September 22, 2009
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
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.
September 4, 2009
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.
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Enjoy, and let us know what you think.
August 21, 2009
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:
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
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.
July 24, 2009
Every day, every hour, FontStructors all over the globe create and edit FontStructions and discuss their work with their peers. Every now and then, we – the FontStruct Staff – select Top Picks, tweet about updates and other topics or post content here on Brick-By-Brick.
As the size and productivity of our community increases, keeping track of all these different things was becoming increasingly difficult. We started to think about ways to improve the FontStruct experience and came up with FontStruct Live, a new website feature which we are proudly launching today.
FontStruct Live is a super-feed that shows all recent activity in the FontStruct community in one single place. New and updated FontStructions, comments on FontStructions and on the blog, updates on Twitter, Top Picks – everything is there. Users can individually select which types of activity they want to view, and can go multiple pages further back in time to see what happened since their last visit.
Another new feature on our homepage is the Tag Cloud, an alternate entry point to the available collection of FontStructions. Having trouble finding that cool FontStruction? Try searching with tags!
We are very excited about these two new features – everyone visiting our website can now have a taste of how it feels to be a FontStructor.
As always, we look forward to hear what you think.
June 23, 2009
Yves Peters made public the other day on The FontFeed what many members of the FontStruct community already know – I have recently joined the FontStruct team to take care of user support, promotion of FontStruct on the web & in the real world and publication of content here on “Brick by Brick”.
Today I’m going to write a little bit about the past, present & future of FontStruct and the new plans for “Brick by Brick”, the FontStruct blog.
FontStruct so far
FontStruct was released on the 1st of April 2008. Since then: 167,144 users have registered, 167,305 FontStructions have been created, 7,371 FontStructions have been made public and 317,770 FontStructions have been downloaded.
We have also collected several success stories of FontStructions out in the world, from the use of FontStructions in a huge LED display at the TU Darmstadt to the recent appearance of Sessions in an article on Grain Edit, or the Communication Arts Interactive Annual we received (more about it on The FontFeed).
These are fantastic results for one year of hard work. But we want even more.
FontStruct as an educational resource
So far we have been blogging mainly about FontStruct itself: improvements to FontStructor, examples of FontStructions in use, messages to the FontStruct community etcetera. For the curious and/or mobile FontStructors we now even have a FontStruct channel on Twitter.
But we want you not only to be up-do-date, we want you to be inspired. For this reason, the FontStruct blog’s mission has been re-defined to cover all things related to modular alphabets. Among many possible topics we are specially interested in the use of FontStruct for education in type design.
FontStruct is great for education because it’s free, it’s simple and it’s a lot of fun. It can be used on any computer with a modern browser and Internet access, independently of platform and without installation of additional software. FontStruct stimulates sharing and collaboration, while respecting the creator’s right to decide about it. Users are presented with a set of flexible and familiar Creative Commons licenses to choose from. Peer-review, user votes and the sought after Top Picks complete the package that makes of FontStruct not just a tool, but an exciting environment for learning how to build fonts and design typefaces.
Here are some of the topics we are planning to blog about:
Modular classics
One of the best ways to learn about type design is by looking at samples of work done by masters. We want to select famous modular alphabets – think of Josef Albers’ Kombinationschrift, Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet or classic bitmap fonts such as Susan Kare’s Chicago – and examine them closely. What are the ideas behind the designs? How were the forms constructed? With which modules, on a grid of how many units? In what kind of real-life projects were those letters used?
Modularity in type-design
Type design deals with patterns and repetition of shapes, so it’s natural that there is a lot of modularity in it. A typeface can contain many different types of glyph shapes: different alphabets with upper- and lowercase, numbers, accents, symbols. Each of these groups has its own development history and construction principles. For example, while the typical modulation of latin uppercase characters is based on basic geometric shapes (circle, square and triangle), the typical modulation of lowercase characters is based on more irregular/organic forms produced by the hand. The spacing of a typeface is also generally highly modulated to create a legible and pleasant rhythm for reading.
Each particular style of type – roman or italic, humanist or modern – has its own rules and patterns for standardization and simplification of letter forms. We can also find many examples of modularity when we think about the choice of type sizes, the organization of text and images on a page and the proportions of the page/canvas.
Tips & tricks
While FontStruct is extremely simple and easy-to-use, some of the type designs produced with it can be quite complex and sophisticated. In this section we plan to invite master FontStructors to talk about their tips & tricks to get the most out of FontStruct.
What would you like to read about?
These are just some of our ideas — there is a lot more to come. But we would also like to hear what you think. Is there a topic you would like to read about, and which is not included on our list? We look forward for your suggestions and comments.
June 22, 2009
Yves Peters has initiated a series of mini-interviews on The FontFeed called Focus on FontStructors. It puts members of our designers community in the spotlight, and introduces them and their FontStructions to a wider audience. The series was started this Sunday with a focus on Afrojet, real name John Skelton, author of many well-crafted and highly usable FontStructions.
It’s a pleasure to know the people and the ideas behind the modules. I look forward to the next post of the series!
June 7, 2009
We did some maintenance work on the servers today.
During the first year of FontStructing, as the bricks piled up, our servers buckled a few times under the load. This sometimes happened without warning and for days at a time, and caused some understandable annoyance. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment to try and avoid this in the future. A large part of this work is now complete.
What’s changed? Hopefully nothing noticeable ;-) but let us know if you spot any glitches.
Download Problems
Many of you will have noticed problems with downloading more complex FontStructions recently. We’re aware of this and it is next on our list of things to work on.
April 2, 2009
Regarding recent technical problems …
Update 12. April: Everything should be pretty much back to normal. We’re on a new hosting platform now which should allow us to increase capacity more easily in the future. Thanks for your patience everyone.
P.S. Especially for French users of FontStruct, and thanks to Francine from Brussels, we added a “no-break space” character at the end of the “More Latin” character set.
Update 5. April: All “invisible” FontStructions should now be visible. No data was ever lost, it was just a problem with displaying some larger FontStructions. There are however still some teething problems generally with the performance on the new hosting platform. You may have noticed pages loading slowly. We’re working to improve this as fast as we can.
Original Post 2 April
If you’ve visited FontStruct in the last few days you may have experienced one of the following unpleasantries:
Fear not. We’re on it. We regret any downtime, but some of these conditions are symptoms of a hardware failure related to our old servers and others are inevitable issues caused by our recent move to a new, more reliable hosting platform. The short story is: everything will get much better very soon.
Some users have expressed concern that their FontStructions are not loading. Let us know if you’re in this camp. We do have backups of all data and we’ll do our best to bring your work back to the most current version possible.
Otherwise, the site is safe and operational. Go ahead and resume regular FontStructing and let us know if you encounter any unexpected behavior. We’ll bring you more info as soon as our tech folks get back from under all the cogs and wires.
