Them Pixels

Mar 13

Sketches on a geometric typeface I’ve been noodling on. Xheight is too low here, and the top bit of the B is a bit rough, but I’m happy with the overall character of the letters. The vision is of a typeface that’s bold, but fluid; pleasant to look at with a challenge to mainstream conceptions of character formulations while still being suitable for body copy. It’s a bit too light for body copy in this conception, and the vision is still hazy, but it’s progressing.

Jan 28

Looking for ideas for Fedora Install Banners

The Anaconda team has been working on a redesign for a while now. While the installation actually happens, there are going to be banners that tell you things while you install. We’ve got a couple of them made, but we’re plumb out of ideas. If you have any, send me an email at ctbeiser(at symbol)gmail.com.

Jan 21

Equaline is a brand owned by SuperValu that sells mostly commoditized bathroom products. For quite a while, my Floss has had the logo that you see on the left, which after staring at it for a long time, I suddenly realized the genius of: the two equal lines, breaking up the ‘equa’ and the ‘line’, and the justification of the letters, making the two fit above the lines equally. Altogether, a very clever, understated branding. On the right, we see the new logo; it’s formulaic, and removes the equality between the two halves. Indeed, even the weights of the “Equal” and the “ine” are different, which makes the letters made of unequal lines. What a shame.

Jan 12

On the left is the Canon ImageRunner 2270. As far as I can tell, it came out in march 2006. On the right is the Samsung SCX-6345, which as far as I can tell came out in october 2006. Things are a bit murky in photocopier release dates, because nobody really cares, so I could be wrong. But look at that resemblance. Even locations of the Green and Orange buttons, and the number-pad.

Dec 2

Iterating, iterating, iterating some more.

Oct 15

It's not anything groundbreaking, but...

doing things like this makes me happy.

Sep 20

Some sketches I did for Fedora

For This

Update: Success; I’m now the fourth-ever-Fedora-Design-Team-Bounty-Ninja-Designer.

Sep 12

A couple days ago, I went to the Apple Store, and finally got to try Lion. Everything was going fine until I tried fullscreening an application. For some reason, it lagged and animation went at about 3 FPS. Pretty egregious, really. Through some testing and conversations with friends, I determined it only happens on machines without SSDs. I suspect that most employees on the Lion team are on the SSD train at this point, and hopefully we’ll see a fix with 10.7.2.

Aug 21

Epidemics and Pandemics

If you care to recall, there was once a day, before Avian Flu pandemic scares and Swine Flu pandemic scares, that people used the word epidemic, and pandemics were unheard of. While the definition basically boils down to that a pandemic is an epidemic in more places, the way I recall hearing it explained was, during the avian flu scare, they had some “expert” on to explain that a pandemic was an epidemic of epic proportions. And sure enough, it captured the public imagination and superseded epidemic in the public lexicon. And here’s the Google Trends data to prove it, from 2004 and the last 12 months.

Aug 3

A mockup for a redesign of the Adium Events prefpane I’m working on. ( http://bit.ly/oveiQZ )