An exhaustive collection of type design resources.

For the first 5 or 6 years of iPhone releases, screen sizes were pretty manageable. If your design worked on a 320x480 screen, you were golden. Now, it’s the wild west out there. Every year seems to come with at least another screen size 🙄…

This E major chord position on ukulele might be easier, but is it the best choice? In this video, I give you an easy way to play the dreaded E chord on ukulele and share the reasons why you wouldn’t want to use this position depending on what song you’re playing. I use Coldplay’s “Fix You” and Train’s “Hey Soul Sister” as two song examples with E chords. I give you tips and tricks for how to practice other E chord positions to make them possible, so you can become a better ukulele player.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about is fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build. It typically has four steps:

1. Start by writing the Press Release.
2. Write a Frequently Asked Questions document.
3. Define the customer experience.
4. Write the User Manual.

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/life-moves-pretty-fast-why-gen-x-got-it-before-the-rest-of-you-kpkn/

Look, we have heard all the jokes. We know how you talk about us. And now you are saying there might never be a Gen-X President (as if Donald Trump did some sort of credit to his generation in that…

We were the last generation to have a technology free childhood and to learn patience waiting for Saturday morning cartoons or a favorite song to come on the radio.

We were the first generation to write papers on computers and the last generation to use typewriters. We were the last generation to know a time when a missed call was a missed call and the first generation to play video games. We were the last generation who spent a largely unsupervised childhood on dangerous playground equipment.

Other Half is one of the most highly regarded breweries for NEIPA, they have two taprooms in Brooklyn and one in midtown Manhattan. If you like the style you can’t miss it.

Finback also does great IPA, and their Brooklyn taproom is very close to Threes, Wild East, and Strong Rope, which have more of a focus on traditional styles. That whole cluster is within a few blocks of eachother, and not too far from OH’s original taproom, so if you have a good chunk of a day that’d be a great way to check out a bunch in one shot.

You can also go along the L train line in Williamsburg/Bushwick/Ridgewood, where you can hit Grimm, KCBC, Evil Twin, Interboro and Brooklyn Brewing, after which you could hit Tørst (a great beer bar), and maybe even pop up to Greenpoint Beer & Ale from there.

Antonio Stappaerts is a professional concept artist and teacher. In this video, he’ll detail his six steps on how you can learn to draw anything and provide you with a better understanding of form, design, and structure. You’ll learn how to break down complex subjects into simple shapes, the importance of shape design, and get some valuable tips on manipulating basic shapes to make them more dynamic and interesting. If you’ve been trying to draw the world around you (or from imagination) and your artwork is not living up to your expectations, then this lesson will really help you out.

• Structuralization - Drawing basic shapes in groups from different perspectives
• Manipulation - Bend and shape forms and contours
• Observation - Mannequinize
• Education
• Imitation
• Imagination

Award-winning artist Mikhail Solovev shows you how to create a compositional sketch in the Russian academic style. These sketches are a key part of the Russian academic process, and begin by focusing on the silhouette to get a good idea of the compositional elements of light and shadow in your piece. If you’re interested in learning more about how to draw in a Russian academic style check out Mikhail’s course - https://proko.com/solovev

"Many people are too lazy to draw a compositional sketch first." Spend 15 minutes doing one first.

Drawing from more advanced students' work is more helpful than drawing from the Masters. The work is more understandable and allows you to incrementally improve. Drawing with pen and ink really shows you what you know. Mistakes are learning tools!

Levels at big tech, the most common career paths, and what comes after making it to Staff

Excellent blog post by James Edmonson (OHNO Type Co.) about vectoring letters, with invaluable tips for both lettering and type design.

Drawing Vectors for Type & Lettering | OH no Type Company

Can also recommend this series of posts by him about drawing letters in general; it’s filled with tips and important content but communicated visually and in a chill way.

Scott Biersack’s step-by-step tutorial of how he used to go about vectoring his letterings
https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/hand-lettering-how-to-vector-your-letterforms--cms-23248

Great tutorial by Glyphs about drawing with béziers showcasing good practices:

Drawing Good Paths | Glyphs

Article by type designer Fábio Martins going deeper into how bézier curves are made and how they behave:

Bézier Curves and Type Design: A Tutorial | Learn - Scannerlicker!

So What’s the Big Deal with Horizontal & Vertical Bezier Handles Anyway?

Dave Coleman’s blog post commenting the importance of keeping anchors in extrema and handles horizontal and vertical, showing examples of how other professionals vectored their letters and also how they used exceptions to that “rule”

So What's the Big Deal with Horizontal & Vertical Bezier Handles Anyway?

Adé Hogue

Bézi-yay! - Adé Hogue

https://web.archive.org/web/20211221173728/https://www.adehogue.com/journal/2019/10/23/beziermethod

Arrow Type’s Instagram post with a sped-up video of him building sans serif letters in Glyphs, showing how he uses parts of already drawn letters to build up other letters.

Illustrator

Illustrator's Pen Tool: The Comprehensive Guide

Vetorizani com Saiani

Series of mini-tutorials by Plau’s Rodrigo Saiani, with invaluable tips and tricks about Illustrator and letter vectoring (it’s narrated in Portuguese but you can probably grasp things by just watching the visuals).

BOOKS

Leslie Cabarga - Logo, Font & Lettering Bible

Logo Font & Lettering Bible

The book is a bit old, but has overall great content about drawing letterforms. Around page 130 there’s a specific part about letter vectoring tips in Illustrator.

COURSES

Phaedra Charles - Hand Lettering Styles and Techniques for Embellishment

Hand Lettering Styles and Techniques for Embellishment | Phaedra Charles | Skillshare

Marta Cerdà - Characters with Character

Online course - Characters with Character (Marta Cerdà Alimbau)

Illustrated tips for making your UI and web designs more visually interesting · Backgrounds · Borders & dividers · Shadows · Text · Other techniques

The double thumbing, 2-finger picking approach makes use of the thumb and only one finger and can be the basis for some very rhythmic and exciting ukulele playing.

Cold Rain and Snow

Stable Diffusion is a new “text-to-image diffusion model” that was released to the public by Stability.ai six days ago, on August 22nd.

It’s similar to models like Open AI’s DALL-E, but with one crucial difference: they released the whole thing.

You can try it out online at beta.dreamstudio.ai (currently for free). Type in a text prompt and the model will generate an image.

A lot of people commenting think that removing nudity form the training is fine, as it just makes the model safe for work, but it actually hurts the generation of non-nude humans as well. Significantly. I use the f222 model as my main general-purpose model, because it generates better clothed humans than SD1.5. The f222 model is based off of extending SD1.5 to have more knowledge of nudity (so the total opposite of the direction SD2.0 went). This actually makes f222 better at making humans IN GENERAL. The f222 model knows a lot more about the shape of humans. It's not perfect, but what f222 needs is just even more body types and ugly folks, but it's not completely lacking in the ability to generate those either. It definitely does have a bias towards pretty people, but it is not near as overwhelming as some of the other models.

Here's a good one I use a lot:
https://stablediffusion.fr/artists [stablediffusion.fr]
Another example:
https://proximacentaurib.notion.site/e28a4f8d97724f14a784a538b8589e7d?v=ab624266c6a44413b42a6c57a41d828c [notion.site]

Everyone! It’s almost the end of the year. It’s nearing that time when we arbitrarily decide we’re going to turn over a new leaf; start a new great habit. But so many of us embark on this process…

Using either the plus, the minus, or the forward arrow, you assess nine different categories:

Health and Fitness
Work and Business
Personal Life
Friends and Community
Learning and Knowledge
Travel and Culture (how much did you explore?)
Hobbies and Creativity (how did you nurture your creative side?)
Emotions and Spirituality (how did you connect with your inner self?)
Money and Finances

“Not a day without a line”, or in its latin version “Nulla dies sine linea”. It comes from the Ancient Greece painter Apelle (4th century BC), who was one of the most famous of his time.

It enables one to steadily build and strengthen one’s unique relationship with creativity. At the intersection between the art of habits (doing something regularly — every day here) and the habits of art (drawing or writing lines), I find this motto to empower core aspects of the relationship to drawing practice:

• Befriending creativity by focusing on regular process over outcome
• Improving one’s craft by focusing on quantity over quality
• Creating one’s very own art by weaving life and art
• Going to the essence of expressiveness in a single line

I came across this article by Miguel Nunez about making a flexbox based gallery that’s well thought out and well written, but has one major flaw. The markup reeks of still thinking in the “table…

This article is about a few quick thumb rules I use when writing shell scripts that I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Very opinionated....

A zero-config, drop-in animation utility that automatically adds smooth transitions to your web app. Use it with React, Vue, Svelte, or any other JavaScript application.

In this post we have provided you with some examples and code for ways to make your page load entertaining via SVG loading animations.

https://codepen.io/nikhil8krishnan/pen/rVoXJa

https://codepen.io/BridgetCReed/pen/YpOEVv

https://codepen.io/matchboxhero/pen/bomWGK