Vootie's blog

Veteran stock image and font supplier Veer recently launched a presence on Tumblr that shares images from a wide variety of sources, organized in photography, illustration and typography categories. No glitz, just good stuff, in the Veer tradition of thoughtful curation.

The Chilean biologists and philosophers Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana popularized the notion that as humans we "live in language." From this perspective we inhabit a world built of words, the superstructure of which is largely invisible to us. Far from being universal, language is intensely cultural and blindness to this is at the root of many a misunderstanding.

You have to hand it to Adobe, they really do spend a lot of time dreaming up ways to generate training material for Creative Suite users. The latest of these is the curiously-named SWAPP iPad app, which will be made available on the App Store in a series of editions, each including up to twelve user-contributed tutorials and examples of work. The first of these is now available for free download. If you're interested in contributing, you'll need InDesign CS6, Folio Producer and Folio Builder, and will begin by downloading provided InDesign templates and assets. It's potentially a great way to promote your work, especially since you can put whatever you want on a page attached your tutorial, thereby singing your praises and linking to your site and social media presences.An example is shown in the first image below.

According to Apple patent news site Patently Apple, a recently published patent indicates that Apple is planning to develop both a desktop and mobile graphics application for the professional market. The patent is said to indicate that such an application would allow users to work with both bitmap and vector imagery, and would support both mouse and touch gestures. While it's a long road from a patent to a shipped product, Apple could probably do a pretty good job of re-inventing graphics applications, given its long track record in that area. It wouldn't be that hard to toss in page-layout and website creation tools and bingo — say hello to a creative suite Apple-style. And if those apps could read and write Adobe application file formats... let's just say things would get very interesting in the suite space.

Font suppliers are increasingly offering free weights of selected fonts to those who subscribe to their newsletters. My advice is to subscribe to every major font supplier and thereby relentlessy build a quality library of free fonts. The latest player in this tradition is Linotype, which is currently offering Sebastian Lester's Gothic Regular and Extra Bold for free download. And you can go further by following Linotype on Twitter or Facebook to access two more weights.

That's the name of a site that Neenah Paper has devoted to the ancient practice of engraved printing, with a focus on its CRANE Papers line. It turns out that CRANE has been around since 1873 and is still employed for a wide variety of engraved work, despite its concession to modernity by shifting to 100% tree-free stock. While the site's history of CRANE is interesting enough, the standout is a gallery of user-submitted engraved work, some examples of which are shown below.

If you've been pondering the purchase of a 27-inch high-resolution monitor but can't quite bring yourself to shell out the funds such displays typically command, I have good news for you. A newcomer to the display market, Nixeus, is offering its 27-inch S-IPS monitor, which supports resolutions up to 2560x1440 in portrait or landscape mode, for an introductory price of $427. Ship date is set for August 18, with pre-ordering possible now on Amazon or CompuPlus.

It would seem that it is for French design student René Mambembé, who created a series of posters on the theme of superheros and famous characters, each using a letter from Helvetica. The illustrations from the Helvetica, My Hero collection have a minimalist style in keeping with the typeface, some of which can be purchased as prints. I've included a few favorites, below.

As devices become ever-more controllable via touch, we're starting to see an increasing number of innovative input devices. The latest in this lineage is Jot Touch, a precision stylus from adonit that is the first to offer pressure sensitivity. The pen has a transparent disk on its tip that mimics the touch of a finger, while adding the benefit of not hiding what is being touched. Also of note are several shortcut buttons, Bluetooth connectivity and USB recharging. All very nifty but it's the pressure sensitivity that sets this stylus apart. Of course, apps have to support this functionality but with Procreate, Sketchbook Pro, ArtRage, DeepSketch and Animation Desk on the list (hello, Adobe!), there's something for everyone. The price? A non-trivial $99.99.