Notes on design, travel, TypeMedia, & more.

September 24, 2018

Lessons learned at TypeMedia

This July, I graduated from TypeMedia in the class of 2018. It was one of the most difficult, most rewarding experiences of my life. I’m still too close to it to understand its long-term impact on my design career, but I learned a tremendous amount…

March 18, 2018

Level up your terminal game with iTerm2’s Hotkey Window and text settings

Occasionally, I’ll be talking with someone as I’m on my computer, and I pull up my terminal to enter a git command or something similar. If they use the terminal a lot but haven’t seen or tried the “hotkey window” in a terminal before, they sometimes…

December 17, 2017

Getting started in Drawbot, part 3: making a perfect, expandable grid

Goedemorgen! This is the third post in a small series about using Python in Drawbot, for Parametric design. If you haven’t read the other posts yet, check out part 1 and part 2 . In this post, I’ll be doing a deep-dive into the thought process…

December 16, 2017

Getting started with parametric design in DrawBot, Part 2

The following are notes taken from Just van Rossum’s Python class in the KABK Type and Media program, on Sep 20, 2017. If you haven’t yet learned anything about Drawbot, start with part 1 of this series . In these classes, Just does a great job of…

December 15, 2017

Make the macOS command line super convenient with aliases

You may already know that the command line allows you to interact with the core of your computer via the “bash” shell (I’m resisting the urge to get into etymology and a description of shells, but if you’re curious, check out the “More Reading…

December 10, 2017

Getting started with parametric design in DrawBot

As part of Type and Media I am taking classes on Python from Just van Rossum (Just is pronounced like “Yoost”). Just has done a ton to move type design technology forward, such as being one of the three main developers of the UFO font file…

November 01, 2017

How to generate simple sample strings with Python in the macOS command line

Recently, I wrote a post about manipulating strings with Python to help in font testing (from here, I’ll refer to this as “the previous post”). I received the feedback/tip that Python can also help you generate the alphabet or digits quickly and…

October 31, 2017

How to manipulate a string with Python in the macOS command line

These weeks, I’m doing a lot of type design for class, and part of this is testing fonts that are just in their early stages, often with a very limited character set. For this, I find myself needing to work with strings of text to test my partially…

October 14, 2017

Our class schedule for the first semester of TypeMedia

Note: I finished the majority of this post in the second week of class, but things got so busy, so fast, that it’s taken me until now to really finish it and post it. Hopefully the classes and projects described below point out why it’s taken so long…

September 16, 2017

Five tips for beginners to start having fun with lettering and calligraphy, with (almost) no budget

I just got a message from a friend from my freshman year dormitory at the University of Minnesota: hey, i thought you would maybe be the guy to ask about this sort of thing. For a weird period every day, i’m a high school art teacher, and the first…

September 14, 2017

Use Drawbot with GitHub and VS Code

My TypeMedia class is taking our first forays into Drawbot, a program that allows you to make drawings and animations programmatically with Python. To me, it feels a lot like CodePen for Python. However, there are a few things that Drawbot doesn’t…

September 13, 2017

Handle events in Gatsby React Components

My initial question: I’ve recently been working on a blog using GatsbyJS, which is based on React. The main challenge I have with it right now is how to the use javascript to manipulate the DOM in react. I know basic javascript, but my basic…

September 09, 2017

Some highlights of Den Haag, so far

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve already been in Den Haag for almost three weeks. Yes, it’s called “The Hague,” in English, but the Dutch “Den Haag” sounds so much nicer to me and is obviously what people call it here, so I try to call it that, too…

September 07, 2017

TypeMedia class introductions + hot tips™ to giving a good self-intro presentation

Today, September 7th, we met (most of) our teachers and had a walk through the calendar for the year and of the course expectations. Then, each student presented for 10 minutes to explain who they are, where they come from, what work they have done…

September 06, 2017

Orientation at KABK for TypeMedia ’18

Tomorrow is the actual first day of class, but last week we had three days of orientation. Monday, we met the classmates who weren’t here earlier and got some opening remarks. I also joined a group of Art Research students on a walking tour of The…

September 03, 2017

How to type with emoji and special characters on macOS 🎨

Quick: you need to add an emoji to an email/document/mockup – what do you do? What if you instead need to add a special character, like a ℉ or ® sign? I used to reach for something like Emojipedia or Amp-What , then copy-and-paste from there…

August 25, 2017

Amsterdam and Delft

I’m extremely grateful to be able to live in the Netherlands for almost a year, in part because it gives me the chance to travel to Dutch cities in a way other than the go-all-day-long-and-take-it-all-in mode I am used to when traveling. I was able…

August 23, 2017

Rotterdam

I didn’t know what to expect from the city of Rotterdam. I knew that a friend of a friend had studied in university there, and I knew that a classmate of mine had gone with parents and felt like there wasn’t much to do. However, I took the chance to…

July 05, 2017

Montreal 😻 🇨🇦

About a week before the July 4th holiday weekend, Celeste (my girlfriend) and I were discussing last-minute travel plans. We looked at airbnb listings up along the Hudson river. A calming vacation into the less-urban, hilly areas north of NYC was…