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monaux: Typography Tips: Lately I’ve had a few people ask me what fonts I use. I don’t use any fonts - I draw all my typography from scratch, and I encourage you to do the same! Typography is something that is frequently ignored or overlooked, but it is one of the most essential elements of design. I hate seeing beautiful illustrations ruined by lazy computer type. I do occasionally base my type on various existing typefaces (usually from Victorian posters & advertisements), but I always modify the characters and invent new ones. Here’s my process for creating logo/header typography: I start by ruling myself some guides so the characters have a uniform height. Then, I work out how wide each character should be. This is generally one width with exceptions for wide characters such as Ms and Ws, and narrow characters like Is. I then start drawing the letterforms and I always try to find ways to make them interact with one another. One trick to bind a block of type together is to make the letterforms flow and link with themselves. Crossbars (like in capital As and Hs) are good to experiment with, as are curly bits like in Gs, Cs, Js and Rs. After I’m happy with how everything is working, I ink it. If you’re serious about learning typography, my favourite book on the subject is called “Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age”. It’s a collection of hundreds of excellent examples of typography that no letterer should be without. It also pays to know about the basic principles of typography - how different typefaces handle different letters, which parts should be thickened, when you should include serifs and what style they should be, how kerning and leading affect how a piece of type looks, and so on. It could be helpful to take a course on it (I studied it at university), but I’m pretty sure you can learn everything you need to know simply by being observant.

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 Voices in art that speak for mysticism, creativity and depth. A smart book connecting the lives of 3 key artists who are often over looked. Also, if you are into patterns in nature, alchemy, inner transformation through the creative process or healing, there’s not a better collect to start with as an introduction to these three artists.With a few notable exceptions including M.C. Escher, Dali, and a few others, I’d never really thought of drawing or painting in terms of being a means to an end other than self expression. Af Klint, Kunz, and Martin came from three different parts of the world and from three different generations. Each of them had a slightly different approach to drawing. What they had in common was that they used drawing as a means to explore the inner universe of consciousness and perception. In that regard, they were way, way, way, ahead of their time. It might be a stretch to call Carl Jung an artist, but he did the same thing through the exploration of dreams. Likewise, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and their cohorts aren’t usually considered artists, yet they too explored consciousness and the nature of existence (albeit by different means)along the same lines as the three women represented here.This is a fantastic book for anyone interested in drawing. There’s an extra reward for those who also happen to be interested in the exploration of the mind, perception, and ultimately, a quest for spirituality.(via 3x An Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin: Catherine de Zegher, Hendel Teicher, Bracha Ettinger, Briony Fer, Elizabeth Finch, Adam Fuss, Rosalind Krauss, Birgit Pelzer, Griselda Pollock, Kathryn Tuma, Susan Klein, Richard Tuttle, Cecilia Vicuna, Terry Winters: 9780300108262: Amazon.com: Books)

Physics is clear and certain. Light is a wave of energy (or a particle, but for today it’s just a wave OK?) and, like a vibrating guitar string, light waves wiggle at certain frequencies. Some of those frequencies we detect with our eyes, and the frequency determines its color: Now we’re getting somewhere! Or are we? First off, we’ve suddenly lost the notion of a “wheel.” As much as the previous color systems have contradicted each other, at least they all agreed that hues transform smoothly and continuously, one to the next, a beautiful symmetry with neither beginning nor end. But here we have a clear beginning (red) and end (violet). The colors in-between are continuous — and seem to generally match the order seen in the various color wheels — but then it just terminates with violet. How does it get back to red? What about that fuchsia / magenta / purplish-reddish color which isclearly present in every color wheel but missing from the physical spectrum? How can a color be missing? Where does it come from? But wait, we’re not done. Another thing to resolve: Opposites Every seven-year-old kid in America is taught that “the opposite of red is green” and “the opposite of blue is yellow.” But what does that mean exactly? After all, there’s nothing in that linear physical light spectrum to indicate that any color is “the opposite” of any other, particularly not those two pairs. And the color wheels aren’t much help either; trying to match the “opposites” on the painter’s wheel yields an unsatisfying asymmetry where two of the primaries are opposite, and the third is opposite from a secondary: But “opposites” are real. In the early 1800s Goethe (yes, the Goethe) noticed that red/green and blue/yellow were never perceived together, in the sense that no color could be described as a combination of those pairs. No color could be described as “reddish green;” if you are asked to imagine “a green with a bit of red,” nothing comes to mind. In the following 150 years, various experiments were devised to test this idea, all of which validated his observation. There’s something to this. Something neither the wheels nor the spectrum can explain. It’s time to get down to the real source of color: The ridiculous complexity of human beings. The answers: Physiology (of course). Caveat Emptor: The following is a gross and irresponsible over-simplification of what actually happens. But it’s correct in its general thrust, and few people on Earth (myself excluded) are qualified to explain with complete accuracy, so in the interest of general illumination, no pun intended, OK maybe intended just a little bit, I’m doing it anyway. So there. Of course it starts in the eye, where three types of cells called “cones” measure the amount of red, green, and blue light hitting the retina. “Ah ha,” I can hear you CSS freaks scream, “it’s RGB after all! I was right! All that time spent — nay invested — in knowing things like #001067 is the default title-bar color in Windows 95 was well worth it!” Hold on there, cowboy. Actually “amount of red, green, and blue” is a gross simplification, as I warned. Peaking under the hood (just a tad), the three types of cones are in fact denoted S, M, and L for “short, medium, and long” wavelengths, and actually respond to a range of wavelengths, with a certain level of response for different wavelengths, like so: But I digress, and besides I did promise to be all gross and irresponsible, so I’ll stick with that. So there are R, G, and B cones. The signals from these cones don’t go straight to the brain; they first pass through a pre-processing filter, and it’s this filter that explains all the mysteries. Actually there are three filters. Filter #1 works like this: Explanation: The more R there is, the more positive the signal; the more G, the more negative the signal. If there’s relatively equal amounts of R and G — whether neither of both, a little of both, or a lot of both — the signal is zero. This explains why there’s no “greenish-red.” Because: Let’s say R and G can go between 0 and 100 units of intensity. Consider the case of “full red with a little green,” where R=100 (full intensity) and G=25 (one-quarter intensity). Then separately consider the case of “strong red with no green,” where R=75 and G=0. In both cases, Filter #1 computes the same output signal: 75. But remember the brain doesn’t get the raw R and G signals — it only gets the filter’s output — so the brain cannot tell the difference between these two scenarios. So there’s no such thing as “red with a little green” — there’s just a less intense red. The brain physically cannot see “greenish-red” because the filter removes that information. Knowing that blue/yellow is the other opposite pair, you can probably guess what Filter #2 is: Here blue (B) is opposed with a combination of both the R and G channels. The R and G cones are stimulated either when there’s literally both red and green light (like when a CSS coder turns on both red and green as #FFFF00 to create yellow), or when 570nm light (yellow, on the visible spectrum) stimulates both R and G cones. Filter #3 is simple: In short, it measures the quantity of light without regard to what hue it is. This is “how bright,” or “luminance” in color-theory parlance. And magenta? It comes from full R and B with no G, activating Filter #1 full-positive, Filter #2 at zero. It’s not a physical wavelength of color, it’s just a combination of outputs from two filters. (via Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works by @ASmartBear)

Artwork, Graphics, Designs, Photos & Ventures throughout my summer break 2011...word