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"How to Do Stuff"
So I finally figured out why my Macbook Pro was barfing and otherwise misbehaving when I plugged in an external display.
When I first got the MBP, I used the Migration Assistant to pull all my files over from my Hackintosh desktop. It did a pretty good job of pulling over all my apps, settings, and files. But it also pulled over some Hackintosh kexts for the mutant display drivers people use to get Hackintoshes to work.
So I found ‘em and removed ‘em. The MBP has been happy as a clam since then.
I found Mike Laughead’s site the other day, and loved the work. I also appreciated the description of his process.
For a good while I’ve been torn between styles that feature line work, and styles that are more shape and color based. Mike’s process bridges those competing aims well.
So I played around with his process in ArtRage the other night. In ArtRage, you have to make a stencil of a layer to ‘lock transparent pixels’ the way Photoshop does. Unfortunately, this means you’re looking through a transparent red field the whole time you’re painting in the lines.
Occasionally during the course of the many iterations we go through for our interface designs, someone will wander up and wonder, in passing, how well it will work for color blind people?
Because of this, we try to have at least two differentiators (e.g. color and shape) for most of our little icons.
But sometimes you need a way to proof and check your image. Vischeck has a very handy Photoshop plugin just for that purpose. And it’s free!
Notice the cyan-green range dropping out.
I’ve been using Fontlab’s TypeTool lately at work. This is really remedial, but could be useful to some beginners, like me.
If you build your glyphs like I did here, you’ll have some overlapping. But beyond the overlapping shapes, sometimes pasting from Illustrator will yield duplicate, overlapping nodes. Yellow Nodes indicate overlapping nodes.
“Merge Contours” will fix this. It’s the little plus shaped icon on the tool bar.
“Merge Contours” also merges the shapes. Now our H is all one piece.
Here’s a case where Merge Contours didn’t behave as expected.
Original Glyph :
After Merge Contours once :
Some of the edges merged, but some didn’t.
Try changing the curves direction, then Merge Contours again.
These buttons alternate the direction of the curves.
Now it’s merged.
