Friday 31 December 2010

Rue in SLanted

Rue is featured in Slanted - Typo Weblog & Magazin based in Berlin. An issue in Women, Typography, Design.

Friday 24 December 2010

Simple Feedback

I love all the feedback I am getting for The Simple Font. Really appreciate them all who took the effort to leave me comments as follows:

- head spinning and blurry-eyes inducing.
- difficult to read.
- fun to read.
- something weird happens when the font is used in text.
- I feel something happens when I read.
- there is a kind of musical pace.
- looks like toilet mosiacs.

It makes The Simple Font feel so alive! :D :D :D
PS: Helps me sieve out my target audience too.

Rue on Veer

I like how Veer handle Rue; the marketplace font.

Simple

The Simple font is featured in http://www.typographyserved.com/

Thursday 9 December 2010

The Wayfinding Face

Luc Devroye describes 'Simple' a Wayfinding face. I like :)
http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/singapore.html

Monday 6 December 2010

(BUY) The Simple Font

The Simple Font is finally available for purchase at http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/winnietan/simple/

A (thousand) Simple Calendar

Introducing Simple - The Bilingual Font.

The vague motivation about simple is that it would be somewhat ‘pixel’-based. The idea was conceived in the beginning of 2010. The drawings came in around April during my convalesce. Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish Gene’ played a big role in molding my thoughts of the typeface as a game of successful replicators* that propagate itself into various forms of surviving vehicles**.

The process of simple began with the usual alphabets followed by a series of icons and soon it was an avalanche of Chinese characters. The pool of proposed Chinese characters were loosely determined by the needs of a lunar calender.

In a nutshell, simple is a single-weight, minimal, grid-based San-serif display. Prudent with details and sturdy in form, the geometrically-driven structure marks the foundation of a cross-cultural assortment of Latin alphabets, Chinese characters and thematic icons. After months of extensive typesetting, simple is also realized to be well-catered for use in graphical information design in games and tournaments, logotypes, advertisements and headlines.

Friday 3 December 2010

The search for a new printer... IS ON!!!

After making so much fuss about the paper-direction for the content pages, they eventually still get it WRONG for the cover. HOPELESS!
花錢受氣.
氣: Bubbles...
I am drowning in my own bubbles.
(or exploding into flames)
****arrrgggghhhhhhhh****
I need to distract myself with some world-crisis news...
like the euro is taking another plunge, of sorts.
Apparently, yoga does not help in moments like this.

Sunday 28 November 2010

WTF

Winnie Tan Fonts

The 'Simple' Mockup

This is suppose to be a simple calender. A 2-color job. But guess how many mock ups does it take to bring us to the final? No less than 12!!

Oh well... I am not looking for anything fancy. All I want is to get the fundamentals right.

So looking forward to the deadline for the job and the school vacation, no more toughness on the printer, the students and most importantly... myself.

Sunday 3 October 2010

A Tall Face

The possibility of the next face, a tall one.

(More) Work-In-Progress

So looking forward to the deadline with the LS guys!

Saturday 2 October 2010

A Cathartic Update

I cannot believe I practically let something so obvious slip by. The new 'R' only appear after 2.5 months of typesetting. Thanks to the word 'APRIL' when the moment-of-realization strikes! Better late than never I guess...

Sunday 26 September 2010

The Multi-tasking Reality

This is the 9th week I have been away from my blog. Thanks to the full-time job. Simple's progress has been fragmented and chaotic but nevertheless rewarding. I am also still working on more typesetting for Rue... which is kind of distracting and far from ideal :S

Typesetting Concentration Camp...

I have never done so much typesetting in my life, in the months of August and September. The most challenging brief would have to be: Set only one weight per composition. Hope that's all for Rue in the meantime. I just want to spend all my time with Simple now.

Friday 23 July 2010

Free font

Rue Semibold is available to download from Typetogether.

Friday 2 July 2010

I Wish I Had Done This.

Guess where I found this cool font? At the totally uncool Woodlands NLB! It's from the DVD cover of Bjork's concert at the Royal Opera House (2002). Till I track down the identity of this font, I will call it Bjork for now.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Literally minutes later, I got the answer I was looking for: Thanks to David from Identifont.com. Vespertine is a linear font designed specifically for the icelandic artist Björk by M/M Paris.
http://www.mmparis.com/bjorkasabook/bjorkasabook01.html
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This is what I would call a highly evolved being camouflaged in a seemingly child-like form.

Monday 21 June 2010

The Paranoia of Working Alone...

“It is a calamity, to say nothing of the time wasted, to labour over details in a poorly conceived design.”
- Sallie Tannahill, B. P’s and Q’s; A Book on the Art of Letter Arrangement.

"The reason is, when there is a hard problem, one has to work a long time and has to be persistent. In order to be persistent, you have got to be convinced that it's worthwhile working so hard, that you're going to get somewhere. And that takes a certain kind of fooling yourself."
-Richard Feynman, Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinov

Tuesday 15 June 2010

The 'Simple' Font 2

Inspired by GYT, I used up the rest of the day doing more typesetting.

The 'Simple' Font

I have finally settled on a name for the 'S' font: 'Simple'. Else, nothing is really carved in stones except some typesetting for review purposes. I will definitely need to add more glyphs to the set though...

Rue on Veer

Guess what! I found Rue on Veer complied by Cabinet Type. It's a very delightful find because I absolutely love the way it has been typeset and its association with food. Yes, I can see Rue as a food/packaging type :)

Friday 4 June 2010

The 'S' Font - Part 2

It began with the usual latin alphabets... followed by a series of icons and soon it was an avalanche of chinese characters! But why not? Yes, daunting but why not? Been a month and with 550 glyphs to-date. Scheduled to debut as a calendar font in 2011. Still no name in mind, so 'S' font it will stay till then.

Such a turn of events. This will be my first bilingual font.

On a side-note, I found an image of a hundred 福 character somewhere on the internet but lost track of the source. Fascinating image! 百福圖.

Wednesday 21 April 2010

The 'S' Font

These are some preliminary sketches for a new font. The vague idea is that it is pixel-based. Maybe it's the influence of currency/stock/weather-watching during my convalescing, or even Tolstoy's 'War&Peace' or Dawkins's 'Selfish Gene'... it's always good to identify some reference point(s).

Regardless I have shortlisted some names for as follows:
1) Saturn (a spacey feel...)
2) Spacey!
3) Scone (simply something I have not eaten for ages)
4) Spider (a tedious metaphor?)
5) Speaker (think Kylie Minogue)

Oh well, maybe typesetting 'Eyjafjallajokull' might bring me somewhere...

Vernacular Type 1

Some vernacular type I have been collecting for a while now. From Singapore, Istanbul, Kuching and for various reasons.

Sunday 4 April 2010

Everything comes to an end - good or bad

'Fire can both destroy and provide warmth. Illness is the same. I can feel joyful when I am sick. During an illness, the burden of everyday concerns disappears, and when I am cured, I once again feel his pressure.' - Leo Tolstoy

Keenly felt.
It's only on hindsight that I could ascertain I was indeed joyful at my most vulnerable.

I have no idea what to expect for my first myomectomy post-recovery. Upon consciousness, I just felt the body weak and distant. The body and mind were separate entities.

Lying in bed made me realized the tremendous milestone achievable by the body every single day. Silently bustling with unwavering determination, the busy body is constantly smoothing the nervous mind through an inexhaustible healing slumber.

The 'hyper-sensationalized' body was my source of comfort. It was constantly communicating to me on its progress through the 10.5cm wound (of course) uterus, bladder, fallopian tube, etc. And now as I got better, their acute presence is no longer keenly felt, it really feels like I have lost a friend.

I missed being in LALA-land with my friend(s).

Tuesday 23 February 2010

Rue@Typetogether

230210. Rue is finally released today! :)

Monday 8 February 2010

Quandary

My most low-key baby: Quandary is now on www.typographyserved.com too!

Sunday 17 January 2010

Prahaha + Rue

Prahaha hardly garners the kind of attention that Rue usually gets. So finally, news came on a Sunday afternoon that Prahaha is featured at www.typographyserved.com via the Behance Network.
Rue Display www.typographyserved.com

Saturday 9 January 2010

Graffiti Analysis 2.0

This is so completely super!!!
http://graffitianalysis.com/

So is this.
Graffiti Research Lab L.A.S.E.R Tag

Friday 8 January 2010

New 'female' Font

In case you are wondering (just like me), what is the new font used by 'female' magazine: it's ITC Caslon 224 Black Italic. At least for now, I can finally distinguish 'female' from 'her world'.

Sunday 3 January 2010

Since the October of 2008

Rue took 9 intensive months to conceive. Followed by 2-3 months of distraction (holiday+moving home) plus 4 (multi-tasking) months and still counting to the last weight of the italics. Geez, has it been that long?

Rue's estimated release is Febuary 2010. Check out www.type-together.com for updates.

Friday 1 January 2010

So Long

Gone but not to be forgotten.