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This blog has been inactive for quite a while. From now on the posts will be published in the blog Acuarela, originally devoted to watercolour and other painting and drawing techniques, but whose scope has been broadeded to include other topics such as graphic design, typography, animation, publishing and the surprises of the online world.

So, point your browsers to the new destination.

Of course, a handy RSS summary of Acuarela (atom) or RSS 2.0 is also available.

Typephases featured in Computer Arts

A selection of our freeware fonts and dingbats is featured in the April issue of Computer Arts, the world’s best selling creative magazine. Computer Arts is full of interesting tutorials, reviews, designer profiles and more, everything packaged in an irresistible eye-candy design. Besides the printed edition, you can also enjoy their website, which offers a huge number of step-by-step tutorials to learn advanced uses for your favourite graphic design software, such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash...
The magazine is published in english, and there are also localized editions in polish, french, korean, chinese and italian.

High Logic font tools at Typephases Design : the notepad

High Logic is a software firm from the Netherlands specialised in font software. They offer two programs, the Font Creator Program, which at the moment is at its fifth version, and a new font management program called MainType. I have recently tried both programs and here are my impressions.

All-in-one Web Developer’s online reference list

The Web Developer’s handbook is a compact list of categorised links about whatever you might need to read or use about website development, exploring imagination, CSS, Color Tools, SEO, Usability etc. etc. Everything in one file: a very handy bookmark.

Tea time

Some herbal tea freshly brewed & served for this week’s Illustration Friday theme. You may click any of these variations to see a bigger sample. If you want the recipe for this special tea, just tell me ;-)

Simple?

This was supposed to be simple, wasn’t it?
Well, here we are illustrating the “simple” theme of the week at Illustration Friday. The base image is taken from my Bizarries II dingbat, available from Typephases Design.

GTDrawings is ready

I started a parallel mini-blog called GTDrawings to show my visual interpretations of the well-known productivity & personal organisation book by David Allen, Getting Things Done. Now it is complete with the sketches I made about the text. The only additional stuff I will be posting will be, perhaps, some more polished illustration.

Don’t miss it out if you’re interested in taking control of your life and getting organised!

Another chair

Another chair, theme of the week at Illustration Friday. This one is an experiment with Expression (now Microsoft Acrylic), a program I definitely want to use more because it’s really outstanding for creative vector artwork.

This is quite simple and I made it with the mouse—not the ideal way to draw.

You can click the image to see a bigger version.

Chair (Illustration Friday)

This week’s theme at Illustration Friday is “chair” and this is what I’ve come up with. I was thinking a bit about electric chairs, chairs upside down, chairs full of stuff but finally I doodled this one.

I use this kind of drawing to experiment different techniques. I just have made a quick pencil drawing, then scanned it at 100dpi, traced it in Inkscape and finally had some fun adding colour and texture in The Gimp.

You can click the image to see a bigger version.

I want to live in this house

I admit it. I’m hopelessly addicted to Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. This Craig McCracken production catched my eye immediately for many reasons. First, being full of imaginary characters, the animators and designers have have been able to take an unlimited number of creative paths. The backgrounds are awesome, with the big victorian house and exquisite care with colours. And so on: too many good things to mention, IMHO. There is a wide variety of influences in the graphic style of the series, ranging from Psychedelic to retro-fifties style. I really enjoy every second of each episode and if you are even remotely like-minded as me, you’ll do the same —if you haven’t discovered the world of Foster’s yet.

From a technical point of view, the show is also remarkable because it has been produced entirely digital tools: a combination of Adobe Illustrator, Flash and After Effects. There is an interesting thread on the Animation World Network forum where many technical details about the production are revealed. The thread is quite long, but if you are interested on the technical side of creating this superb show you’ll find very relevant comments. The use of vector animation on this series is groundbreaking and very, very good.

Besides the official show page in Cartoon Network, you may also find it interesting to read a Craig McCracken interview about Foster’s, and the unnofficial fan site.

A wonderful online library about animation and drawing

The folks atAnimation Meat have put together a wonderful resource for learning cartoon drawing and animation techniques.

Look in the “notes” section: in this area you will find animation notes from various artists and various studios in "print ready" format (PDF.) It includes drawing class notes from the drawing instructor for Walt Disney Studios Walt Stanchfield (nearly 60 handouts); Helpful information for doing full feature quality traditional animation; and more. A ton of materials to study, practice and enjoy.

In-depth articles about digital image editing

For those who feel the most powerful image editing tools, such as histograms, levels, curves and other arcane features of your photo-editing program are too intimidating to care about, there’s an excellent, in-depth article at Arstechnica, called Editing your digital images without the mystery. The article continues with other recommended parts, such as Retouching techniques 101 and Compositing.

Public Domain Movie Torrents à go-go

The Public Domain Movie Torrents website is an invaluable repository of the strangest artifacts from the past of cinema, especially from the realm of B-and lower movies.
For example, let's take a look at some movie like The Attack of the Giant Leeches (!). The synopsis goes like this:

After local-moonshine swilling trapper Lem Sawyer (George Cisar) sees a giant creature, people start disappearing. While searching for illegal traps Steve Benton (Ken Clark) and Nan Greyson, his girl-friend (Jan Shepard) find Lem dying with giant sucker wounds on his body. One couple Liz Walker (Yvette Vickers) and Cal Moulton (Michael Emmett), forced into the water by her enraged husband Dave Walker (Bruno Ve Sota), gets taken by the leeches. When police refuse to believe Dave's story, he hangs himself. Soon after this, 2 more trappers disappear, the local Game Warden Steve Benton gets involved. He and Nan's father Dr Greyson (Tyler McVey) realize that the people were taken by the leeches and the leeches live in caves under the swamp. Using dynamite, the 4 missing bodies are discovered and the leeches are destroyed.

Feline subject

A completely different subject and technique for this week’s Illustration Friday theme, “cats”. This is a crosshatched ink drawing on paper. You can see bigger versions in my Flickr page.

Illustration friday: cats

This is a “cat” related illustration for this week’s topic on Illustration Friday. I have made a rather simple vector drawing, then enriched it a little with some texture. Finally I couldn’t help adding some lettering. Great fun.

(you may click the image to see bigger samples.)

FightAIDS@Home, SETI@home and other volunteering from home

You can volunteer your CPU to power global non-profit research in initiatives such as SETI at home or Fight AIDS at home.

There are other projects of this kind. Grid.org is a single destination site for large-scale, non-profit research projects of global significance. With the participation of over 3 million devices worldwide, some projects like Cancer Research, Anthrax Research, Smallpox Research and the new Human Proteome Folding Project (running in conjunction with IBM's new World Community Grid) have achieved record levels of processing speed and success.

Blue moments

Illustration Friday theme “blue” (you can click the image to see a bigger sample.)

Like most of my contributions to this project, this one is actually a vector illustration made with simple shapes (see the underlying structure below) a little processed with Virtual Photographer (a freeware Photoshop-compatible plugin.)

The vector shapes for this illustration:

Technorated

I have just added my blogs to the Technorati listings to make it easier to find specific topics, categorise the contents and improve the networking for my projects. Several tweaks related to this will follow soon.

Milton Glaser and Nicholas Negroponte: “Since Then: Two Points of View”

Listen to this conversation (plus backstage interview) between two of the world’s most significant voices from design and technology. The conversation actually began at the first AIGA national conference in Boston 20 years ago when AIGA represented graphic artists and technology promised to change the world.
Together, these giants discuss their work and relationships to community, history and humanity. Then, at the AIGA Design Conference in 2005, they reflect on what has changed and what has remained the same.
(Mind you it’s two huge mp3 files, but it’s worth listening!)

µTorrent client

I was rather intrigued by the proliferation of Bittorrent downloads in many websites. For example, the latest version of OpenOffice.org is available in this p2p format, very efficient and fast for popular files.

Taking a look at the available Bittorrent-compatible clients, I’ve found that some popular choices are Azureus, BitTornado and BitComet. Shareaza is also Bittorrent-compatible now. But there’s a diminutive client called µTorrent that I want to comment here. It’s remarkable: very small file download (about 350k!), no installation necessary, robust and easy to use, with freeware licence and computer resources-friendly.

Categorised under tools, technology

Photofonts

Fontlab Photofont is an exciting new technology that allows you to create and use full-color bitmap type with transparency.

Photofont Start is a free plugin that allows the use of photofonts in Adobe Photoshop and compatible applications for Mac OS and Windows. There is a free version for Windows and commercial version for Mac, plus a detailed user manual and sample photofonts at the Fontlab website.

Should you wish to create your own Photofonts, you would need Bitfonter.

The Portable Freeware Collection

The Portable Freeware Collection is a site dedicated to the collection and cataloging of freeware that can be extracted to any directory and run independently without prior installation. You can carry these applications around on a memory stick / USB flash drive, or copy / migrate from PC to PC via simple copying of files —hence the term portable freeware.

Some freeware already come in the form of a ZIP file, ready to be extracted and run from any directory. Others require an extraction procedure, which could be as simple as installing them, extracting the necessary files, and uninstalling them again.

This website has a comprehensive list of portable applications neatly classified in categories, plus a handy RSS feed which will let you know of new additions to their list.

Steve Mack’s Spot Illustration

What really fascinates me about Steve Mack’s Spot Illustration is his natural-looking technique, surprisingly a complete digital (Adobe Illustrator based, 100%) process. He really doesn’t want to explain how he creates these great-looking illustrations:

“...Truth is I am keeping kind of tight lipped about this. I devised a little program modification in Adobe Illustrator that lets me texture on the go, dynamically. That means I don’t have cross software versions of the same illustrations.”