I have been interested in generative art (art generated by code) for as long as I remember, and Flight 404 was always one of my favorite websites. I hadn’t checked for anything new until just today. Boy am I glad I did. Amazing stuff. Read about the process if you are interested… (part One, Two, and Three).
As far back as I can remember Robert Hodgin did most of his work in Flash and Flight 404 was primarily used as his portfolio. For awhile now Robert has been dabbling in the Processing library for most of his experiments. Here’s another of his creations. Check out his blog for lots more!
Helvetica is the most ubiquitous typeface in this era.
Are you a typophile?…a typomaniac? At the remarkable and inspiring Future of Software conference held at Adobe this week, we were privileged to view a screening of Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica. Helvetica is a “film about a font”. Really?? A film about nothing but a font?. If you are a graphic designer I highly recommend the documentary - you’ll find the film to be an invaluable historical record.
After watching the film, I can’t get away from Helvetica. It’s everywhere I look! As observed in the film, Helvetica is the “perfume of the city”….you don’t notice it, but you’d miss it if it wasn’t there. And considering it was invented over 51 years ago (by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann), it’s incredibly timeless. Helvetica is the tofu of the font world. It adapts to its environment and allows the content to infer the meaning, as opposed to most typefaces. Helvetica is about the negative space, “figure-ground relationship properly executed”, the space between letters, rather than the positive space. It’s a purely neutral font, clean, efficient.
When I look at a street sign, or advertisement now, and when it isn’t Helvetica, I have wonder what it is…. Have you seen or used those cell phones that can listen to any tune on the radio or TV and identify the artist and title of the track automatically? Well, there’s a damn cool site (and probably more) out there that can actually tell you what font or fonts are used in an image. You simply upload the picture you are curious about to the site and it will detect the glyphs within and report back to you the probable typefaces that match. One such site, MyFonts.com, provides a really nifty “What The Font” feature. Give it a try.
So, now that you know Helvetica is lurking everywhere… have you ever heard of the Trajan font? No? Guess again. Watch this absolutely great video:
…what it feels like to be poisoned by food.
Ugh. What a rough couple of days. Decided to have a healthy fish dinner with friends. Took a few bites of my Halibut, followed by a fourth..only the fourth tasted like I was biting into one of Davy Jones rotting tentacles. So nasty. I returned the dish and the chef confirmed it was bad but it was too late. 25 minutes later I was vomiting. Made it back to my hotel and continuing getting sick (think dual exhaust) - and by four a.m. I was completely unable to walk due to dehydration. Hotel security called an ambulance for me and I was off to the hospital to replenish the 25% of the fluids that I’d lost. Another twenty four hours later I could finally stomach water — don’t wish such an experience on my worst enemy…
