Brick by brick: News about FontStruct
February 5, 2010 | In News
Welcome FontStructors to my inaugural Brick by Brick installment. In the coming months I hope to use this space to showcase many of your incredible FontStructions and to shine a light on you, my fellow brick junkies, who work tirelessly to enrich the site and the community with your work.
To kick things off, I’d like to take a moment to talk sports.
Two Sundays ago, I watched with devilish glee as Brett Favre threw his final interception of the season – the final interception of his career perhaps – effectively closing the door on any chance the Minnesota Vikings had at making a late game rally to win the NFC Championship game against the New Orleans Saints. While watching the game, I couldn’t help but notice my eye (my mind!) returning time and again to the slab-serif number four on Favre’s jersey. What my mind kept returning too, was a question. A question that many of you out there in FontStruct Nation I’m sure have asked yourself from time to time: can I FontStruct it?
I find when I watch sports this “can I FontStruct it” question comes up frequently. It’s purely a hypothetical question – a mental exercise and a pastime – where, having internalized the limitations of FontStruct I can look at soccer jerseys, race car numbers, scoreboard displays and determine quickly whether the letters and numbers would map to FontStruct or not. It’s possible I’m going nuts. But if I am, there is certain to be a large group of FontStructors waiting with welcoming arms in that Cuckoo’s Nest.
In fact, sports or athletics seems to be a source of continued inspiration for many in the FontStruct community. Its influence runs deep and its breadth shoots wide.
Rooting for the home team
Some FontStructions wear their athletic influence (and their FontStructor’s team loyalties) proudly on their sleeve.
Sketchbook B was so jazzed after watching South Carolina defeat Clemson he had to create Scoreboard just to document the moment. Not to be outdone, p2pnut, his heart still racing after the success of Jenson Button’s Formula 1 success, took a few laps around the grid and created Grand Prix. Kix, another Formula 1 fan created Pole Position – a raceway classic.
Saturday May 2nd, 2009, was a great day in Geneus1’s sports book. That was the day Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao a.k.a “PacMan” knocked out Ricky Hatton to win a light welterweight title. The next day Geneus1 created his amazing PacMan tribute FontStruction.
Inspired by Otl Aicher’s pictograms for the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Cam.ill built an extensive (and comical) set of his own Olympic icons in Pictales. Frodo7 has a set of his own competitive icons in French Defense – a chess font. And somewhere between icon and lettering, the Funk King introduced his own personal cheering section with Yay Team and Sports Wave. Oh hey, need a font made entirely of footballs or baseballs or golfballs? The Funk King’s got you covered there too. There seems to be no end to the games or the victories FontStructors will celebrate.
The winning style
There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a sporty typeface – script, sans, blackletter – they all work fine if done well and in the right context. Some FontStructions aren’t necessarily athletic specific but their style could be used successfully in a sports context.
Varsity, an athletic slab created by Stewf, would look as fly on that letterman jacket as it would on your home game jersey. Shasta’s Teatral Stencil is a solidly built slab whose muscular strength makes it perfect for the gridiron or an MMA title fight.
Sector 017 by Neoqueto is a grungy modern display sans that could introduce a motocross rally as well as brand the Energy Drink™ sponsoring all the riders.
Letra Libre by nathancox, Corrida Evolved by jmarquez, and m.ove.r by minimum are all wonderful triline fonts that evoke the spirit of the lettering done for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. Each would make strong candidates for lettering up some contemporary soccer (err…football) jerseys.
Mummification by the Funk King and Donna 85 by stigtafto are both intricate display fonts with no specific sports connection yet their details lend themselves to contemporary athletic usage. Likewise DJ Nippa’s NCD Octangle 20 and p2spnut’s RM Squarial are stylishly modern thin faces, perfect for when you want to stay light on your feet.
I’ve barely scratched the surface here. No doubt there are countless other FontStructions I’ve missed in this brief round up. Please use the comments to help fill in the gaps and sound off on what FontSructions you think make for good sport.
Good thing are coming our way
FontStructors…I can tell you right now that February is going to be an exciting month here in FontStructlandia. Mr. Meeks is cooking up a new feature that will have you all singing teary-eyed toasts to him down at your local pub. Sadly, I should warn you; this new feature will bring about the passing of one of our beloved keepsakes. But take comfort when I tell you that this passing will be followed by a Phoenix — a rebirth! Our collective mourning will be short.
Later this month we will also launch the first ever FontStruct competition. The Rules Committee is still hard at work fine-tuning the details of the contest but now is the time to sharpen your skates, wax up your skies, and start your mouse finger calisthenics. Did I mention prizes? Oh yes, there will be prizes! Stay tuned sports fans.
January 29, 2010 | In News
Happy new year everyone. I think it’s going to be an exciting one for FontStruct.
Here are the latest stats, hot from a bulging database:
238,849 FontStructions
244,930 registered FontStructors
400,796 Downloads,
1,437,963 Glyphs
This vast and rambling edifice just keeps on growing. If you’re FontStructing, you’re part of a phenomenon.
As you may have noticed, a new, yet familiar hand has been at work at FontStruct over the last few weeks – selecting top picks, featuring exceptional FontStructions and tweeting like a man with a beak and feathers. We’re delighted to announce that designer and long-time FontStructor John Skelton AKA Afrojet joined the FontStruct staff at the start of the year.
He’ll be working with the FontStruct community, FontShop and myself to continue to improve FontStruct and to raise the profile of the project and your work. If you haven’t done so already I recommend reading Yves Peter’s fascinating interview with John over on the FontFeed. It was the first in the wonderful Focus on FontStructors series.
Afrojet will also be posting on this blog about what’s happening in and around FontStructia, so welcome to the far side of the bricks John, and watch this space!
December 31, 2009 | In News
Before the year ends there is still time for a couple of last minute new items:
FontMortar update
As many of you know, a new version of the FontMortar – FontStruct’s font-generating software – is online since last week. There were some initial glitches with spacing and corrupted download files, but with help of many reports from FontStructors all problems have been fixed.
The main purpose of this update was to make font generation more efficient and save processor effort and time, consequently reducing server costs. We can now also proudly say that FontStruct’s carbon footprint is much smaller.
Font generation on FontStruct works as before, but a lot faster and more powerful: FontMortar should now handle those huge FontStructions which couldn’t be downloaded before.
If you happen to be the proud creator of one of such GigaStructions: please give it another try and let us know if they are working now.
Article about FontStruct workshop
In November I had the opportunity to teach a workshop using FontStruct at the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd in Germany. During one week 14 students designed their own screen fonts using FontStruct. It was a great experience: observing FontStruct in action in a classroom was very valuable, and the final results were very, very good.
If you would like to know more, I’ve written a report about the workshop including some visual notes and results from students.
Logging off
After six months as FontStruct’s community manager I am logging off today to enjoy one month of vacation, far from email and internet connection.
It was a lot of fun to witness the day-by-day development of FontStruct over the last 6 months. I’ve seen amazing new designs emerging every week, and I’ve got to know lots of cool people with many different personalities and backgrounds.
It has truly been a great honor and pleasure for me to be a part of FontStruct during this time. I’ll be back in February – not as community manager, but as one more passionate FontStructor. ;-)
Until then, take care & and have a great start in 2010!
December 24, 2009 | In News
It’s amazing how fast time goes by when we are being creative.
The year 2009 is almost over, and we would like to thank all FontStructors for their great work.
To celebrate this year’s fantastic production we are now displaying all Featured FontStructions of 2009 on the website.
And so you don’t have to reload your browser several times, we’ve also put them together in a single image as a small present for you:
Merry Christmas & happy holidays!
December 19, 2009 | In News
The long awaited FontStruct t-shirts are finally available!
This week we are launching the new FontStruct Shop with a few classic FontStruct items to start. The initial range of products feature the original FontStruct logo. The designs are printed using our shop partner Spreadshirt’s high quality “flex” printing process which produces great results for vector graphics.
In the shop you can find not only t-shirts (for boys and girls, in different sizes) but also caps, bags and other items.
Shipping is currently available for North America, Western Europe and some other parts of the world (see the full list of countries here). We hope we can add more countries to the list at some point.
All revenue will go to support the project.
September 22, 2009 | In News
As some of you probably noticed, we have recently improved the main navigation of the FontStruct website.
The main menu now includes a link to FontStruct Live, and My FontStruct, Gallery and Support now show quick links to internal pages of the FontStruct website.
The latest FontStruct news, the Top Picks gallery and your own FontStructions are now just one click away!
September 11, 2009 | In News
We get a lot of positive feedback from FontStructors through email, on FontStruct threads and specially on Twitter. It feels great to give people something that makes them feel happy and creative. Thousands of FontStructors who voluntarily choose to share their work with the world are discovering this feeling too.
Of course, among all praises there are also feature requests, occasional bug reports and complaints. Interestingly, most complaints we get are targeted at one particular feature in FontStruct: the rating system.
Continue reading…
September 4, 2009 | In News
Great achievements in type design demand a lot of work and concentration, but that doesn’t mean the design process needs to be solitary.
FontStruct is not just another font editor – it is special because it is built around the idea of sharing. FontStruct is a tool, but it is also a rich and lively community of designers who exchange ideas about type design and give feedback to each other.
The “Share” button
Today we are introducing a new “Share” button to make it even easier for FontStructors to share their creations with people outside the FontStruct community.
Popular social networking services – Facebook, Twitter, delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg – are now just one click away, integrated into individual FontStruction pages.
Your friends and family are curious about what you have been doing all this time since you joined FontStruct? Now it’s easy to show them.
The “Remember me” check box
Preparing the ground for upcoming changes in the rating system, we are also introducing a small “Remember me” check box to the Sign In page.
Regular FontStructors can now use this feature to enter the website and start FontStructing (or voting ;-) right away, without having to sign in each time again. Note that we don’t recommend doing this on computers which you share with others — unless you want to share your account with them.
* * *
Enjoy, and let us know what you think.
August 21, 2009 | In News
The FontStruct team is continuously adding new features to the website and to FontStructor, working hard to keep the demanding FontStruct community satisfied.
Today we are happy to announce three small but important updates: integration of Flickr and tweets from other users into FontStruct Live, expansion of the arabic character set and the long awaited implementation of copy & paste between different FontStructions
Integration of Flickr and Twitter into FontStruct Live
FontStruct Live has transformed the FontStruct experience. One month after its release, it is hard to imagine how we managed to keep track of all the updates in the community without it.
With a better communication infra-structure, FontStructors have been able to focus on what matters most: FontStructing. Every new week has brought more and better FontStructions, and we had to augment the capacity of Featured FontStruction from one to several fonts to acommodate all the amazing new work produced by the community.
Last week Rob silently plugged the FontStruct Flickr pool into FontStruct Live, so new images and comments on Flickr are automatically displayed on the feed.
This week we are introducing another addition to FontStruct Live: now not only our own FontStruct tweets, but any tweet including the magic #fontstruct tag is displayed in the feed. We hope this will bring even more integration to our community and bring FontStruct to even more people out there.
FontStructors on Twitter – say hello!
Arabic glyph sets
Being online and free, FontStruct can be used by anyone anywhere in the world to build fonts. We are well aware of the importance and the challenge of supporting alphabets other than latin.
Today we are happy to announce the expansion of our arabic character set to support initial, medial and final variations necessary for high-quality arabic typography. This still doesn’t mean full support for arabic (read notes below), but it is an important step in this direction.
A few notes about current support for arabic in FontStruct:
- The FontStructor uses fonts installed on your system to display the glyphs in the Character Selector bar. Users who don’t have unicode fonts installed on their systems might experience empty glyph slots, or slots filled with a placeholder glyph. We recommend users willing to access the full extended arabic character to install the free arabic unicode font Scheherazade.
- There is currently no support for right-to-left text in the preview window.
- Fonts generated by FontStruct don’t include OpenType shaping features for the arabic script (but these can be added with other tools such as FontLab Studio or MS VOLT).
We would greatly appreciate feedback from arabic designers – let us know what you think.
Copy and paste between FontStructions
And finally, the feature that all FontStructors have been waiting for – copy & paste between different FontStructions is finally possible!
It works as expected: simply open two FontStructions at once (in different tabs or windows), select and copy bricks from one glyph in the first FontStruction and paste them into another glyph in the second.
We believe this little feature will greatly improve the productivity of work with FontStructor – Enjoy!
Note: This update involved changes in the way FontStruct uses a sort of “cookie” that saves user preferences like palette positions, zoom factor, last letter edited etc. These changes mean that users will lose the current workspace snapshot.
July 31, 2009 | In News
As the quality of the output of the FontStruct community increases, making the choice for the next Featured FontStruction gets more difficult every week.
We gave this issue some thought, and starting today we have not just one, but several rotating Featured FontStructions at once.
We think that this little change will make Featured FontStructions more efficient in communicating the stylistic diversity and the creative power of our top FontStructors.
Next Page »
