Because I didn’t opt to have the fancier lens implants, I just have good lenses, but need reading glasses with an astigmatism correction. Which are now on order. Glass lenses. Extra weight, yes, but they clean up so nice. My optometrist is the only place in town that grinds their own lenses, so they can do glass, and have it within a week.
We tried one of those TENS units that uses electric pads to make muscle contract as a treatment for sciatic pain—I read all the ads and reviews for various pills and nostrums and then read WebMD, which said that TENS devices work, not so much the other things. Well, we got one, and it does help. Unfortunately, it refused to recharge. So back it goes to Amazon and we ordered another one.
I am also—gasp—ordering a bedspread set, inspired by the fact the room now has a very nice floor.
If we can just get through the next week or so with jury duty, we are going to get the living room floor to match and quit living on plywood among boxes, of evenings.
Good that the surgery went well, and that the flooring is proceeding apace. I went to our local ReStore on Tuesday, looking for shelf brackets. They had none, but they DID have half a dozen boxes of Pergo @ $15 each. If I only had to do a small area, that would have been in the trunk of the car immediately. As it is, I’m putting off redoing the floor until we can replace a very battered sectional couch and an aging TV, and the cats show evidence they won’t be traumatized by all the upheaval. That might be easier said than done; I don’t know how you are keeping Mr. Sei and Mr. Shu from going ballistic.
They LOVE the new floor. Shu haroos and howls at Sei until he can organize a chase, and then they run and run and run, down the hall, around and through—*I* think it’s because the old carpet would catch their claws, and hurt. Now they yowl and chase—thumpety-thumpety-thumpety through everything, and over boxes, and up onto the cat tree as if they were youngsters again.
https://simonscat.com/simonscatlogic-crazytime/
Whew!
I really wanted people to be able to see some sort of preview of my works in progress, so they could know what I’ve got and how far along it all is.
I also wanted something that won’t give away too much too soon.
This is time-consuming, but eventually, a finished product happens. It had better! 😀 I need to get these done for all kinds of reasons. Simply to have my creative work done, out there, available for people to use, for one. And yes, to be able to patch my leaking budget and actually make a living doing what I love again.
So — Now you all can see samples of the most basic part of the fonts. Click a link to view sample images. Later on, when these are published, you’ll also be able to view pages for each font-family, and that front-end list will get a lot simpler.
For the curious: There’s a lot more to each font than just what’s shown. The sample images show the old ASCII 96 out of 279 OpenType Standard characters. Along the way, these will get upgraded to the Pro set of some 433 characters.
As I develop further, plans for each font-family may change, but this is what I anticipate so far.
[url=http://www.fontstylus.com/]FontStylus.com[/url]
Thank You All!
I think the link got a little borked; no matter, I got there 🙂
I like Retro Rocket; it doesn’t look like it would be out of place on a Golden Age sci-fi novel. Cedar Spirit makes me think of our previous discussion about various NA typefaces, in particular the script Sequoyah developed for the Cherokee language. Martian Mystery — “Ak! Ak-ak-ak! Ak-akak-akakak!!”
Good news that it’s gone well. Hope the bedspread’s good.
A cozy new bedspread as a winter reward to spruce up the place and stay toasty warm? Sounds good to me!
Very glad the eye checkup went fine and all is still well. That’s super. Bettre eyesight and longer term reassurance, really a relief. Stable, good eyesight is a real blessing.
—–
Heh, I only thought I’d cleaned up the link. Here it is, corrected:
http://www.fontstylus.com/
Retro Rocket and Martian Mystery were both inspired by Golden Age science fiction covers and movie logos, and by one of the fonts used for some of Heinlein’s reissues in the 1970’s. These are getting bolder weights and a “shadow” effect for some real eye-catching fun. Martian Mystery’s Italic slants to the left. (There’s no good way to provide left, right, and upright without some compromise, so I went with what would be the most unusual. I’m right-handed, but plenty of people are left-handed, and a left-slanting italic, well, why not, for Martians?)
Cedar Spirit has roots (ahem) in old wood display type, things like Caslon, Clarendon, Bodoni, and others, and a bit of Cyrillic influence. There’s also a feel of the Cherokee alphabet (syllabary) by Sequoyah. The most usual font for Cherokee, from his designs, was made during his lifetime, when types like Caslon, Baskerville, and Bodoni were created. (All those are named for real people who created those fonts.)
I intend to create other weights for it, and a “carved” version.
“Phidias” started out as an attempt to do a certain style of very minimal serifs. It was inteded as a very formal look. But what started coming out has a more romantic feel, and more casual, I think. I realized I’d done something odd in the lowercase, but this will lead to splitting it into Roman and Italics, and each will get the proper treatment for those. — Phidias was a classical Greek sculptor, one of, if not the best master sculptor in the ancient world. But his name doesn’t lend itself much to a typeface name, and doesn’t quite suit the font. It will get renamed, but I haven’t come up with a good name yet. — I’d still like to do a formal style like what I’d intended with this, but I really liked the results here.
“Vital” will get renamed too. I’m still not happy with the M and the N (capitals). There’s a recent typeface named Vitali, by an Italian designer, so I’m leaning toward Archer or Bowyer for the font name. Bentwood is already taken, and is a fine typeface. (I don’t have it. I do wish the designer would add a bolder weight.) — Vital is intended to give a soft, rounded, arched, arts-and-crafts feel, something warm and approachable.
I have an idea, not yet on computer, for something else in a sans-serif, inspired by milk and cereal, or milk and cookies.
Heh, Librarium also took an unusual turn, and is probably more a display type than an everyday book type. But it looks good. — The first drawings date from the late 1990’s or early 2000’s. — Librarium is probably bad schoolboy Latin. Bibliotheca is the usual word for a library. A Libreria in Spanish is a bookstore (as opposed to a Biblioteca, a library).
Artisan sort of fell into place as I began drawing it. It’s a little unusual as far as font classification goes, but is made to look very ordinary.
Affinity — has a long history, dating back to my first font work back in the 1990’s. I had two fonts, Sterling Formal and Sterling Casual, nearly done. But the backups, so far, I haven’t found, along with the other fonts I did back then. So I’ve had to redraw. I also had Affinity, a more monoline sans-serif. A search showed Sterling has been used for a couple of things, or I would’ve kept the name. Affinity suits it better.
Wanted Poster is redrawn from the old 1990’s version almost exactly, from memory, but I did alter a couple of letters from the design I had back then. The new design works better. — I plan to have a “grungy, distressed” Rough version, and the current Shiny version. If you detect a reference to a certain fandom, with the Shiny word, why yes, my coat does have a brownish color.
These all still need to have the toher weights and styles done, but I can submit and see what the review editorial committee thinks, soon.
I have more on the way. Hauler is from the 2000’s and 2010’s, and would be further along, but I realized the upper- and lowercase don’t quite jive. This is going to result in Slim and Wide versions, though. No sense throwing out good drawings of letters. — Hauler has a futuristic look, in a very usable book typeface. Your local cargo hauler and merchant starships should find it handy.
Galaxy Oval and Galaxy Quad — Date back to one of my earliest font designs, from the 1990’s. I wish I had those early files! But instead, it’s likely I’m going to have to redraw these from memory. I think I can do that. I knew pretty well what I did with the old Galaxy Quad Bold weight. I had planned a different system of weights for these, but that didn’t quite jive with the font I’d drawn. So it was going to be a display version. But in December or January, while working on another font design draft, I realized a better solution that will be used for the Galaxy series. These are pretty unique. There are only a handful of fonts that take that approach. I think I’ll really have something there. But what I have planned will take a long time to get done.
So — I have at least one font close to being done, for each of the ones with an example image shown. Cedar Spirit still needs some work to complete the Standard set, before I can do more on it.
I’ll be concentrating on getting other fonts in those series done, but periodically, I need a break from working with one font-family, so I pick up another and do some on it, then go back to the other project. It’s resulting in a sort of round-robin effect, a little delaying, but that’s what’s working best for me.
I’ve noted my approach to working and art seems to be similar to how Jane does things, lots going at once, a tendency to over-commit and then get bogged down. 🙂
I’m really super pleased with how my creativity and productivity are doing lately, for the fonts. But this is offset because my income and budget are not good and are worrying me, so I’m pushing as hard as I can physically manage, to get things done. Font production is a long-term project, much like novel writing. The pay is also feast-or-famine because there’s a long time between project completion. That should ease when I have a steady stream and workflow going, but not yet.
Still, I’m really proud to get this far on my goals, and I’m really enjoying the productivity and creativity. They’re going well. They’d be going better if I were sleeping better and didn’t have pressing deadlines, self-imposed. But overall, this is really good. I’m very happy with what I have going.
More news as it develops.
@bcs I really like the different typefaces. I did note that several of the ampersands were missing their “umbrella” I assume this is because the blocks cut off some of the actual character. Right now they look like lower case a and I would find that terribly confusing.
I’m very glad your eye surgeries went well. I’ve had 3 so far and it looks like a fourth is in order.
I also still wear glasses but it’s mostly for protection-I am effectively blind in my left eye and wear glasses for protection. I know it’s a one in a million chance but I’ve been wearing glasses for 60 years so a few more is OK with me.
I’m happy for you. Eye surgery is for me more worrying than other surgeries. Don’t know why, it just is.
When I moved out to the farm in 2005, it was winter, there was very little heat in the rooms, and the first night I got into bed, I almost hit the ceiling because the sheets were so cold. When the room temperature is in the low 50s, the bed doesn’t get warm. So, my mom gave me a queen sized heated mattress pad with dual controls. Such a nice item to have on a cold winter’s night. Well, it started to lose its heating on one side, and I’d roll over from a warm side to a suddenly colder side in my sleep.
I bought a new heated mattress pad, they’re not cheap, and this model doesn’t stay on all the time like the other one did, it’s on a timer, 10 hours after you push the “ON” button, it turns back off. There’s a handy preheat feature, although I haven’t figured out how that really makes much difference, unless it just gets the bed warm faster. It shuts off after 30 minutes and the program goes back to the whatever you had it set for when you pressed the “ON” button. (You have to turn the pad on first, then press the preheat button.) There’s also the fact that the plug that fits into the mattress pad is on top of the mattress pad, right where my feet can run across it as I move. The old mattress pad was long enough that the plug hung down at the foot of the bed and I rarely encountered it with my feet. I’ve got a second unheated mattress pad on top of this one, and then the fitted sheet, but it still hurts. I’ve let the manufacturer know I think it’s a poorly designed plug placement, and I noted in the customer reviews that other people told them the same thing about that plug. But, it’s warm on both sides of the bed again. That’s the most I’m going to splurge for a while. I’ve seen some really nice sets I’d like to have, but if I’m the only one who’s going to be using them, there’s not that much motivation to get them. I can only wish that the lady I’m courting will someday say “yes”, but that’s a LONG way down the road.