dewline | Entries tagged with design ideas

Noticing the similarity between the font used in the Canadian Tire logo and the one used for titles and author credits on most of the Star Trek: TOS novels published during the 1980's. I asked around on Facebook, and the conclusion reached by several of my friendlisters there was that we were talking about was called Futura Display. While there's plenty of sources for purchasing licenses for the "main" weight of Futura Display, there's not a whiff of the weight I'm looking for so far.

Any suggestions for legal sources? I've looked at MyFonts and Fontshop, so far.

Current Mood: curious

Thanks to Eric Trautmann for pointing this out.

Current Mood: nerdy

Continuing the practice...getting the guidelines for the deck lines into place, streamlining the dorsal radome, adding transverse bulkheads (but not prepared to die over specific placement)...

Current Mood: nerdy

Suggesting to the comics fen with an interest in automotive design that you might want to run an image search with the following phrase in full:

"Lamborghini Sesto Elemento"

Just saying, as the night moves onward...

Current Mood: nerdy

On a more positive note...stumbled across this on YouTube tonight...

Getting the sense that this is what Drexler, Okuda and company were aiming for in their work on the 2150's travel pod cockpit designs for Enterprise.

Trouble is, I worry that such design choices could backfire on the crews of Orion-type mission vehicles. One sufficiently nasty solar flare...? But surely, the designers of this real-'verse cockpit have already anticipated such things?

Current Mood: curious

I figure on attending this on Thursday night.

As for the group's purpose? Details here in the "About us" link. With my addition to design issues rooted in things all the way back to TOS Trek and Space: 1999, I figured I had to go have a look.

More on other stuff later in the day...

Current Mood: nerdy

Rummaging through the Ottawa sections of the Skyscraper Page Forums for topics of interest.

You might want to rummage there too, whether or not your city has a section there. There's some fun to be had by science-fiction-minded architecture and design fandom...

Current Mood: nerdy

It's not new, but since they decided to aggravate it for me and hundreds - possibly thousands - of other users tonight...

To Flickr- A Layout-Design Complaint - 23 June 2014

Current Mood: annoyed

Because various people have been pointing things out to me via Facebook that are catching my attention tonight.

The Geometry of Starship Design - Star Trek from robotjackelope.com. Focusing mainly on the TOS Enterprise, but a page is set aside for the Klingon D-7 as well. I was never the best geometry student in high school. I barely recall ever hearing about the "golden ratio" concept, and we never got into the Fibonacci Sequence material at all. But this is interesting. Thanks to the Star Trek Art Group on Facebook for this!

(For those of you interested in Star Wars, there's another page from the same blog.)

From the Icarus Interstellar Blog, pointed out to me by David Brin, we have some thoughts on starship design in a different direction, based on assumptions that artificial gravity will have to be attained by more realistic means. Mostly, they focus on the probability that long-haul generation ships really are going to have to be mobile towns on the scale of Melville to Moose Jaw in terms of population in order to work.

Not a mathematician or an engineer, so I'll be interested in seeing opinions from the rest of the room re: these two articles.

The song may have been intended as a Québecois separatist anthem, but it still works for Canada as a whole. At least, for today. The wind chill around this town was pain enough this morning to walk to the local mall for grocery errands as it was.

Add in the winter storm warnings provided by Environment Canada for tonight, and I've more than enough grounds to keep as close to home as possible.

So...fiddling with the web and Adobe Illustrator and looking for the Vulcan equivalent of Microgramma Bold Extended this afternoon. I've got a wordmark here I'd like to translate, you see...

Apologies to the people at Bell and Boeing. Seemed like a fun idea at the time and still does.

Looking back at this entry on Pete Woods' mapping out of Metropolis for the purposes of Geoff Johns, James Robinson and company a couple of years back...particularly in the context of this YouTube video Pete uploaded for other artists to work from.

The whole thing still seems a bit inconsistent with what was previously established, but I must give kudos to the effort that Pete put into this project. This took a lot of work to nail down as much as he did.

Current Mood: impressed

Unusual Telescope Mounts, a photo by dwight_ew on Flickr.

Saw this at the pro-evidence rally. Considered it evidence of a sense of design humour in action.

Current Mood: amused

Got this link from

coudal: the evolution of a widget in Iron Man's armor "HUDware" for use in The Avengers.

This is one of those things that got left out of the Art of the Avengers coffee-table book, along with the console art for the Helicarrier sets. Stuff that I'd have liked to see more addressed - you can blame this attitude on my being an Okudagram fanboy! - but they didn't have the page space or the page count for.

At least, we have the article on the web. Anything else along these lines I'm missing?

Current Mood: nerdy

Item 1: If I can use'em in Corel 11 or Canvas 8...? Any leads you can give me will be appreciated. I've got a bit of news-related satire in mind. Details if I can make the idea work.

Item 2: A recent post on

brianwood's LJ led

kadymae to suggest that Brian was "tapping (his) inner

coppervale. Interesting art style, especially in its emphasis on detail through line art.

I note that in comics, the artwork burden -- if that's the right word for it -- is oftentimes split amongst as many as three separate disciplines: pencil, ink and color. Thus far, I've chosen to focus on the first two. At times, I've been tempted to focus only on the first.

For today at least, I'm seriously considering it after looking at that third-mentioned LJ's most recent entries.