Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Nancy Kominsky (1915 - 2011)

Nancy Kominsky passed away on the 11th of March, 2011.


Through her HTV West series, Nancy didn’t just inspire and teach me. More importantly, she gave me the courage to not give a damn what anyone thought of my efforts and not give up. Provided that I was having fun and progressing, nothing else mattered.

And, thanks to the magic of DVD, she inspired my two daughters as well. Although they are only 8 and 9 years old both of them know about “light, medium and dark tones” and “where the light is coming from” – Nancy explained these fundamental ideas so clearly that even children could, and did, understand them.

You Know When You’ve Been Tango-ed

My friend Samwise and I are both enthusiastic users of the GNU/Linux operating system and also enormous fans of the incredible range of retro computing emulators produced by the brilliant Tom Walker.

Tom (left) and Samwise (right)
Photo courtesy regregex

There’s seemingly nothing that Tom isn’t able write an emulator for. He’s written emulators for everything from the humble Acorn Electron to the StrongARM-ed Risc PC with Spectrums, Amstrads, Beebs, Archimedes and much else in between.

Elkulator, running on Fedora 14

So it wasn’t altogether surprising when, last month, Sam asked if I could create some icons for his desktop he could use with Tom’s emulators.

Superior's EGO:Repton4, running on RPCEmu

Sam is a KDE desktop power user, whereas I’ve always been a GNOME numpty. Fortunately for us starving scribblers and colourers in there is a project that aims to standardise all free software desktops and ensure we can create icons once that look good on all of them. The project is called the freedesktop project and the part concerning icons is called Tango.

There are numerous tutorials on the web that explain how to create Tango icons in both Inkscape and The GIMP.

The first icon I tried to create in Tango format was the three dimensional RISC OS era Acorn logo, to use with Arculator. Below, you can see the real Acorn logo on the left, and the “Tango”-ed version on the right.

More Tango-ed than Judith Chalmers

As you can see, the Tango version looks rather cartoonish – and the colours are rather muted and pastel. And the direction of the light source has been changed. This was all done deliberately and in order to follow the Tango guidelines.

Sam was happy with this icon and asked if I could create icons for all of the Acorn-related emulators. And that’s when sticking to the rules started to get a bit of a pain. For Tango icons, each icon should be a distinctive shape in order to help those with poor eyesight and each icon should also contain a metaphor as to the icon’s purpose.

However, for the emulators all that we really needed was a square icon with a logo that told you at a glance what computer you were using so the guidelines rather went out the window. The Tango colours were also very restrictive as far as what I could use so I just threw caution to the wind and did what I felt!

Here’s the Elkulator icon:


I really like the background grid, which was the trademark of the Acorn Electron.

Here’s the B-Em icon:


And here’s the RPCEm icon:


I also created some Archimedes artwork – here's the Archimedes logo I created as an SVG file in Inkscape:

Click to enlarge.

Here it is “Tango”-ed!


And here are the full set of icons I created for Sam:

Click to enlarge

In future, when I have more time, I’ll create proper Tango themed icons for all of these emulators. I spent about two minutes on each of the icons above and it shows! This will require me to actually draw the systems being emulated and make sure that I've got a different shaped outline for each one.

So I'll probably return to this topic when I've done some decent, real, Tango icons!

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Jewel Chase In A Jewel Case

Thanks to Dave Moore at Retro Software, I received a very exciting package in the post last week:


It seems so strange to go from a sketch on an envelope, to producing artwork in Inkscape to a finished product on my shelf with a 5.25" floppy inside.

If you want to get hold of your own copy of Repton: The Lost Realms, it is available here.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Back to Oxford

If you've had a good look at my blog you'll know that, though the medium may vary, it's essentially all about me copying something that someone else has done. Badly.

This is all very well in as much as it serves to keep a useless eater off of the streets of Kiskunhalas. However sometimes, to my acute embarrassment, the original creator of something I've been butchering gets in touch with me.

This first happened to me over ten years ago when Terry Griffiths, the designer of the London Weekend Television "river" ident sent me a very nice e-mail about the rather dodgy Flash Files I had created based on his work. They are still on Andrew Wiseman's 625 Television Room site. I later ended up animating Terry's idents in 16:9 for London Weekend Television's last day.

Christine Lord, pictured in 1969

The most recent example was last week when Christine Lord, original designer of the Letraset Oxford typeface got in touch with me after reading this blog.

I was thrilled to hear from Christine for several reasons - first and foremost because she's a lovely person, who was kind enough to send me some lovely goodies with her e-mail.

My version of Oxford in FontForge

Then there's the fact that I've never been in touch with a type designer before, let alone someone who had designed such an iconic part of my childhood.

And finally my blog allowed Christine to get Profonts' Sportowy font renamed as OXFORD PF and to get herself a well deserved credit as the typeface's original designer.

Thanks to Christine I can fill in a little more of the background behind the Oxford typeface. The face was designed in 1969 when Christine was 21 as a special project to create a corporate identity for the new Oxford Polytechnic. The face was originally called Lord Lower Case Linked, but was later renamed Oxford when picked up by Face Photosetting. It was then made available as dry transfer lettering by Letraset.

Another use of Oxford

I've also come across another example of Oxford being used, this time on the excellent TV-Ark website. It was used for Sheffield Cablevision, a short lived but very popular Yorkshire cable station. It's worth taking a look at the link as the station featured a presenter with a truly splendid comb-over.

If you are daft enough to want to get my version of Oxford, which I called "Scene", it's available for download here. Windows users will need to download the excellent (and free) 7zip utility in order to unzip the tar.gz file.

My version of Oxford features an upper case but, mercifully, I don't think Christine has seen that yet!