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…
This is another script I just recently threw together. It falls into the same category as the last one, being some kind of a cipher script. Only difference is that this is based on real letters. I use the dashed stroke effect set to a circle to draw the unicode value of each letter and it looks like this.
[more…]
Someone scribbled some incomprehensible symbols on a wall at my work some time ago. I have no clue what it reads or if they are even real letters. Probably just the work of some bored-out-of-his-wits zombie drone. Nevertheless, they looked somewhat real to me and seemed to follow some kind of inherent system. I let [more…]
Just as a way to get my brain going I have put this little script together. I found a similar thing in a Flickr gallery and thought that it wouldn’t be at all hard to replicate and it might just get me back in creative mode. Or, at least keep my brain from going soft and forget everything I know. It doesn’t do much, it just draws some concentric circles in different colors depending what color scheme is used (RGB, CMY, Gray or Black/White).
[more…]
I’ve always been impressed by those colorful patterns produced by Kapitza. It’s nothing shy of genius creating a set of geometric fonts and then just type to your hearts content.
The idea of making something, preferably complex, out of a limited set of rules, principles or objects is very appealing to me. It’s like art sprung out of (almost) nothingness. It’s called synergy – when the sum is greater than its parts. I think these patterns adresses just that; very simple and mundane geometric shapes, but put together, they create something more with seemingly infinte possibilities of variation.
Now, I thought about this for a while, wondering if I had the patience to construct my own symbols and shapes and turn them into a working font, I finaly decided I had not. What would be the point, it’s been done already. Although, I had one concern, as all these symbols where made as fonts there isn’t a very intuitive way to rotate a symbol or flip it around its own axis. Sure, it isn’t that hard to flip a character around, but say if there are a 1000 different symbols it becomes time consuming and counterproductive.
[more…]
