Something that’s bugged me about LaTeX is the insane difficulty of installing new fonts. I guess that’s just a sign of its age, but I have all of these great fonts that I can’t use because I don’t have the time or patience to learn how to change fonts from OpenType to TeX font metrics. Another thing that’s bugged me is how hard it is to position things, to draw things, and manipulate things that aren’t text. Continue reading
We had this assignment in calculus that was basically to do a review of a website. There was a writeup as well as a presentation. Being the Internets kinda guy that I am, I had a lot of fun doing the writeup, because I could finally complain about websites and get marks for it. Unfortunately, the presentation part had a few snags to it.
Basically, I got a crappy mark on the presentation, which, if it were not for my terribly brilliant writeup, would have brought me down by very much. Part of our mark was based on the site itself. If we chose a bad site, we’d get worse marks. That’s where stuff went wrong: it was the difference between my view of a good site and my teacher’s view of a good site. Continue reading
It has now been almost a year since this place started and it has been quite fun. It’s nice to have a place to rant and rave and have your opinion count sometimes. I’ve learned a lot in the last year through all of this blogging and to celebrate, I’ve decided to redesign (realign, reboot, whatever you want to call it) again.
Now I know that this place has seen a lot of “redesigns”. They were pretty crap. I just wasn’t happy with what I was churning out. I had this great idea and I had to dilute it down a lot because a lot of the time, I just couldn’t do it with my sucky skills. This time, I think I’ve got it down. Let’s have a walk through it. Continue reading
The Globe and Mail decided to kill all of their serifs on their site today. Damned contemporary hippies.
You may remember several months ago, I asked for a critique of some logo design concepts for TC. The deadline for entries was the day right before the volunteer retreat. On the way to the retreat, the logo contest came up, and apparently, “In the Dash” didn’t refer to a race.
On a person’s grave, it has the year of their birth to the year of their death. In between those numbers is a dash (an en-dash, to be specific). A person’s life can be represented as that dash. So, what did you do in that dash?
Of course, if you saw my design, you’ve noticed that I interpreted dash as in race. I thought that I’d screwed up and that I was done. That was further solidified once I realized that January had passed and that I didn’t hear anything.
Until of course, yesterday. I got an e-mail in my super secret account that very few people know of. Basically, it was to say that I won. Yay! My design didn’t suck after all.
Today I got a phone call from Paula, saying that they found a picture on the Internets that looked very similar to my logo and that they’d discuss it some more. I told her that I’d only used a photo as the base for my design.
Well, crap.
A few hours later, she called again to tell me that they decided that it was original but that they didn’t feel comfortable using it because it bore too much resemblance to that picture they found. So they ended up not using it.
I must say that the timing for this was really crappy. They find the picture one day after they told me my design got chosen. Not only that, but how did they find that picture? It took me forever to find the perfect picture to use as my base. The only resemblance my design has to the source photo is the general shape.
Of course, this has taught me a few things. See, I can’t draw. If I could, that’d be totally awesome and I’d be able to make more cool things. But I can’t. The best I can do is take something that has elements of what I’d like to have in whatever I’m designing and adapt them. Apparently, I didn’t adapt enough and that worked against me.
I’ve been trying to use less and less photos recently, mainly because there isn’t too much I can do with them in Inkscape. So to solve both problems at the same time, I’m going to try more and more to design only with type. I’ve got a good library of typefaces to choose from and I’m sure that those unicode blocks will have some glyphs that are of use.
In retrospect, using type would really have been a good idea, considering that the original theme revolved around a dash. I could probably think up some good ideas right now, but I guess it’s too late for that.