Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Just a few more words about Fonts

Something I rarely bring up my from inglorious past is my first art job. It was 1966 and I was 18 and a college drop out, just floating around waiting to get married when my then fiance decided to up and join the US Air Force. He didn't even mention it and just went ahead and enlisted. This should have been a warning sign to drop the dirty dog, but I was too naive and in love to care.... I digress.
It occurred to me that I was not about to be married anytime soon and would have to find gainful employment. This job opened up at a gift wrap and commercial shopping bag manufacturer and I applied with my pitiful pulled together in minutes portfolio. Apparently qualified applicants were not showing up and so out of desperation they hired me at $2.10 an hour.
My job was to work in the art room, doing the grunt work of turning free lance artwork into camera ready black and white stuff with two other chain-smoking artists (I have always been a non-smoker).

I also had the job of using this huge machine called a Photo-typositor to crank out text for customer store names for the custom shopping bags/gift wrap we made. I sat in a closet and using a couple of rank smelling chemicals, photographed fonts and developed them on long strips of photo paper. These were the Dark Ages when I became aware of the vast variety (at the time) of fonts. I became entranced that this was a field that people actually made into a career. I assumed they designed these fonts like architects do skyscrapers.
...How things have changed since then.
Today I downloaded 409 fonts from this site.  I didn't save them all to my system, as most were dumb.
Now there are programs that take your handwriting and vectorize it to become a font mimicking you. Imagine that.
And now the  mystery is solved. The name of the font on http://www.whynotsew.blogspot.com/ is Pea Olson
http://kevinandamanda.com/fonts/fontsforpeas/pea-olson/. Thanks to Amanda for providing the solution to my quest.
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Edith Tan sent me this about the posters and calendars she made for me:
Click this link and enter your zip code and it will find the retailer that can do all this printing magic for you! http://www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/retail-photo-services/
Not all sites offer all the services. At least that's what I found with my local Walmart, posters printing are not available. If you want specific service, posters for example, then select that service and try other zip codes that close to you. Often enough, you will find some place near by(i.e. in driving distance) you can get to, to get the posters printed.
 
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Meantime back at the ranch, it has been raining like mad (Thank Heaven!) and so getting stuff done inside has taken priority. I had our man Mike for the day and he regrouted the tile in the bubble tub room and assembled the new guest bed for us. Stock photo. I got this from Overstock.com. Such a deal.
The before and the after picture.

This will be where I sleep when we have a female guest. If we have a male guest, he can sleep up here with Dave in the next room. I doubt any guy would appreciate my girly room. I love that there are three drawers for the stuff guests usually bring. Then they won't have to live out of their suitcase.
 And here is the lovely new grout in the bubble tub room. Not having a before picture, I'll just say that there was very little grout left between these tiles. Now it looks finished. We are veddy pleased.
 
PS: Here's a sample of what that font page looked like that you couldn't see:
I used the Windows 7 Snipping tool to capture that part of the post.

7 comments:

  1. Nice bed. Is that a memory foam mattress? Very comfy! Needs color.

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  2. How nice of you to create a place for me when I show up unannounced some day. LOL

    I really wish I could!

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  3. Anonymous1:02 PM

    You just have the most interesting life! :-) Yay fonts!

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  4. Thanks for the links to the printing... I may do some this weekend.

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  5. Some people drink to relax, some eat, some go shopping- I download fonts! My fonting occured early in life in the 80s typesetting in HS on a behemoth called a Compugraphic- crazy what you can do now with a laptop and endless hours of download time and hard-drive space :)

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  6. love the new fonts. blogger is so limited. fonts are just another expression of your personally.

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  7. Love that font!!!!


    -Samya

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Hello,
So nice of you to drop by. I love your comments, and if you would really like a reply, please email me at fibermania at g mail dot com