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• Post #4227487

  In February I had the pleasure of hosting a one-week **Unconventional Graphic Design Tools** workshop at the Institute Digital Communication Environments, HGK FHNW during the Fasnacht carnival in Basel. The question asked at workshop was: could one be a graphic designer WITHOUT Adobe Software? The participants had a week to produce two spreads for a collective zine, using anything but Adobe tools. The zine is printed with a risograph by the students. Here's some of them, but the full z...

• Post #4227486

  Working on a new editor (again)! This one simulates letterpress where you make digital layouts with cut-outs from old scanned type specimens, all in type size so the images could be recreated in with real type on real letterpress! It supports all point sizes and shapes, so it's not restricted to square shapes. This image is made with ornaments from the 1880 Fonderie typographique Gustave Mayeur type specimen, using type ornament I call "ivy combination".

• Post #3707568

  My pre-ASCII art / pictorial typography / text art archive site is out now! People have been making ASCII-like text art on letterpress for over 300 years, building pictures entirely out of metal type, ornaments, and rule. The practice has often been dismissed as "tasteless", "wasted effort" and "nothing to do with art", which is why I think it's gone largely undocumented. So, I've spent the last 8+ years collecting ~2500 of these works into an archive. Tha...

• Post #3561335

  New tool: POLYARC DRAW is free online vector graphics drawing tool based on my research on polycentric arcs. I've also included around 1300 old school textures that you can drag&drop onto shapes! https://hlnet.neocities.org/polyarc-draw/

• Post #3080691

  Welcome to Tekstin talo (in Helsinki) on Monday 25.5. at 18:00 to a joint talk & performance by me and @adelfaure The talk will focus on how ASCII art can act as a theoretical & practical foundation for two completely different yet strikingly similar design practices of me and Adel.

• Post #3080690

  @DerGuteAlteHerrSchwarz More like 1960s, my direct inspiration for this was Hershey fonts & formats (https://archive.org/details/hershey-calligraphy_for_computers/)

• Post #2546665

  NO Adobe used! This zine is a milestone in my quest to make a book where I design *everything* myself: 1. The font is made with my Hershey font editor. It's actually not an outline font at all, but single stroke lettershapes rendered with SVG! The curves are made with G-conics. 2. The paragraph engine is also custom, and it uses my semi-justified text algorithm. It's like greedy justification but with bounded word spaces (lines that would stretch or shrink too much fall back to...

• Post #894404

  Working on a new autokerning script. It's based on a simple idea: fit glyphs as close to each other as possible based on the actual vector shape, so they're just about touching, but don't collide. Then add tracking. But, depending on the desired effect, this can create too much overlap in combinations like "C-" where the dash would go completely inside the C shape. This is fixed by add a big bounding box that's some percentage of the original...

• Post #894403

  Quick collision demo with matter.js

• Post #894402

  My new visual poetry / experimental writing editor is almost ready to be shared! With it, you "drop" characters in a straight path (up, down, left or right) until it collides with another letter.

• Post #894401

  I added a JHF (Hershey font format) export and import to my Hershey font editor (https://hlnet.neocities.org/hershey/). Using Ted Davis' xyscope.js, I can draw text using my own custom font on an XY-monitor or an oscillator... if I had one (this is a simulation). Will try to get my hands on one soon

• Post #871137

  Good progress on my experimental web-based font editor! I'll publish a beta online soon. Some features: — Design type & typeset at the same time — Pixel (PNG), vector (SVG), and font (OTF) exports — Specialized in single stroke vector fonts (OTF export just reverses the paths and closes them) — Two curves not found in any other program (afaik): polycentric arcs and g-conics (rational beziérs) The UI still needs work!

• Post #862942

  My new visual poetry and experimental typography tool is out now in beta! It lets you drop letters on a canvas with collision detection. https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/ Let me know what you think!

• Post #641398

  Added animation, timelapse and red color today! https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/