9.10.08
Hack Jam: 10.8.08
Discussion: typography, drawing, and the library of our dreams.
Font was on the table because Adam's been working on a font for the coming nanowrimo; for tasks of that nature, several of us use FontForge. Fontforge has a miserable interface; it's highly unintuitive, uses multiple windows that cannot be docked, and is all around a hassle to use. However, it is open source software -- and is pretty much the ONLY free or even reasonably cheap software that will allow you to make the most of what the TrueType and OpenType standard have to offer in terms of kerning pairs, ligatures, and hinting. Powerful but not agile or intuitive? The story of open source.
We also talked about how unfortunate it was that so few pieces of software allow for the use of these features even when they are included in a font; Adobe products remain nearly the only bastion of font flexibility --- outside, of course, the ever miraculous Latex.
I mentioned that I had offended an art student by mentioning that I thought it was worth any artist's time to learn to draw. In my opinion, the ability to communicate visually, to see objects with a draftsman's eyes, is enough excuse. But still further, it is expected of you --- if you say you're an artist, lay people assume that means you can draw. As Adam put it: "When someone asks 'Can you draw that?', 'No' is the boring answer." I brought up Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain which is a book of exersizes based on a neuro-psychological understanding of how draftsmen draw; I recommended her methods as pedagogical breakthroughs which ought to be applied but, at least in my experience, have not been.
On calling my shots:
I did not get the Livescribe working with virtualization; I did get the pen working on a native windows system, and it is recognized by a VirtualBox machine, but the LiveScribe Desktop installer throws an unrecoverable error when attempting to communicate with the pen. Will try VMPlayer.
This week I call several small things:
Font was on the table because Adam's been working on a font for the coming nanowrimo; for tasks of that nature, several of us use FontForge. Fontforge has a miserable interface; it's highly unintuitive, uses multiple windows that cannot be docked, and is all around a hassle to use. However, it is open source software -- and is pretty much the ONLY free or even reasonably cheap software that will allow you to make the most of what the TrueType and OpenType standard have to offer in terms of kerning pairs, ligatures, and hinting. Powerful but not agile or intuitive? The story of open source.
We also talked about how unfortunate it was that so few pieces of software allow for the use of these features even when they are included in a font; Adobe products remain nearly the only bastion of font flexibility --- outside, of course, the ever miraculous Latex.
I mentioned that I had offended an art student by mentioning that I thought it was worth any artist's time to learn to draw. In my opinion, the ability to communicate visually, to see objects with a draftsman's eyes, is enough excuse. But still further, it is expected of you --- if you say you're an artist, lay people assume that means you can draw. As Adam put it: "When someone asks 'Can you draw that?', 'No' is the boring answer." I brought up Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain which is a book of exersizes based on a neuro-psychological understanding of how draftsmen draw; I recommended her methods as pedagogical breakthroughs which ought to be applied but, at least in my experience, have not been.
On calling my shots:
I did not get the Livescribe working with virtualization; I did get the pen working on a native windows system, and it is recognized by a VirtualBox machine, but the LiveScribe Desktop installer throws an unrecoverable error when attempting to communicate with the pen. Will try VMPlayer.
This week I call several small things:
- A post reviewing the Livescribe.
- A post with a right-brained drawing excersize you can do at home
- Screen-print a t-shirt for Maker faire.
posted by Sam Bleckley # 11:59 
