The Blog of Glen Moyes

I recently reinstalled Windows onto my computer, a ritual that I have done for years to keep my operating system running nicely thanks to Windows bit rot. I usually do it about once a year, in this case it's been two so it really needed a fresh install. The problems with regularly reinstalling Windows are downloading and installing all of the updates, which takes forever since my original Windows XP Pro disc is Service Pack 1. Luckily there's software that makes the process easier. nLite I wish I knew about this program earlier. nLite is an easy to use application that allows you to make a backup copy of your Windows install disc, slipstream the service pack and updates into the Windows install (google for the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers; it's an EXE file that nLite will ask for to do that), install drivers such as my SATA drivers that I needed to install Windows on something other than my old soon-to-fail IDE ...

You know that top secret Lumaglyph project I've been mentioning recently? Well, it's not a secret anymore. Here's the announcement. Hackberry Hollow is our first internal project at Lumaglyph, and we've recently launched the site at HackberryHollow.com . We set up a blog so we can post new concept art and other cool stuff as the project develops. The blog is updated every Tuesday afternoon. We've been writing the story for about a year now. Both Adam and I are really excited with how the story has developed, and so far everyone we've shared it with loves it. Now that we have a solid outline for the story we are going into high gear working on the concept art. So be sure to subscribe to the Hackberry Hollow RSS feed for updates on my new work. Here's some of the artwork I've posted so far. So that's what we've been working on: Hackberry Hollow . Visit the site, post comments on the artwork, and soon we'll have an epic webcomic for you to read...

Celtx is a great and all for writing stories, but when it comes to online collaborative writing our team uses Gobby . Gobby allows multiple people to work on the same text file at the same time. You don't have to designate one person as the scribe. You don't have to take turns. You can type where ever you want when ever you want, and any text you insert will be highlighted with your user color, so you always know who wrote what. Gobby was created with programmers in mind, so it features line numbering, auto indenting, and syntax highlighting. As writers we ignore those features except for the line numbering. Our text documents can get quite long and it's easy to say "look at line 2053," because they can press Ctrl-I and enter that line number in to zip them to the same line you're looking at. The user highlighting has also been useful for us to tag sections that need attention with bright red or some other obnoxious color that you can't possibly miss. We j...

A couple of days ago Braid was finally released on Steam . I bought it, played it and enjoyed everything about it: the puzzles, the art, and especially the story telling mechanic in the last level. I had already decided to buy the game long before because Jonathan Blow always gives such good talks on game design , so I was more than happy to send money his way as soon as a PC version was available. Anyway, check the game out. A free demo is already out in the wild so you can it a whirl.

Celtx 2.0 was released this past week. For going from 1.0 to 2.0, Celtx doesn't have a whole lot of new features . The two big changes are Celtx Studio, which is their $50 yearly subscription version of Project Central with a free beta until March 24, and the ability to add Extensions/Add-Ons to Celtx, which I'm really excited about.

You'll be hearing a lot more about illustration from me in the future as our project develops, and to kick it off here's the brushes I use for most of my illustration work. I didn't include any of my special brushes for things like trees and water; most of those brushes are created on a per-project basis and I only ever used them once, although I did go ahead and include my fur brush. Anyway, these are the brushes I use all the time. Glen Moyes 2009.03 Brush Presets – 85MB Glen Moyes 2009.03 Tool Presets – 85MB Here they are in action. Many of these brushes have a narrow tip like a calligraphy brush, and they use the pen tilt of the stylus to rotate the brush tip, so you really need an Wacom Intuos tablet or better to take advantage of these brushes. I'll get into the advantages of a narrow brush tip when I start doing video tutorials on painting with Photoshop. I've provided a Tool Preset and Brush Preset file for these brushes. You should download both so you c...

EDIT: This article has a follow up post about the beta program that was written a year later. And yes, I do mean life changing. Ever wonder how much time you actually spend on a project? If you bid a 40 hour project are you really sure it's going to take that long? How much time does each stage of the project take? How many hours do you spend emailing the client? What about other activities during the day like visiting websites, recreation, and cooking food? Where is your time going? I've wanted to know the answers to those questions for a very long time. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I could never know for sure without an easy to use timeclock program. In the past I've searched for a free one that does not require a web server and is adequate for single person use, but I couldn't find one. Luckily a week and a half ago I found a very promising candidate thanks to an article on Webdesigner Debot . It's called Klok , an Adobe AIR app and therefore multipl...

[EDIT] Scruss provide some information on how to do this under Cygwin (and Linux I'm sure) at http://scruss.com/blog/2010/05/09/creating-a-truetype-font-from-your-handwriting-with-your-scanner-your-printer-and-fontforge/ I haven't tried it out yet, (when I do I'll post it here) but this could very well come in handy. Thanks for the tip! Many of the designers I know are typophiles. We live and breath type and will search for hours trying to find the right typeface, and when we are not doing that we'll spend weeks trying to create one. Here's a couple of font tools that I've used in the past: YourFonts.com automatically creates a TrueType font from a scan of your handwriting, and FontForge allows you to create fonts from scratch and of course edit existing ones. YourFonts.com [EDIT] YourFoints is not free anymore. It now costs $12.50 + $6.00 if you upload both template pages. For years I've wanted to create a font of my own handwriting. Originally my m...

If you have 15 seconds I'd like you to participate in a quick test for one of our graphic design projects. The test is at http://toastbusters.net/?p=16&v=11 . Thanks in advance.

NOTE TO CS5 USERS: I've gotten reports that in CS5 (and maybe CS4 but I haven't heard anything yet) that the minimum width of the Swatches panel in the default workspace is 17 instead of 16. The Swatches panel must be 16 swatches wide, otherwise the circular swatch pattern becomes slanted. The culprit is the Layers panel which can't be as small as the Swatches panel, so if the Swatches panel and the Layers panel are put on the same column the Swatches panel will be wider to fit. The fix is to undock the swatches panel, at which point you can dock other panels below it that aren't wide. Three months ago I released a set of RGB and CMYK color wheels . After some user feedback I fixed the CMYK wheel so it has richer colors and pure CMYK data for the Adobe formats that supported it. The files are updated there so go ahead and get them. In addition, also at the request of a user, I made a color wheel with shades instead of tints. The special thing about this palette is ...