Brick by brick: News about FontStruct

1. 

   I use Firefox and not all of the bricks are showing up.

   Comment by Terry Sampson — June 7, 2008 #

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2. 

   Terry, try clearing your cache. That should solve the problem.

   Comment by Rob Meek (meek) — June 8, 2008 #

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3. 

   Yeah!
   I friggin’ love this place!
   Im into design for about lets say 8 years now. i mean like in a professional way.
   I always had a deep interest in designing/abstracting letters and studying their behavior in different situations. maybe thats why i ended up spraying graffiti, hehe.
   In digital sense, i really often tried constructing a cool font in all these years .but all apps seemed to be, ya know… uncomfortable.
   seeing these new bricks will make me smile for weeks, cause i really waited for them, even if im a newbie here :)

   sry for bad english…
   im a stupid german :P

   Comment by kix — June 9, 2008 #

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4. 

   Hallelujah! Just when I needed something like this for Greek support (the delta character), it comes through. Kuler gets an update one day, FontStruct the next. My world has been turned on its head!

   (I now must make changes to some of my characters to incorporate this great new set! I’m thinking a new X and even some redone characters. Chaotix Sans is on its way to being one of those typefaces with Greek+Latin+Cyrillic support!

   Comment by Raymie — June 11, 2008 #

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5. 

   How does a designer like myself submit brick ideas?

   Comment by Terry Sampson — June 11, 2008 #

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6. 

   Hurrah! Just what the doctor ordered! A little more freedom in the diagonals!

   Comment by dtw — June 16, 2008 #

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7. 

   I just finished my first font ever (“Angus”), and can’t wait to get started on my next. FontStruct is an amazing tool.

   I have two suggestions for future features: 1. allow vertical and horizontal flipping of selected tiles. 2. To go with the bricks for elongated triangles, how about some elongated curves? The purpose being to build ovals.

   Thanks again. The site is great!

   Comment by Jacob — June 18, 2008 #

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8. 

   Well, now there’s triangular blocks to make a two-block diagonal, would it be asked too much if I liked some circle segments to make a sixteen-block circle? I mean 4 blocks high and 4 blocks wide?
   That would help me a lot.
   Thanks,
   P

   Comment by typerider — June 19, 2008 #

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9. 

   It will be interesting to see how the designers cope with “real estate” issues in the toolbox. So far from satisfying our craving, the addition of new bricks just makes us want about twenty more… as soon as I started using them, it was “ah, yes, but, see there’s a roadblock here if I want to use that brick…” this applies particularly to the half-bricks. Illegal terminations on the diagonals, that’s my problem.

   I’m all for the half bricks; you couldn’t get anything like a subtle “thick & thin” without them. But I can see they’ve introduced a whole new level of snafu that’s both fascinating and irritating.

   On my wish list is (yet another!) diagonal brickset that’s at an even steeper pitch. But I realise the minefield such a brickset would introduce. It goes like this: the 45deg brick resolves over just two spots on the grid. Easy. The steeper brick is trickier; more brick permutations needed for a pattern that takes three or more grid spots to resolve. A yet-steeper brick is going to introduce a galaxy of late-night migraines. Not to mention gumming up the toolbox with yet more bricks.

   It’s a bit of a poser, innit.

   A question for Rob: is the idea of scalable bricks completely out of the question? (i.e. as in requiring a complete redesign of the software [not going to happen!])

   Or is there an aesthetic issue to do with user-complexity? One of the brill things about FontStruct is the “BAM! I’m makin’ fonts right out the box without any resorting to useless help-files!” epiphany the user gets straight away. And that’s because it’s beautifully intuitive and simple.

   The more sophisticated you make it, the more unfriendly it will be for newbs.

   Have I answered my own questions? Ha, ha.

   Dammit, but I DO want to be able to do sort-of believable curves without creating gigantic files that time out when you save.

   Comment by intaglio — June 20, 2008 #

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10. 

    Sorry, I just noticed all these comments.

    @terry: Send a contact mail in the ‘I have a problem’ category to catch my attention and I’ll send you an email. Then you can send me ideas for bricks. But, as other commenters have mentioned, we need controlled growth in the brick library – we can’t just add bricks ad infinitum. We may need to change the interface and explore other ideas such as brick-scaling, brick-grouping, brick-translation, custom bricks etc.

    @Jacob
    Regarding flipping. Yes, that would be a huge help and it’s on our feature list, but it’s not as easy as I first thought to implement.

    @typerider
    Sorry you’ll have to be patient.

    @intaglio
    Thanks for answering your own questions :-) Brick scaling isn’t completely out of the question but there are a lot of features and bug fixes ahead of it on the list – like control over horizontal metrics, and making sure our database is fast enough to prevent those timeouts. We’re over the 1,000,000 glyph mark!

    Comment by Rob Meek (meek) — June 23, 2008 #

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11. 

    I suppose I’m the only one who is not happy with the new brick implementation.

    There has been a small discussion in the comment section of one of the font I fontstructed, so I invite you to read more opinions there.

    I have not tried to use the new bricks yet because I’m quite busy in this period. But somehow I’m not really looking forward to. Modular fonts looks less interesting to me if available modules are too many.

    Rob, your words reassure me that this is not a trend, and future developments do not involve necessarily new bricks.

    Looking forward to seeing the new features you talk about implemented. On my wish list, basic horizontal metrics is on top.

    Comment by Em42 — June 24, 2008 #

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12. 

    There needs to be a way to make the steeper grades “cross”.

    Comment by Frozen Serif — September 18, 2008 #

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13. 

    Dž dž LJ Lj lj NJ Nj nj were overlapped here. DZ caron will work.

    Comment by tae wong — November 7, 2008 #

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