Adieu 2012

The one and only consistent sentiment I have at this time of the year is the gratitude of a temporal state of suspension just before all hell breaks loose (again) in all conceivable situations where one can only be oneself by merely being oneself. My new year resolution is how to be less of an asshole, on the rationale that one only sees more of what one really is made of. Great read from Mark Teh.

什么是南洋风格?

All to a TV show I came across. The host from Taiwan mentioned Eric Moo having a distinctively Nanyang style of singing... and I was like (perplexed), what the hell is that suppose to mean?!? So does Stefanie Sun, Kit Chan, Fish Leong possess any Nanyang style in their music? Gosh, only if anyone can provide even the most remote possibility of what that means...

I find this deeply fascinating: What is Nanyang Style? Not particularly in the art movement (which is so conveniently associated with the likes of Liu Kang & friends) but more in the larger picture of contemporary attitude and culture and of course not forgetting the trigger of this post - music.

I googled for 什么是南洋风格? and the dismal results are mostly associated with home decor with description such as:

1) Source: 南洋风格
风格元素：芭蕉叶般的热带风情作物，纱幔，泰丝靠垫，印尼木雕，泰国锡器。

东南亚地区家装风格一般被称为南洋装饰风格。糅合多样文化的南洋装饰风格受 限于当地气候与天然环境的客观条件，总体上热闹，休闲，慵懒，香艳，舒适，明媚，室内与室外空间融为一体，充满自然气息又及其舒适，在南方地区受到人们的 欢迎。它在设计上逐步融合西方现代概念和亚洲传统文化，通过不同的材料和色彩搭配，在保留自身特色之余，产生更加丰富的变化，尤其是融入中国特色的东南亚 家具和那些具有浓郁的明代家具风格，重视细节的装饰;以波浪状，格子状，斜纹状的线条，挑起与热带文化的共鸣。运用熠熠金光，营造贵气雍容的泰式皇族空间质感，也是南洋装饰风格的设计特点。水池，SAP养身疗程的使用，则是南洋风格的另一种延伸。

色彩方面，南洋装饰风格有两种取向，一种是融合了中式风格的设计，以深色系为主，例如深棕色，黑色等，令人感觉沉稳大气；  另一种则受到西式设计风格影响，以浅色系较为常见，如珍珠色，奶白色等，给人轻柔的感觉，而材料则多经过加工染色的过程。

配 设方面，采用艳丽轻柔的纱幔，泰式绣花鞋，色彩妩媚的泰丝靠垫，流动着水中花的烛台，或者由椰子壳，果核，一粒粒咖啡豆穿起来的小饰品，再加上芭蕉叶般的 热带风情作物；印尼的木雕，泰国的锡器可以拿来做重点装饰，即使随意摆设，也能平添几分神秘气质；做工精细，设计巧妙的莲花型纸灯，给家带来宁静。浓浓的 东南亚热带风情就这样扑面而来。

2) Source: 讨论]什么叫南洋风格
南洋风格——特殊构造、图腾迷情
起源与特色：
近10年来，强调原创、原住民本味的民族风，在建筑与空间规划概念上，也对设计师提出另一个层次的省思。融合多样殖民文化的南洋风格，受限于当地气候与天 然环境的主观条件，室内与室外空间的区分不太明显。因此在格局配置方面，主要空间“凉亭”（客厅）就是整个空间重心，所以南洋风格的设计重点，主要是以打 破传统的格局配署为诉求。
材质与色彩：
把握以下3个要点，即可创造出南洋风格居家风格：
⒈将产自当地的矿业加工与手工艺品，例如：印尼的木雕、泰国的银器等，作为重点空间装饰小品。充满地方背景文化的图腾（大象、猴子等），即使随意摆设，也能平添神秘气质。
⒉以波浪状、格子状、斜纹状的线条，挑起与热带文化的共鸣。
⒊运用烁烁金光，营造贵气雍容的泰式皇族空间质感，也是南洋风格的设计元素。

The closest relevant information but still painfully archaic with an acute snarl of contemporary conflict. And just when I thought I have out-grown my identity crisis...

PAP Letterhead ♥ (& forever be reminded of our humble beginings)

So QUAINT. A great typographic find in the midst of some political scandal ...
Source: Lee Hsien Loong

Super Food For Thought

This post leads me to think about core strength and centripetal force not only in anatomy and yoga training but type design.

不論是漢字的設計師，或是拉丁字母的設計師，都會告訴我們，掌握線條之間的留白，重要性絕不亞於設計線條本身。因為在視覺上，留白才決定了字能不能容易辨識。 在構圖比例上，信黑體以楷書藍本，中宮緊湊，外圍寬鬆，每個字的邊緣形狀突出，讓辨識度與可讀性都高，因此非常適合用在內文排版上面。

之前與日星鑄字行 Rixing Type Foundry 張老闆聊字，發現鉛字的製作，尤其是日星的楷書，在筆劃設計上，都還要模擬寫字時的輕重，每個筆劃轉折、撇捺，都要有人味，也就是有書法的質感，所以在線條上並不會完全平順、完全規格化，要有用手執筆寫過的質感。 但數位字體因為螢幕顯示的載體特性，需要有不一樣的適應。如何在一格一格的螢幕上有最好的顯示效果？其實就是從筆劃著手，貝茲曲線的控制點要盡量減少，降低螢幕顯示上柵格化的干擾，減輕閱讀時的吃力程度，這與日星鉛字適應紙本要模擬手寫書法的效果，採取的是兩種不同的策略。 不過，信黑體在設計上還是向傳統學習：構圖結構源自於楷書，筆劃設計上雖然因為載體限制，無法模擬手書感，但筆劃走勢還是有楷書講究的力道；而在切角設計上，也是俐落但不露鋒芒，讓讀者眼睛感受更為舒服。這些優點其實都是傳承前人的智慧結晶，而有現代的適應與開創。

Source: 信黑體

Me, Myself and My Time

Slowly but surely, gearing towards 'Me, Myself and My Time' as the semester is closing to a swift e.n.d... Mad preparation for the show in January next year. There pretty much goes another year in a flash *bittersweet*

Trilingua from HK

The bilingual aesthetics is the obvious head-turner but the scalability of the interface is the real stunner! http://www.trilingua.hk/

Awesomest Weird Shit

This is a bilingual (Chinese and Thai) dream book with corresponding numbers for gambling.

'Simple' Stuff

Posters I passed by everyday but never really taking a good look at them.

Sobering Reminder

My favourite quote at the moment, with my favourite face :)

ATYPI HONG KONG 2012

I have lost count of recounting the event to both colleagues and students. Still, it warrants a post on my blog, and since pictures tells more, so here it goes. Not forgetting a recording done by a Kelvin Ke. and my FB album

One of those treasure given to me by the kind folks from 方正. So totally cool and awesome guys! All of course for their gorgeous type specimen. In fact, this is my first Chinese type specimen!

Men in pigtails doing type-setting. Just too hot! :)

Akira Kobayashi. Don't know why but feels so embarrassed **blushed** taking pictures of him. He looks so different from (pretty much the only picture of) himself on the internet. He is so understated and I guess it really doesn't matter what he talks about anymore... :)))

It was such an amazing experience and I was part of it. Not to mention all the fascinating folks I met. BLISS!! ♥
Other reports on ATYPI HONG KONG 2012:
By Masataka Hattori
By Dave Crossland (Blognotes)
By Luc Devroye

Uniquely Singapore

As far as I am concerned, this is old as my own existence. Not to mention there are different templates going around in both traditional and simplified Chinese script. Mad love!

S.O.S

Having a little crisis of the inability to 'get back', must have been away for too long. Hoping some typesetting can help get me back on track. Week 12 in school to-date. Seriously cannot wait for semester to be over! Geezzz.....

Looking forward to ATypI HK2012

What's in a Word?

I Beg to Differ...

"The designer of type is often found to be the very man who is not invariably successful in his application of type since he often lacks the necessary critical distance from his own creation." - Emil Ruder in Typographie

Upcoming Show @ The Substation

Typeset with Twilight.

My Latest Look

My favorite portrait to-date by Ms Lim Cheng Mei. ♥ the Snuffleupagus Lashes

美的觉醒

“我才知道世界上有一个考试，答案是不重要的，重要是那个过程！” - 美的觉醒/蒋勋
http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4a87402401008089.html

Italics Redraw

The slant angle which I have been using with the lowercase and ligatures unfortunately did not turn out well with the uppercase. In short, it simply looks too unstable for the bulky caps. This is what happens when one is away too long from one's craft. Simply forgot to test the slant angle on both upper and lowercase before implementation. Now, I have to negotiate a new slant angle that looks stable on both and rework my (previously done) lowercase, not forgetting the laundry list of ligatures **Ouch!**

3rd Week of School

Still ploughing through the italics and the ever-growing super list of ligatures ♥...

Ligatures to order ♥

K-pop unites the world

Sharing my desktop with the super talented boys from BigBang. Seungri is too hot and G-dragon is just too cool :D

Digress...

Something super random that clearly does not belong to the family (though sharing the proportions).

Having a Weird Moment with the 'T' Name

Twinkle, Twilight, Tableaux, Tzarina, Transyl, Tychism, Trapezius ...
One thing for sure, my trapezius are so aching! *dying to drop dead*

Moving on with Twilight Italic

Twilight Old Style Figures & Family

Yay! I will reward myself with a Korean movie tonight :D

Twilight (s.l.o.g.g.i.n.g..in.progress)

I thought I am done with the full set of basic opentype when I realized that I am not done the oldstyle figures yet! None of my faces offers oldstyle figures and I am determined to make it happen with Twilight.

Meanwhile, reading "Super Normal, Sensations of the Ordinary' by Naoto Fukasawa & Jasper Morrison

Greek Letters

Even though I know that the chance of anyone using any mathematical glyphs from my typefaces is nil, I still do the standard  μ  Ππ  Δ  Σ Ω  because, apart from not wanting my OpenTypeBasic encoding format to look 'incomplete', the other motivation is to see for myself how my design works into those exotic sexy symbols, always in hope that it will give me a bigger family to 'play' in my typesetting process.

So as I was 'combing' through my first weight of a new face, I was confronted with my usual acquaintances once again. Familiar yet strange, I googled for them again to refresh my memory of their anatomy. However, this time (finally), I went a step further for my own sake and it was a beautiful discovery. It came upon my realization that the full 24 letters doubles up as a complete numeric system too! Not just the usual  μ  Ππ  Δ  Σ Ω  but the entire-24-letters.

All of these glyphs/letters/numbers (some even into each of the u&lc distinction) represent an inexhaustible list of concepts in physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, neuroscience, telecommunications, finance, statistics, orbital mechanics, meteorology, computing, gaming, music, philosophy, linguistics, religion, mythology, agriculture, legal terms, etc.

No longer are these guys merely exotic-looking, they are super-loaded too.

Passing the message on

Even if it's been fallen on deaf ears...

“When a designer in Ice­land is pick­ing a font to use for his design some of the desired fonts are impos­si­ble to use for the Ice­landic lan­guage. How come?
In addi­tion to the Eng­lish alpha­bet the Ice­landic lan­guage requires few spe­cial char­ac­ters. These accented and spe­cial char­ac­ters are:
á é í ó ú ý ð þ æ ö
Á É Í Ó Ú Ý Ð Þ Æ Ö
See this more detailed at Dia­crit­ics site.
Accented char­ac­ters are com­mon in scan­di­na­vian and east­ern Euro­pean lan­guages and are there­fore more likely to be included in the fonts. How ever we often real­ize that the Thorn, thorn, Eth and eth are missing.” Read on...

In any case, here is a question if anyone has an answer to. If the eth is modified from lowercase 'o', why does FontLab automatically insert numeral '9' to the default eth?

The Meaning of Our World (According to the Simplified Chinese Characters) 2

Much to my horror, it just came to my realization that the original 五藏 (organs aka five treasures) which has been simplified to 五脏 shares the same 脏 as 肮脏 (dirty, filth). Gasp! Nevertheless, I am sure ample deliberation must have been put in place for such decisions to be made.

衫蒲康平于亚洲同人的对话-亚洲之书／文字／设计

So inspiring. Just what I need:
“。。。它们堪称日本技术创新最具代表性的器材，如今作为人的耳朵和眼睛的代用品而普及，都是性能很好的设备。然而，用这些感觉的代用品却是绝不会记录下这一瞬间的。不仅因为现场的刺激及其微细，还因为如今的器材过度分解成了单一的感绝体系。正象这些器材象徵的那样，我们的文明是将五感分裂开来，然后定向进化的，这一点是其后我在印度的大地上多次感受，无法释怀的。”

衫蒲康平于亚洲同人的对话-亚洲之书／文字／设计
Kohei Sugiura, Books, Texts and Design in Asia

Birth of Twilight

Finally managed to get away from the job to work on my new typeface! Calling it Twinkle Twilight for now. It was a slow start with my files dated from the 1st of May. The key glyphs are basically done and the design of '@' gave me some ideas on the italic version. Not sure if it will expand to a heavy weight as yet. Meantime, am taking some time to catch up reading 衫蒲康平于亚洲同人的对话-亚洲之书／文字／设计.

The Meaning of Our World (According to the Simplified Chinese Characters)

Whoever came up with this is such a genius. I will not even attempt to translate it as it's practically impossible to do so ♥

A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

《饮食男女2012》 A thing of beauty indeed.

ChengYu Visualized

Cool initiative. I am a fan: A Project in Shanghai >

Typographic Treat from Mayday (五月天)

另类美! (from Taiwan)

Fun Sightings

The top reads 'The Study of Organized Behavior'. The bottom: 'The Study of Organized Sexual Behavior'.

Magical Ordinary Characters

I have a special affection for this combination of characters. In its obvious (everyday) meaning, it reads 'Bus Station'. In its equally literal reading, it says 'Change Luck Station'. I read the latter. Feels so 'Alice In Wonderland' - ordinary, magical and dark. ♥ (from Taiwan)