Posts

Showing posts from February, 2009

Massively Useful (Life Changing) Software: Klok

Image
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

Massively Useful Software: FontForge and YourFonts.com

Image
[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