Mighty Forces

Since I've spent the morning working on a logo for a client, I found the Phallic Logo Awards to be particularly funny.

"Atherton Car Centre" is my favorite.

In an effort to stretch myself, if only a little, in 2008, I decided to get on the "Project 365" bandwagon, where you take at least one photo every day for a year. I've started a Flickr photo set with the first week's results. Should be an interesting experiment in a lot of ways.

Related: The incredible PicLens browser plugin has a new version that allows you to look at a bunch of photos on a zoomable 3-D photo wall. Fantastic. Check it out.

It's been a long time - years - since anything computer-related has gotten me excited with anticipation. Hardware and software both are in a becalmed state these days. Where are the real revolutions, the real leaps forward that seemed so possible say, 15 years ago? Maybe this is how the people who owned the first refrigerators felt. At first it was exciting and interesting - keeping things cold with electricity! Now it's just something that you want to blend in with your kitchen countertops.

But after years (!) of gestating, Will Wright's Spore is finally going to be released in September (of THIS year). And I'm beginning to get excited again about the possibilities. Designing any creature you can imagine, and shepherding it through sentience, society and galactic exploration. And not just creatures - buildings, vehicles, whole societies. With an interface that allows Pixar-level procedural animation to be done with a few clicks of the mouse. Plus, other people's creations will automatically be added to your game's "universe."

How cool is that?

After many months of procrastination, I finally put up a new design for my business site, lucky8ball. Let me know what you think.

So tonight I geeked out and watched the movie "Helvetica," (very cool movie about typography and design) and then played The Rather Difficult Font Game online. I'm both proud and disturbed to say that I got 34 out of 34 on the font quiz, and thus am immortalized on the Hall of Fame page.

Bonus points for anyone who can tell what font spells out "signs point to yes" in the previous entry.

My latest online obsession is FontStruct, a free online font editor from FontShop. I love typography and fonts, but font design programs have always been expensive and complex. Not so for FontStruct, which is actually fun in addition to being free. For some reason I enjoy making the punctuation the most.

My first attempt at designing a font is called dottie:

I've decided that I'm most likely going to move this site from Movable Type to WordPress. By some miracle, I managed to import all my existing posts and comments into WP, and I'm working on picking a design and tweaking things now.

I never much liked Movable Type. I think it's too complicated for its own good, and the selection of templates is abysmal, especially when compared to the flood of professional designs available for WordPress. I'm thinking of going with a theme called PressBox, although it has weird behaviors in Firefox 3, which has become my main browser.

Anyone who has thoughts on the two systems, please let me know in the comments. Thanks.