A Photo
H2Office - a compact, versatile floating office unit for use in marinas and inland waterways(via @chrisangle)
A Photo
This ugly iPhone 4G concept design makes me sad. It looks like a cheap knock-off, not something Apple would ever design.
A Photo
Rétrofuturs - Alarmist, but funny.
This is the first time I have seen YouTube style ads on images.
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A Post Entitled MyPaint, a simple open-source painting app
I’ve been looking for an open-source equivalent to Project Dogwaffle or Corel Painter for a while, and today I finally found MyPaint. The app is very simple, offering many preset natural media brushes, with the ability to customise and add your own. Naturally, these respond to the pressure sensitivity of a Wacom tablet pen, or similar. It supports layers (but seems to lack a dedicated window to manage them). There’s also a colour picker and… well, that’s about it.
It’s available to download for Windows and Linux, but there doesn’t seem to be a Mac version.
Don’t be mislead by my attached image - I’ve simply doodled on one of my earlier GIMP creations.
Now I just need an idea…
A Post Entitled 3ds Max vs. Blender: Revealing results of a CG software user survey
via cgenie.com
It’s clear from the pie chart that 3ds Max is the giant in the market here, with Maya (also an Autodesk product) the next big player. If you scroll down the article, what really stands out is that both of these packages consistently rank the lowest in user satisfaction.
I was surprised to see that Lightwave has such a small share. I’ve always had a soft spot for it, but perhaps in recent years the situation has changed. I stopped doing 3D work around the same time that Modo came out, and I was aware that many were switching loyalties then.
The Cinema and Houdini get big positives, but I’m especially pleased to see the open-source Blender rank so highly in most responses. I’m hoping to get back into CG graphics soon, and I’d love to invest my energies in free software.
A Post Entitled Angle of Attack
Digging through old folders on a HD, I found this render of a
spacecraft hitting atmos. I love the design of this ship, so I
remember leaving the rear section in the composition deliberately.
With hindsight I really should have left it out. This would have been rendered in Lightwave 3D, and worked on further
in Photoshop. Background plate was probably a NASA image, with a CG
starfield ‘shopped in. I’ve also attached an unfinished penguin mode
I found.
spacecraft hitting atmos. I love the design of this ship, so I
remember leaving the rear section in the composition deliberately.
With hindsight I really should have left it out. This would have been rendered in Lightwave 3D, and worked on further
in Photoshop. Background plate was probably a NASA image, with a CG
starfield ‘shopped in. I’ve also attached an unfinished penguin mode
I found.
A Post Entitled Geronimo! Adventures in Space and Type: Part 3
Another late night progress report for ‘my’ Doctor Who font. Mostly subtle tweaks, but these usually take the longest. There’s still a lot I’m not keen on, in Particular the V. Both Y’s are ugly, but I’m fairly happy with the current G and Q situation.
I’m open to constructive criticisms and suggestions at this point.
A Post Entitled Geronimo! Adventures in Space and Type: Part 2
Progress report for day two of the ‘Geronimo!’ Doctor Who font experiment. Most of it is basically there, but I’m pretty unhappy with some of the details. Nothing like kerning has even been attempted here, this is literally just so I can see how the whole alphabet looks.
Now I need to work on how to make the difficult characters (B, G, Q, Y, V) work, and what, if anything, I can do to improve the bland characters (E, F, S, Z).
I still plan to do numbers and some of the more essential special characters(“, &, #, ~, @, +, - and parentheses).
A Post Entitled Geronimo! Adventures in Space and Type: Part 1
This evening I’ve been playing around in Inkskape, trying to reproduce the typeface used in the new Doctor Who logo. If I finish it, I’ll set it free on the internet for the Whovians to play with. I picked it mostly because it’s a nice simple design. I plan to call the font ‘Geronimo’.
On closer inspection, I’ve started to take a strong dislike to this new logo. I find the ‘DW’ TARDIS shape to be huge and ugly, but even the letters themselves seem to have some funny issues. Look at the third slide attached to this post, or go and find a larger version of this image on the BBC site. The H’s right leg is thicker, and the O is not symmetrical vertically! The W is just so ugly I’m reluctant to draw it, and I have no idea why they made the R like they did.
Anyway, I’m going to be faithful to what they’ve done here, but I’ll probably build in an alternate character set with my own ‘improvements’.
A Post Entitled Apple’s iPad design
I am not a big fan of the new iPad design. Perhaps it will appeal more when I get to handle one, but I’m not blown away by what I see.
The pad itself is very much like some of the lamer mock-ups: A big ass iPhone. The way the icons on the home screen are all spaced out looks odd too. Perhaps future OS updates will improve this.
I’m really not keen on the design of that stand either. I wonder how easy it will be to knock over?
Brushes looked good though. I’m sure the iPad will very quickly have a huge selection of creative apps, which is just about the only thing that could persuade me to get one. I didn’t see news of a pen though? I’m sure a third-party will come out with a capacitive pen, like the Apple staff have for the new iPod Touch PoS devices.
The pricing seemed pretty reasonable I guess, but, I dunno, the thing just gives me bad vibes. It just has the feel of doomed prototype.
A Post Entitled Rocketship sketch (and my retirement from #Daily365)
Last weekend I bought a nice heavy weight sketch pad and some new technical drawing pens, and I’ve finally had some time to sketch something. I’m not thrilled with the wonky proportions and I rushed some of the details, but I’m generally happy with the result, considering I haven’t sat down to draw something like this in years!
This also seems like a pretty good time to mention my daily designs - or lack thereof! Yeah, I gave up after two weeks. The truth is, I wasn’t thrilled to post an unfinished idea (the astro-penguin illustration I still have plans to finish) and it kind of killed my motivation. I could have attempted some simpler designs, but I really wasn’t interested in producing that kind of stuff.
As bad as I feel about quitting, I still plan to post things I’ve been working on fairly regularly, like this sketch. I’m still doing a Thing a Week, and I regularly update another photography blog.
A Post Entitled The dog’s bollocks :—
:—
Citing usage from 1949, the OED calls this mark the dog’s bollocks, which it defines as, “typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.” This is why I love scrounging around the linguistic scrap heap that is the OED. I always come across a little gold. And by “gold,” I mean, “vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons.”
A great article for budding archetypists and palaeotypographists!
A Post Entitled Retro cassette icon freebie #Daily365
Today’s daily design is an icon of an old cassette tape. I’m making the actual SVG vector file available with this post in an attached ZIP file (I think Posterous does something sensible with those!). I consider it free to use for any non-profit reason.
It generally follows the principles of the Tango icons, commonly used on Linux’s Gnome desktop, but I haven’t exactly paid close attention to their guidelines.
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