November 20, 2008
Attention Bay Area FontStructors! I’m very sorry for the late notice, but I’ve just confirmed that I’ll be presenting FontStruct at Pecha Kucha tonight. The event is a high-speed, entertaining way for creative folk to show off their work. Each presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds each, ensuring that you’ll never be bored. Come check it out — even if you’re an old FontStruct pro — I’ll need you there too hoot and hollar your support of the site (or shout out any key points I’ve missed).
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November 18, 2008
Server Problems Fixed
First up, sorry for the unheralded downtime last Thursday and Friday. With well over a 100,000 registered FontStructors and a similar number of FontStructions in the system, our server decided it needed a few hours of tender love and care from our sysadmins. Apologies to all whose bricklaying was interrupted.
Scrollable Character Selector
The FontStruct team has been a bit quiet for a while but don’t worry, we continue to make improvements to FontStruct, and are preparing many more. One recent change in the FontStructor is that the character set selector is now scrollable. This means that people with smaller screens can now easily skip between Tamil and Basic Latin. The old selector with its tendency to disappear off the edge of the screen annoyed and puzzled many, so we’re very glad to have that finally sorted.
Large FontStructions and Saving strategies
One of the ongoing challenges the development team has to deal with is the unforeseen ambition and scale of some FontStruction projects. Some designs contain so many bricks and so many characters that parts of the FontStruct system struggle to keep up. For example, some users have had problems saving because so much information needs to be sent to the server. I’ve written a little FAQ article about this problem. We will continue to try and optimize the saving process, but if you’re working on a very large FontStruction, often the best strategy is simply to split your creation into two or more parts. An excellent example of this strategy is the masterly Prometheus Shadow Basic and Extended set from SquarePeg. The FontStruction is built on a high resolution matrix and contains 388 glyphs. It needed to be split not only to get around saving problems, but also to make downloading as a TrueType font possible.
Optimized Gallery Previews and Illustrated RSS feeds
Another issue with large FontStructions has been the relatively long load-times for previews in the Gallery. We put some new code online today which speeds things up a lot. A nice side-effect of this work is that the RSS news feeds from the gallery now also contain images, just like Flickr photostream feeds.
The Joy of FontStruct
Of course aside from technical improvements, excitement and novelty is always to be found at FontStruct in the boundless ingenuity of the FontStruct community. It’s wonderful to see the ever-expanding range of complex, beautiful and funny designs being built within the limits imposed by the application. Thank you, and carry on FontStructing!
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