Typegeek

You may not know that I'm also interested in staying healthy and fit. This Sunday I'm running a 5 Kilometer (3.1 miles) for the CIBC Run for the Cure to support Breast Cancer. It would be great if you amazing readers can find the time to support me by giving a donation for this great cause. You can read more about it at http://active-wellness.blogspot.com/2008/09/help-support-canadian-breast-cancer.html or give directly at https://www.cibcrunforthecure.com/html/personal_page.asp?track=3057758&languageid=1 Cheers, Rick

I found a great design site with lots of freebies at fudgegraphics.com . In this case, it was a collection of hand drawn fonts with a nice pencil-sketch look to them. The fonts all come from a great font collection called DaFont . What sets this font site apart from the rest? Well its large collection of REALLY GOOD fonts! I haven't spent too much time there, but a lot of good fonts were found just from visiting the front page. One of the great things I love about typography, and yet still almost hate about it at the same time, is the unlimited variety that can be found in designer type. There are practically an infinite number of fonts out there! It can make it hard to choose a specific font for a specific project. A good software package for organizing your fonts is a must if you are doing a lot of design and don't want to get overwhelmed by the choices out there. What font organizing program do you use? Leave it in the comments and in the future I'll write a post about s...

I've got my own domain! Help out by checking for this article at its new location: http://designtypegeek.com/2008/09/font-used-in-google-chrome/

I was just reading an article in the last issue of Wired on Chee Leland, the keeper of continuity in the Star Wars universe (that WOULD be a great job - read it here ). In an aside comment, the author makes reference to the Aurebesh alphabet... so of course with my interest in fonts and typography, not to mention made up languages and their connection to real ones, I just had to google it. The Aurebesh alphabet was created by graphic artist Stephen Crane . In this article, Mr. Crane explains how it came about that he created the alphabet for the Empire... at least one of them anyway. The article is a great read, and includes links to a whole collection of Star Wars related fonts including a hand-written version of the Aurebesh alphabet (named after the first two characters, Aurek and Besh naturally) but also Ewok and Droid letters. The article was written in 2000 and mentions a Trade Federation font that appears in a Droid Viewer on the StarWars site, but that viewer is no longer easil...

Through the power of blogging, I've found a couple of amazing colour sites I wanted to share. Of course I love fonts and cool paper, but who doesn't love colour?! Especially when trying to find the perfect shade or colour combination for a website or other design piece, working with colour is a whole art and science unto itself. I had been reading a blog by Sugarrae about a new WordPress Theme , when I came across a blog post of big name sites that use WordPress , and one of them happens to be this amazing colour website, ColourLovers.com . The site is so big and so diverse, that the best thing about the site is not just that they spell "colour" correctly :) ColourLovers is a combination community blog and social tool, with a whole bunch of cool colour palettes and other tools available. I'd love to become a member but I wonder if I'd have the time to really check everything out! In one of the posts on Multi-blends, I found this tool to create colour blends ...

I've always wanted to design my own font (typeface!), and the last two days I had been wondering what software to use, and just now StumbleUpon has led me to this great article. It explains it all. http://www.solscape.com/site/articles/fontmaking.html I've actually done a kind of designer type that I use on whiteboards when I'm teaching my computer labs. I'll try and get some photos and post them to get your feedback. If you are a new or highly skilled font designer or foundry, drop me your best tips or favourite software!

A few months ago I started working on some designs I thought would be useful for my wedding, which will be happening June 7, 2008. We expected to do our own invitations, and I had wanted to try playing with our initials so I took to working on a monogram for us... but since there are two initials isn't called a duogram? My fiancee decided not to change her last name (which begins with an S) and I wasn't about to change mine (which starts with an H) and there was talk of having the future offspring with the S-H name... that is yet to be determined. But I figured for the purposes of decoration, there would be nothing wrong with a nice SH monogram so I fired up Photoshop and spent sometime with it. This first image (72 point Edwardian) was the starting point but I had to work on the spacing. In the second image I played with the spacing enough to have the flourish on the H seem to hug or embrace the S. The S is slightly higher to place the letters closer together, but any closer a...