Author: Nathan Campbell
Font of knowledge: A collection of font resources
Right. More font stuff to clear from my set of open tabs… Hopefully you’ll find these interesting or useful.
Here’s an “anatomy of a typeface” picture to examine so that when you read about fonts you know what’s going on.
It’s from Font.is. You can get it in wallpaper size here.
I tend to stick with Helvetica as a user friendly sans serif for the web, and Georgia for serifed fonts (like on this site – at the moment). But if you want to stand out from the crowd (though arguably a Times derivative and Arial are the fonts of the masses). Then here are some alternative serifs, and sans serifs, for you to consider.
If the idea of matching fonts seems daunting to you – and it should… Because golden rule for graphic design and fonts #1 is don’t mix too many fonts… then you should check out Smashing Magazine’s guide to choosing fonts. It’s a five point list. One of the points is “know your types” – did you know fonts can be described in the following classes:
This little snippet on how to use fancy fonts (like the one in my header on St. Eutychus). The answer: sparingly.
Periodically, there’s a need for a font that oozes with personality, whether that personality is warehouse party, Pad Thai or Santa Claus. And this need brings us into the vast wilderness of Display typefaces, which includes everything from Comic Sans to our candy-cane and bunny fonts. ‘Display’ is just another way of saying ‘do not exceed recommended dosage‘: applied sparingly to headlines, a display font can add a well-needed dash of flavor to a design, but it can quickly wear out its welcome if used too widely.
Good stuff. Keep it on file.
Then find out what font you are using this video quiz. Apparently I am Bifur.
Each sold separately: Pocket Canon
As a couple of commenters have already pointed out – it turns out my idea was “nothing new” (cf Ecclesiastes). Enter the Pocket Canon series:
Pretty much what I described, only using the KJV. And a bit old (published in 1999). Reasonably priced too – 10 for . $24.95 on Amazon
The good news is, obviously there’s a market for this stuff.
Here’s a glowing review from a blog that’s all about Bible design.
DIY Angry Birds
If I were crafty I’d make these. But I’m not that kind of crafty. Instead – I’ll craftilly put this out there and hope that crafty people in my life get the message and make them for me.
ShadyURL: A non truncating web service to scare people
Got a link you don’t want clicked. Or that you only want clicked by idiots who are more likely to give you their username and password for something?
Shady URL is here to help.
is now
How to lead the singing/interpreting at a Pentecostal Church
There are instructional videos for all sorts of things on YouTube. This one’s a doozy.
If you can stick it out until about 5 minutes – through two gibberish sessions and two vague interpretations that would make Johnathan Edwards (the psychic, not the theologian) proud… you’ll hear that there’s a movement and things are breaking free. And there are vibrations. Things that don’t belong. He says “the right things will remain” – I can only hope that this movement dies a rapid death.
It’s easy to be one of these training facilitators. You don’t have to write your own stuff. You just let the people on the floor do your job for you.
Urgh.
That’s my one-word tongues response to this video.
Can you name these traffic optimised books?
McSweeneys put together a list of classic books reworked for the Internet generation…
- 7 Awesome Ways Barnyard Animals Are Like Communism
- The 11 Stupidest Things Phonies Do To Ruin The World
- 8 Surprising Ways West Egg Is Exemplary Of The Hollowness Of The American Dream
- 6 Shockingly Evil Things The Turn-Of-The-Century Meatpacking Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know
- 5 Insane Ways London Could Become a Dystopia (And How It’s Not That Far From Reality)
- 1 Weird Thing Caddy Smells Like
There are answers here. If you’re stuck. Which I was.
Shirt of the Day: Music I no longer like…
One of the things I love the IT Crowd for is the T-shirts. I saw this one. And I had to find it in the real world.
You can get it from here.
Google’s Guide to the Internet
This is a beautiful website/book designed to introduce people to the internet – Google serves it up when you download Chrome for the first time.
If you want to know about the Internet, or have an old or young relative who keeps pestering you – then you should send them to that link.
Mathletes: Reforming sporting endeavours… again
First it was football free kicks and tracking the path of the ball in flight, then it was baseball – and finding the most efficient path around the bases – now mathematicians have turned their attention to basketball. And the free-throw.
You may already have seen this gravity defying shot on YouTube…
8 million people have in a pretty short amount of time. So nailing the perfect free-throw is no doubt something lots of people care about. Not me. I hate basketball. Even though I’m 6’3. I’m rubbish.
It turns out 45 degrees is the perfect angle for a free throw shot. So says this study reported on by the NY Times. Some people probably knew that already. It shouldn’t be too hard to work out. The distance from the line to the hoop is constant. The height of basketball players is a variable, but there’d be a pretty small standard deviation from the average (very tall). This story is actually about a shooting school for basketball players like me. But players who want to spend thousands of dollars being better. It deals with this guy named Andres Sandoval (who is in that photo).
“As the free throw swishes, the building’s silence is broken by a disembodied voice announcing “46.” Another nothing-but-net, another “46.” Sandoval follows with one more 46, a 43 and a 49, all of which reflect the angle of the ball’s arc.
At courtside, the device speaking in a computerized monotone has snapped high-speed digital photographs of Sandoval’s shots and combined them. The composite is displayed on a screen, with color arcs tracking the trajectory of each try. The ideal for a standard player is 45, though Sandoval earns a solid green.
The screen also indicates precisely where the ball, which is a little less than nine and a half inches in diameter, lands inside the rim, which is 18 inches in diameter. The objective is for the center of the ball to hit 8 to 10 inches inside the rim. Sandoval usually settles on 12.”
Incredible Coin Stop Motion
From two guys who call themselves Ninja Moped and do awesome stuff. They want to make a music video flinging 62 pianos over 100 metres in the air. At stuff. How awesome.
You might remember them from this 8-Bit lego stop motion.
Coffee Tips from Modernist Cuisine
Modernist Cuisine is the foodies’ bible.
Also, I can’t get over how many serious coffee snobs are scared of doing espresso at home. It is possible to get cafe quality coffee at home – you just need a cafe quality machine.
The Cold Portafiller
“The classic example with espresso is if your portafilter is cold, it’s impossible to pull a good shot. It’s going to be sour no matter what… And the portafilters are clean and sitting down in the drip tray, they’re not locked into the machine. You might as well turn around and walk back out. It’s impossible for them to make a good cup of coffee at the point because the portafilter’s cold. They’re going to put the grinds into a cold or even lukewarm portafilter before locking it in and pulling the shot, and the temperature of that portafilter is going to cause the temperature of the water to plummet. And low temperature water going into your grounds is going to make a very acidic brew. So one of the things you want to see is the protafilter even when not in use locked into the machine because that keeps it hot.”
Weighing the Dose
“… we would do experiments where just being off by half a gram, how many espresso grinds you put in, would make an enormous difference in how good the coffee tastes, with everything else being as same as possible. And so it really reinforces the point that if you want constancy, especially when you’re learning a knack for it, you’ve got to weigh. We’re just not that accurate as human beings to judge things by eyeball. We certainly can’t feel in our hands 17 and a half grams versus 18 grams of coffee. That’s just too small of a difference for us to perceive. It makes an enormous difference in the final cup of espresso.”
Salting bitter coffee reduces the bitterness
“… actually sugar doesn’t actually mask bitterness at all, but salt does. The idea with adding a tiny bit of salt to mask the bitterness of the coffee, and the trick when doing this is to get it so you don’t really detect the saltiness. A salty cup of coffee is not tasty, but just enough so it diminishes the bitterness of the coffee. The easiest way to do it is to just add small amounts of saline solution, actually. That’s a very dilute solution of salt, you don’t have to worry about it dissolving at all, and it’s harder to over do it. You can do that in your cup of coffee, you can do it with tonic water.”
Bohemian Rhapsody: Stringy edition
I’m a sucker for a Bohemian Rhapsody cover. Here it is arranged for violin.
Via 22 words.
P.S. I’m loving YouTube’s new iframe embed code. That’s a pretty geeky thing to mention – but it makes the embed thing a lot more html compliant. Speaking of which… I am going to be tweaking my design again in the next few days… hoping to iron out some glitches. So if there’s anything you don’t like currently – tell me in the comments.