The Blog of Glen Moyes

I'm a long-time Adobe customer. I've been in a good position to use Adobe's software throughout my education and career. It's been a good experience for me, but only because I was a student when the Adobe software had perpetual licenses. You pay for the software once, and you own it forever. For a lot of the designers and content creators I associate with, they are not as content with Adobe as I am. Working with more students has opened my eyes to experiences that seem to be the norm, and those experiences are far from my own. The root of this seems to be Adobe's current subscription business model. I'm lucky that I graduated when I did, because if I graduated today, there's a greater chance that I wouldn't be a designer. Perpetual licenses saved me after college. I purchased Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium when I was a college student. The student version wasn't that expensive, and I was able to purchase every new version of the Creative Suite w...

[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...

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 ...

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. Edit: I've created a new swatch set with shades instead of tints. In the past I've used the VisiBone2 swatches in Photoshop, and I've been meaning to make an improved set of swatches for some time now, one that's organized like an actual color wheel. So I did. Here it is. The special thing about this swatch layout is that the color wheel is actually ac...

I've waited for a while to talk about this on my blog; I finished this project four months ago, and if you've looked at my Vimeo page within the past two months you may have noticed a new video on there called Aesop's Fables. That video only showed the completed animation with the background overlay and not actual footage of the gallery installation in action. Well, today I finally uploaded a video that does this project justice, and I went ahead and updated the older video by adding the same music by Kevin MacLeod that I included in today's video. >> Watch Aesop's Fables streamed in HD (720p) >> Watch Aesop's Fables: Complete Animation streamed in HD (720p) Aesop's Fables is my first 2D animated project. And by "2D animated" I don't mean animated with After Effects or Flash, I mean actually animating a character frame by frame. I loved it. It was a lot of work, but I loved it. This project was an experimental motion desi...

Adobe Gamma is one of those massively useful programs that many people already have installed but don't actually use. If you've installed Photoshop, it's running on your computer right now. If you haven't actually calibrated your monitor with it, you should do it right away. At one of the places I used the work at, we used the Spyder2 colorimeter to calibrate all of our monitors to have a perfect white point and gamma. Having a calibrated monitor makes a huge difference. The colors on the screen looked more vibrant, the contrast was perfect so you could see all the colors without them being clipped to white or black, the blue tint was gone, and the colors on the screen actually matched the colors that were printed. It was such an improvement that I decided that there's no point in buying an expensive screen if you are not going to callibrate it using a Spyder or something similar. Even our inexpensive LCDs looked like high-end $800 monitors once calibrated. Unfortun...

Like most people, the first time you need to use a macro program it's for something completely immature and nonconstructive. For me, I needed something like AutoHotkey to quickly generate my 3-line Cute Bunny Giving You the Bird ASCII graphic into the game chat before someone realized what was going on—which was usually around the "( ._.) ..!." line—and then they assault it by quickly sending something like "asdf" which decapitates my bunny! I wasn't going to take that kind of treatment anymore, and no bunny deserves to be decapitated, so I used AutoHotkey to create a macro that creates the bunny immediately without having to type it in by hand. No one could stop it and no more bunnies ever died again. Well, that's not entirely true. There were a couple of stray lines of text that killed a few Cute Bunnies Giving You the Bird, but the mortality rate was much lower. Of course macros are useful for constructive things too. This neat little open source Wi...

Apophysis is an open source program that creates flame fractals. The only thing I can say about this program that contains any amount of profound insight is this: the fractals look awesome! Seriously, tinker around with the program. It comes with plenty of presets and all kinds of ways to manipulate them. I'll probably do a series of sketches based on the designs of these fractal patterns at some point because they look so cool. I'm also planning on using Apophysis to create animated magic/sci-fi effects for use with 3D animations. And I can finally make some cool dual screen backgrounds too. Anyway, lots of potential applications for these images and people will wonder how you did it. Expect more blabbing about Apophysis-generated content in the future.

Speaking of video games, This is proof that I need more free time. This is entirely due to a television ad that I'm working on. The visuals should be done tomorrow and I'll get the audio done a couple of days after that. It's been neat taking part in the entire process of creating an ad, and being able to see a design project of this magnitude from beginning to end. I've had a lot of help from the rest of us in our little 5-man studio: critiquing, concept art, and animation (lots of animation). I'll likely post the ad up here when it's done. I wish that's all I had to do before Christmas, but I have to move and job hunt too. Oh well. Until then, I miss you Team Fortress 2. Here's the link to my Steam profile so you can see what dirty rotten games I've been playing and for how long. There's also a picture of a scary possessed evil satanic squirrel there too (the spawn of a graphic designer when he did have too much time on his hands). So that...