Happy Sunday. 🔤
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Category Archives: Typography
BWHAM!! For the love of comics
My old friend Mike Essl curates a fantastic Instagram feed mashing up classic comics typography, and I dare you not to be charmed by his infectious love of the art form:
Sononym: Finding sound by similarity
This audio browser app has a clever idea, though I wonder if it’d benefit from the kind of rendering that a Google project uses to let researchers visualize thousands of bird sounds via AI:
The primary innovation in Sononym is something called “similarity search”, which enable users to find similar-sounding samples in their sample collection based on any source sound. Essentially, a bit like how Google’s reverse image search works, but with audio.
The initial release focuses strictly on the core functionality of the software. That is, to offer similarity search that work with large collections of samples. Technically, our approach is a combination of feature extraction, machine learning and modern web technologies.
Not entirely dissimilar: Font Map helps you see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.
[YouTube]
Google’s new Sketch plug-in helps you pair harmonious colors & fonts
Old Man Nack would’ve killed for this back in his designer days:
As Design Taxi writes,
“Material Theming” effectively fixes a core gripe of the original “Material Design”: that virtually every Android app looks the “same,” or made by Google, which isn’t ideal for brands.
The tool is currently available on Sketch, and you can use it by downloading the “Material” plugin on the app. Google aims to expand the system regularly, and will roll out new options such as animations, depth controls, and textures, next.
[YouTube]
SNL savages Papyrus font
Oh, I see you nervously shifting a little, photographers. 🙂 This take-down is as hilarious as you’ve heard:
Bonus: CBS news caught up with the font’s creator to get his reaction:
“I designed the font when I was 23 years old. I was right out of college. I was kind of just struggling with some different life issues, I was studying the Bible, looking for God and this font came to mind, this idea of, thinking about the biblical times and Egypt and the Middle East. I just started scribbling this alphabet while I was at work and it kind of looked pretty cool,” Costello said.
He added, “I had no idea it would be on every computer in the world and used for probably every conceivable design idea. This is a big surprise to me as well.”
[YouTube]
Photoshop sneak: Support for “variable fonts”
First they add an actual Glyphs panel, now this? Dogs & cats living together, mass hysteria!
In this one-minute video, Adobe Creative Cloud introduces you to ‘Variable Fonts’, an open-type font format that allows for easy weight, width and slant customization—just drag the sliders until you get desired results.
Typography: Words as what they are
Typography: Art Text 3 can create cool, non-cheesy 3D type
It makes me sad that after 10 (!!) years of having 3D in Photoshop, I can’t think of a single time I’ve created good-looking text in it, much less anything else 3D of value. Given that PS includes a whole 3D engine, I hope that someday it’ll include easy ways to make attractive text.
In the meantime, amidst sometimes literally cheesy results, Art Text 3 ($29.99) produces some rather impressive pieces. Maybe Adobe could just license & bundle it as a plug-in. Hmm… (No, I don’t know anything you don’t know.)
[Vimeo]
Create color & vector fonts in Photoshop & Illustrator CC
Typography: “Is That A Fish In Your Ear?”
Here’s some fun animation from Matt Young conveying interesting info on cross-language differences.
I’ll give it a thumbs-up with my northwest hand…