I’d rather read Goethe and Schiller because I am very German, but a few updates are in order.

I have worked with ChatGPT to finally crack programmatically using the Adobe line of software, and so far I have a few successes here and there, to which I will return later in this post.

I put together a small set of scripts on Github, if you are into that.

Then I have spent a lot of time working on my personal website’s layout and display, but that is still very much a work in progress right now, because I just started scratching away at ARIA, and thinking about my website as a useful interface for content. I actually immensely enjoy the serif I use for body text, it is the Cormorant Garamond, by CatharsisFonts, and you can find that here.

I am still doing quite a few adjustments on my website, nudging it closer to the ebook sweet spot. I think you can see the influence Apple Books has had on a few decisions here and there.

There is a dark version in the works, too. I was already experimenting with that.

What else?

The informational bot service called Grafikdesignfeed (on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and on Twitter) has been improved further over the last two weeks: more feed sources, better curation, a lot of huginn intergration and logic wrangling before it all gets sent to buffer to be syndicated to various platforms.

There was a lot of optimization potential there, which I am now glad I figured out. Thanks to ChatGPT again, I was able to work backwords from the results I aimed for and design the fastest and most efficient path to get this project there.

Rebuilt the permalink structures for my website and my social wall as well. worked with solid redirects, so that absolutely nobody gets lost in the translation from structure to structure: I am forcing usablility and accessibility into these online projects as hard as I can, and the new permalinks work because of that, I’d like to think.

Also, there was type experiments going on this week and last week. I was channeling my own graphic design nerd and went to town.

Equipped with ChatGPT, I pulled out BlackInk and built my very first pixel shader brush.

And it is a just so much fun to use it with a pressure sensitive pen!

I even uploaded one demo to my Youtube account, which I never use for anything.

And I put the code for the brush everywhere: on my cara.app account, in the description of the video on Youtube, even put together a page to store these experiments on my website, so that people can always refer back to that, and use these things themselves. For inspiration. For whatever.

Even linked that and the other thing, a small calculator for lines per page, on that page, and on my bento.me

I figured that using that to link to these projects makes sense if I want to post something, say, on Instagram and instead of having the hassle of trying to use links there, I can just say to go to my bento.me and click on the box which matches the post.

Which I did.

Called the page the toolbox, and well, it is. Will need to update it with the next thing. The bento.me page, the other project is already on my toolbox page.

I think I am missing something, but this is my after hours blog: polish is not what I do here.

And this brings me to the final part for today: using ExtendScript to take glyphs from five typefaces I chose for being different from each other, channeled my understanding of David Carson’s print work into it, and went exploring.

Pictures say more than words.

So I did this: put together several versions of an ExtendScript to talk to Illustrator programmatically, to glitch the word “frakt” (which is my server’s name, I have christened him that recently), then I sorted through all these outlines and forms, printed my favorites, and scanned the printouts, glitching the word by moving the scanner, sort of making brush strokes. And then sorted through these scans. Below are my favorites from this fun afternoon spent in flow.

I teased most of these on my instagram stories, because that is how I treat those: as a behind the scenes, teaser type of thing.

See you next time. Man, those are a lot of hashtags. Well, I did say I wanted to be embedded into the culture inside graphic design, so forget about marketing, choom.

That last one is actually a photograph shot with a macro, because look at those subpixel edges !

EDIT: a sh*t, yeah, and I put together a script for WordPress which gathers all links from inside an article upon publish and sends it off to linkwarden to be stored (and also to archive.org via linkwarden, which is way more wiz than what I did).

I now know what I will use Linkwarden for: to be a vault for my actualy links. Fight the link rot, build your own web, live forever.

This workshop is based on using a random letter and choosing a theme to help create the poster. I found this quite hard as I didn’t know where to start, we got the letter ‘S’. So we decided to use the theme loss as ti has the letter in. Loss is about losing someone or something that has drifted away. 

Our first trial we scattered the letter s in faded opacity across the poster. The only problem is that the placing didn't make much sense and didn't seem like people would understand. (Bottom picture)

In our final idea we thought doing a black background made the word stand more and make sense to the audience. Then we dragged the letter out in slow opacity to then the letter not existing at all. Which made sense as the word relates the letter. (The top picture)