Brick by brick: News about FontStruct

---

New Features: Favorites and improved Tagging

Sunday is Valentine’s day. Time to finally declare your love to that special someone dearest to your heart. But why wait two days? With the new “Favorites” feature on FontStruct, you can now easily start right now, sharing your affection for the work of fellow FontStructors.

Favorites, along with an improved and extended tagging system, are a core feature of today’s site update, which we think will really help you to organize and access your own work, and that of other designers, more easily.

People have been asking for these new features since the early days of FontStruct, and as the gallery has sprawled over countless pages, and individual FontStructors have found themselves working on hundreds of designs, there’s been an obvious need for new ways to organize and navigate through work on the site.

Favorites

You can now bookmark any shared FontStruction (other than your own) by clicking on the “Add Fave” icons which you can see all over the site.

All of your Favorites can be browsed on your My FontStruct page under the “Favorites” tab:

You can also browse other people’s favorites when you visit their FontStruct homepages.

Favorites can be used to collect and organize any FontStructions which you find interesting, or to collect designs for specific projects and purposes. Favorites will also function as a new way of sorting FontStructions in the gallery – with a new “Favorite Count” sort order. Next to every FontStruction in the gallery you will see a heart icon, indicating the number of users who have “Favoritized” that design.

Not all love is eternal of course. Just click on the Favorite icon again to drop a favorite:

Tagging Favorites

You can now also tag other people’s work by tagging your Favorites. You can do this either on the respective FontStruction homepages, or on your Favorites pages under MyFontStruct:

At the top of your Favorites pages you can access and browse all of your favorite tags.

You can use these Favorite Tags to collect and group, for example, your favorite FontStruct pixel fonts, or your favorite western-style fonts, whatever you like. Or, if you’re interested in using a FontStruction for a specific project, you can use a favorite tag to collect some candidates:

Enhanced tagging of your own work

As well as adding Favorites and the ability to tag them, we’ve enhanced the way that existing gallery tags work. Gallery tags are the tags which FontStructors apply to their own designs and which have always been visible on the gallery pages.

Designers going to their MyFontStruct page will now see an overview of all of their gallery tags at the top of their FontStruction listings:

If you click on any tag on your My FontStruct > FontStructions pages you will see only the work which you have tagged in this way. For those of you with hundreds of designs this should make it a lot easier to organize and navigate through them. Other users visiting your user homepage will also be able to use these user-specific tags to browse your work. If you click on the “View all FontStructions tagged with …” link you will be taken to the gallery and see all work tagged with the same tag.

You can use tags to organize your work into families of related fonts accessible via a single, unique and human-friendly URL such as “http://fontstruct.com/fontstructors/funk_king/tags/Track”

As with Favorites, you don’t need to go to the individual FontStruction page in order to add tags, you can now tag your work directly in your MyFontStruct > FontStruction listing pages.

Private Tagging

Your Favorites and your Favorite Tags are all visible to all FontStruct users. Tags which you apply to your own work are also visible to others with one exception: Any tags applied by you only to your own private FontStructions will also be visible only to you. So private tagging of your own private work is possible.

Known Issues

When trying out the feature we noticed that some FontStructors had already used a huge number of tags.The truly inimitable funk_king for example has almost 1000 tags already. This is wonderful, but it also means we will have to add some way of navigating through such very long lists of tags. Until then, you can create as many tags as you want but only the first 1024 will be appear at the top of your MyFontStruct/FontStructions pages. The tags are sorted according to how often they have been applied, so the most common tags should appear first.

Adieu Pink Dot

The most important and controversial change of all today! The old magenta “TOP PICK” sticker has been retired to a comfortable folder far away, to make way for a new star icon. The old girl had been through a lot, and deserves a rest from her many brick-bearing suitors. The new TOP PICK star is a bit more compact and should work better together with other icons such as the new favorite icons and future additions.

Other Changes

There are a number of other, smaller changes across the site:

There is now a comment form at the bottom of longer comment threads, so you don’t need to scroll back to the top of the thread if you want to say something.

Tag links in the gallery are now shorter, taking the form /gallery/tag/mytag, and clicking on them will really only show you FontStructions which have been tagged accordingly.  (Until now clicking on a tag did a a search of tags, FontStruction names, designers, and FontStruction descriptions, which was slow and could produce confusing results).

There is a new category – “monospaced” which will show you all shared, monospaced FontStructions.

As always little bugs may appear when changes are made, so let us know in the comments or contact us if you notice anything wierd.

Enjoy!

---

From the Sports Desk

Welcome FontStructors to my inaugural Brick by Brick installment. In the coming months I hope to use this space to showcase many of your incredible FontStructions and to shine a light on you, my fellow brick junkies, who work tirelessly to enrich the site and the community with your work.

To kick things off, I’d like to take a moment to talk sports.

Two Sundays ago, I watched with devilish glee as Brett Favre threw his final interception of the season – the final interception of his career perhaps – effectively closing the door on any chance the Minnesota Vikings had at making a late game rally to win the NFC Championship game against the New Orleans Saints. While watching the game, I couldn’t help but notice my eye (my mind!) returning time and again to the slab-serif number four on Favre’s jersey. What my mind kept returning too, was a question. A question that many of you out there in FontStruct Nation I’m sure have asked yourself from time to time: can I FontStruct it?

I find when I watch sports this “can I FontStruct it” question comes up frequently. It’s purely a hypothetical question – a mental exercise and a pastime – where, having internalized the limitations of FontStruct I can look at soccer jerseys, race car numbers, scoreboard displays and determine quickly whether the letters and numbers would map to FontStruct or not. It’s possible I’m going nuts. But if I am, there is certain to be a large group of FontStructors waiting with welcoming arms in that Cuckoo’s Nest.

In fact, sports or athletics seems to be a source of continued inspiration for many in the FontStruct community. Its influence runs deep and its breadth shoots wide.

Rooting for the home team

Some FontStructions wear their athletic influence (and their FontStructor’s team loyalties) proudly on their sleeve.

Sketchbook B was so jazzed after watching South Carolina defeat Clemson he had to create Scoreboard just to document the moment. Not to be outdone, p2pnut, his heart still racing after the success of Jenson Button‘s Formula 1 success, took a few laps around the grid and created Grand Prix. Kix, another Formula 1 fan created Pole Position – a raceway classic.

Saturday May 2nd, 2009, was a great day in Geneus1‘s sports book. That was the day Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao a.k.a “PacMan” knocked out Ricky Hatton to win a light welterweight title. The next day Geneus1 created his amazing PacMan tribute FontStruction.

Inspired by Otl Aicher’s pictograms for the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Cam.ill built an extensive (and comical) set of his own Olympic icons in Pictales. Frodo7 has a set of his own competitive icons in French Defense – a chess font. And somewhere between icon and lettering, the Funk King introduced his own personal cheering section with Yay Team and Sports Wave. Oh hey, need a font made entirely of footballs or baseballs or golfballs? The Funk King’s got you covered there too. There seems to be no end to the games or the victories FontStructors will celebrate.

The winning style

There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a sporty typeface – script, sans, blackletter – they all work fine if done well and in the right context. Some FontStructions aren’t necessarily athletic specific but their style could be used successfully in a sports context.

Varsity, an athletic slab created by Stewf, would look as fly on that letterman jacket as it would on your home game jersey. Shasta‘s Teatral Stencil is a solidly built slab whose muscular strength makes it perfect for the gridiron or an MMA title fight.

Sector 017 by Neoqueto is a grungy modern display sans that could introduce a motocross rally as well as brand the Energy Drink™ sponsoring all the riders.

Letra Libre by nathancox, Corrida Evolved by jmarquez, and m.ove.r by minimum are all wonderful triline fonts that evoke the spirit of the lettering done for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. Each would make strong candidates for lettering up some contemporary soccer (err…football) jerseys.

Mummification by the Funk King and Donna 85 by stigtafto are both intricate display fonts with no specific sports connection yet their details lend themselves to contemporary athletic usage. Likewise DJ Nippa‘s NCD Octangle 20 and p2spnut‘s RM Squarial are stylishly modern thin faces, perfect for when you want to stay light on your feet.

I’ve barely scratched the surface here. No doubt there are countless other FontStructions I’ve missed in this brief round up. Please use the comments to help fill in the gaps and sound off on what FontSructions you think make for good sport.

Good thing are coming our way

FontStructors…I can tell you right now that February is going to be an exciting month here in FontStructlandia. Mr. Meeks is cooking up a new feature that will have you all singing teary-eyed toasts to him down at your local pub. Sadly, I should warn you; this new feature will bring about the passing of one of our beloved keepsakes. But take comfort when I tell you that this passing will be followed by a Phoenix — a rebirth! Our collective mourning will be short.

Later this month we will also launch the first ever FontStruct competition. The Rules Committee is still hard at work fine-tuning the details of the contest but now is the time to sharpen your skates, wax up your skies, and start your mouse finger calisthenics. Did I mention prizes? Oh yes, there will be prizes! Stay tuned sports fans.