One of my favourite sites to visit is ‘Oh Joy!’ not least for the name alone. Reading this site is a joy indeed, and conveniently enough I have a type-related post on there to link to!

Cool Hotel: The Library

I’ve been using Google SketchUp today. I’ve been sketching a design for a garden! It’s got some amazingly useful tools, and some fantastic features… and a couple of very strange and annoying bugs. See those vertical posts? They represent pergola-style gates that already exist in the garden - and they’re slightly different heights in the sketch (but not in real life). This is because:

1. The extrude feature wouldn’t let me extrude past the limit of the adjacent low wall in a single step. I would have to extrude to that height, then extrude again to the height I want, which I have to do by eye because...
2. The extrude numbers said, ‘-2.05m’ but when I told it to be ‘-2.0m’ the pole disappeared. Setting it to positive didn’t make any difference. In fact, typing in any value made the extrude go away.

OK, so it’s beta software, so you expect a few bugs, but these ones really detract from the experience.

And… just how crap is ADSL? Especially from Pipex! It drops every 30 minutes or so, and takes about a minute to come back up again… partly the fault of the modem, I’m sure. Bad netgear. Bad pipex. Evil bad PCWorld for selling my parents an adsl router modem thing that does so much stuff, and doesn’t do the main thing it’s supposed to do properly.

I’ve come across Penguin by Designers on a few sites now, and the cover intrigues me. I was discussing the grid used on Pelican Originals the other day, after seeing this post. I had thought that both sets of books used a fairly conventional grid, but assuming this cover is accurate, then the real one is more interesting.

I was looking at it, trying to work out how it’s built. I doubted that any part of it was entirely arbitrary so I’ve redrawn it, but having each line only drawn in an obvious relation to something that already exists. What results is a pretty much perfect copy of the existing grid, so unless I was just lucky, I guess this is how they made their grid. These are the gridlines - each one is illustrated in blue as it is introduced:

1. Divide the page in two, vertically
2. Draw the ‘right’ diagonal, across the page
3. Draw the ‘left’ diagonal across the page
4. Draw a line from the top right corner so that it intersects the ‘left’ diagonal at a right angle
5. At that intersection, draw a horizontal line across the page
6. Draw a line from where the line from step 1 meets the top of the page to where the line from step 4 meets the left edge
7. From the intersection of that line with the ‘left’ diagonal from step 3, draw a horizontal across the page
8. From the intersection of the lines from steps 3, 4 and 5, draw a vertical to the top of the page
9. Now draw a diagonal from the top left of the page to where the line from step 5 meets the right hand side of the page
10. Now draw a vertical from the line from step 5 to the top of the page so that it passes throught the intersection of the lines from steps 3 and 7
11. Now for a final horizontal across the full page, passing through the intersections of the lines from steps 6 and 9
12. Then draw a final vertical from the intersection of this line with the left diagonal from step 3. Then add your titles and publisher logo!

The sampler for Moderne Schwabacher

After reading this thread on Typophile about a new beer label I did a quick search for Hartwig Schrift (the original type for the label) and found this incredible site. It’s got a collection of resurrected blackletter types (and elsewhere, Pirate types!) some of which I’ve seen before, others which I’ve never seen, like Jaecker-Schrift. I love blackletter type anyway, and there are some real gems in there. The fonts themselves are of patchy quality, but if you’re after some beautiful letterforms to use in lettering or logo projects, it’s definitely the place to go.

Eth from Jaecker-Schrift

This capital Eth from Jaecker-Schrift for example is really quite compelling. The composition of the diacritic brings to (my) mind Suprematism, or Kandinsky - it’s that dot, almost like a full stop hidden in the character and balanced by the verticals - so perfect! As in the sampler on the page, I’d be tempted to use it as an ornamental ‘D’ as after all, it’s so ornamented it goes far beyond a normal Eth that you couldn’t tell the difference anyway. I’m also thinking of creating a set of similarly ornamented caps to use as cadels with the font. I have a thing for cadels too…

Files can be uploaded, it’s now all working just fine. Finally!

That was probably the biggest pain in the arse of any site I’ve ever had to get going. EE Core installed instantly, I’d got the templates all sorted out already locally (using MAMP, which is awesome) and then the database kept falling over for some reason.

I host with Supanames who are normally pretty damn good (I’ve recommended them to friends in fact) but they’ve beefed up their timewaster controls on support requests. Cue much tediousness of explaining that, yes, I have tried to access the site using a different browser, that I can get to the control panel and a completely new error from phpMyAdmin is hardly likely to be a browser caching issue… but hey. It’s now sorted. Turns out that the database was corrupted.

Sigh.

So. On with the type!