Amstrad CPC
• Apple II
• Atari 2600 NTSC
• Atari 2600 PAL
• CGA
• Commodore 64
• Commodore Plus/4
• Commodore VIC-20
• EGA
• Gameboy
• Mattel Aquarius
• MSX
• Nintendo 8-bit
• Sega Master System
• Teletext
• Thomson MO5
• ZX Spectrum

Had a coffee at Wayne’s before going to work today and noticed that the vintage movie star trading card-imitations I made as a free give-away for Teater Bartolini where featured in our local newpaper center spread. Looked ok, but I think I could have exaggerated the crude hand coloring alot more. Nevertheless, I’m quite satisfied anyway.