A question of fonts

I often agonise over what fonts to use on my blogs. Design and readability are my key considerations of course, plus i want to use the most accessible fonts possible to ease reading especially for dyslexics (being one myself!). One font which is good for readability but generates a lot of hate is of course Comic Sans though i personally like the font, its often fun to set it as your browser's default font and then force websites to use it (as you can in Firefox), reading serious news stories in Comic Sans is a somewhat surreal and relaxing experience.

So that brings me to this blog, i've become bored of sensible fonts and wanted to use something similar to Comic Sans and a bit weird so i am trying a webfont called Coming Soon. No doubt i will bore of it soon so i have attached part of a screen shot so future readers (after the font has changed) will know what it looked like! Update: I bored if it very quickly!

Industrial Birmingham then and now

Today i headed up to Birmingham Central Library to research some sources in the archives. I am currently writing an essay for my History MA on the industrialisation of Birmingham and the West Midlands from 1850-1950 and the sources one can use to facilitate that. As part of that obviously i need to look up some primary sources so had a look at some wage books from the now-closed Hardman Trading Company, a stained class and ecclesiastical metalwork manufacturer (the company is not that relevant, it just was a handy source). It is interesting to have a peek into the lives of past workers, who earned 8s and 2d or whatever it was called back in 1864. Was that a lot of money back then (probably not)? The bosses seemed to get a few quid though which i suspect was more comfortable.

After researching the past on the way home i checked out the future of industrial Birmingham with the Birmingham Made Me design expo in the Mailbox. No stained glass on show this time but we did have a guard of honour created by 2 JCBs.

The art of post-it art

This week i got an album by Tender Forever, and pretty good it is too. One thing i noted immediately though (apart from the fact the CD seems to want to kill my Macbook's drive) is that the title of the album on the cover had been done using post-it notes.

And very cute too... the post-it notes of course. This reminded me of a similar thing i did at work a number of years ago. Every year each office competes with their Christmas decoration display, usually though in our office we takes ages to do anything because we are a) so busy to bother with such trivialities b) can't be arsed.

However a couple of years ago i decided to put up a decoration but do something very different as befitting someone in Creative Services. I created a Christmas tree out of post-it notes.

Did it create a stir? Well it certainly generated some comments. We did not win the competition though as apparently its better going to Poundland and turning your office into a tack-fest, not that i am bitter of course.

Last year i also went all creative with post-it notes though this time i decided to take it to the next dimension... i went 3-D. I created candles and a nativity scene out of various pieces of cardboard and decorated these items with post-it notes and pieces of felt. You see the humble post-it note is the most important invention in human civilisation since the invention of fire. They are just so useful, i do all my financial modelling using them for example. Sometimes you can even use them to leave yourself a note too.

A canal tube map

A few years ago i combined two of my loves : canals and the London tube map and created a "tube map" of my own depicting the canal network in Birmingham and the West Midlands. A few days ago i decided to redo it and the results can be seen here.

It was originally created on a PC in Photoshop back in 2009 but since then i have moved to using a Mac at home sans Photoshop but with Pixelmator instead. Although i could edit an imported version of the original in Pixelmator it was becoming a bit untidy and i also wanted to improve how the map looked, optimise it for viewing on an iPad, and include some of the canals in Warwickshire i have been exploring over the last 12 months.

So i recreated it from scratch. Next stage will be to turn it into a full-fledged HTML5 interactive map using Hype with information on the various canals and links to my imagery. So keep tuned. You can find out all about my canal wanderings on my Down The Cut blog of course.

Rethinking the tube map... thinking the unthinkable

Harry Beck's London tube map is nowadays as iconic a part of the capital as Beefeaters, Buckingham Palace, black cabs and inner city squalor. However over the last couple of decades it has become a little too cluttered as new lines have been added, really someone could do with remastering the map. Or maybe rethinking it altogether.

Thats what Mark Noad has done, he has totally rethought the map this time returning to the pre-Beck geographical style which Beck abstracted out with his original design. I think it is great though of course as with anything new like this many people disagree. Not that i think the original design should be binned as i still prefer that, i'd like both to be available.