Sam Inada 6000

Here's Sam's first draft of his font. Pretty cool, I think. I'll probably steal it for my own selfish purposes. Christy had a good post about how it's tricky to talk about your young'uns without sounding like the obnoxious freaky parent. I just like watching Sam roll. Keep it comin', Jr.

Also, respect to all of the true TYPOGRAPHERS keepin' it real out there. I am not one of your ilk. I do appreciate your freakiness, though. Kern on, you weirdos.

Miles Inada 3000

Crotchety and ticked off now that it's 11:20 p.m. Grrr. Productive day, swell day, but I noticed I was tired and aggravated by 9:00 p.m. I'm feeling driven to get some groove on with Arms and Ether, and the groove had not fully materialised. Hence crankiness. So I put in a few more hours and feel a bit better about my work. Unfortunately, staying up = increased cranky, so . . . we'll see how it all shakes down.

I did finish up my hand-lettering font, though. Behold, "Miles Inada 3000." Named in honor of all shady products that have ever added a number to their title in hopes of improving its appeal. Also named in honor of all great comedy titles that have mocked this convention over the past quarter century or so. See Mystery Science Theater 3000; Pimpbot 5000; and Look Around You's, Music 2000. I've declared the first version of Miles Inada 3000 as "good enough for government work." In other words, I'll need to see it in action before I'll go back and make further changes on it.

fontabulous

Here's an early stab at the Miles Inada font done in Fontographer. Whoo hoo.
I haven't worked on the leading, kerning, tracking etc. yet. Thrillsville.

Friday down in flames

Sometimes you expect big things from a day and it doesn't deliver. I thought this would be a big day to get some Arms and Ether goin.' No such luck. Meetings. Yay. Grumble. I did eat a lot of pizza though. Ugh. For the love of . . . Here's some of what I'm cookin' up.
1) I want to sell shirts and books on the site. I'm looking at cafepress.com, but I think I'll also get the fine young men (Alex Falkenstein and Jess Gleasman) at basement-ink to do a run of higher quality screen print shirts as well.
2) Fontlab with Scanfont is looking good so far. I just need more TIME.
3) Arsenal's playing Wigan at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow. Don't think I'll be up for that one. Darn.

Fontlab

More techno-babble. I ordered Fontlab for the lab today. I'm going to take a stab at making a font based on my "lettering." I figure even if I make a hash of it, it'll be nice for the students to give it a go. I've had some pretty studly students this quarter, so hopefully some of them will take up the challenge. Should be a cool tool for the motivated.
Well, I'm not on the picture-magic computer, so, uh here's a picture of my son with his young Beatles hair-do.

Lettering--sweet god, save me

Here's a stab at hand lettering--compare it with the image in the previous post. I did several versions of the text on bristol with a Hunt 102 nib, and some Micron pens. The version I used here was done with a .05 micron.

I had to make some of the balloons bigger and adjust some of my word spacing once I got it into the computer. Screen readability is much more of an issue with hand lettering. I do think I'm liking it better than the Digital Strip version.

Seeing as it is going to actually be a pain in the @#$% and probably double my production time to hand-letter, I think I'm going to have to make/commission a custom font based on my lettering. Only thing is, I think I'm going to need to hand letter quite a few strips first before I get a decent sample of my lettering to start creating a font with. Sigh.