A bit of cooking, a bit of typography. Next meal will likely have a more elaborately written and designed menu, but this was just a bit of fun.

I was, however, playing with a new approach to faux letterpress shading that I’m fairly pleased with. It’s delicate, but decidedly letterpress in appearance. The coverage noise is a little pronounced, but it’s digital, and we usually need to exaggerate these things.

Blambot has a fantastic breakdown of how type conventions work in comics and graphic novels. Full of things that are news to me, like the use of breath marks. Great as a supplement to the always relevant work of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner.

Comics Grammar & Tradition (via BoingBoing)

Score your bend lines. To get a shape to pop up as desired, you need to be able to define where and how the metal bends. Not surprisingly, you do this by weakening the metal (scoring, essentially) at the place you want it to bend. Using the hand card as an example, the fingers are articulated because they bend where the knuckle design is etched; not below, not above, but right at the knuckle where the metal is weakest.

3 ways to score. The photochemical etching process, at least with 0.01″ sheet steel, etches at 2 depths: half-way, or all the way. So we have 3 basic ways to plan where the metal will bend: half-way, all the way, or not at all. Let’s take a closer look:

1. Make it skinny. The metal will bend where the metal is weakest, and it is weakest where it is narrowest. Pretty straightforward, this.
2. Etch a score. By etching a line all the way, or even most of the way, across the metal, you thin the metal at that point, forcing it to bend there and not elsewhere.
3. Perforate. A variation of #1, perforation is a series of small narrow points. But the basic rule is the same: less metal = more bend.
4. Mix and match. Try some combination of the 3… maybe only perforate to half-depth, or make it skinny and scored.

Bend + bend + bend = break. Understand that bending sheet steel also weakens it, and repeated bending along a score will eventually lead to a break. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way. As neat as the Hand + Eye cards are, that thumb can really only be well bent a couple of times. Then you have a thumbless hand.

Remember your papercraft. While there are many things metal can do that paper cannot, like hold a bend, metal cannot do everything paper can: without tools, you can’t fold it, roll it, or tuck a flap under another flap (think origami). Nonetheless, the history of papercraft is rich with technique that can be applied to metal. Start looking there for ideas.

Get samples. The biggest piece of advice I have is to get samples of the sheet steel, cut it up, play with it, bend it, destroy it. You won’t really know how the metal will behave during bending until you test it out for yourself.

That’s about it. Have fun, stay safe. If any of this is helpful to your project, please share your results with the class.

• How were they made? The cards were produced using a process called photochemical etching.
• Where did you get them made? The Hand + Eye cards were produced by Acu-Line in Seattle. There are other outfits around the country, but Acu-Line was the one closest to me. I was very pleased with the result.
• Will the metal cut you? The metal is thick enough that a flat piece with a smooth edge, with most normal handling, will not cut you. After the photochemical etching, the cards are deburred to smooth the edges, removing any metal snags. However, if you design the card with sharp corners, they are capable of scratching and poking, which is why rounded corners are recommended.
• How much does it cost? At the time they were made, these cards were roughly $1 each to produce, but that price appears to have gone up.

That’s the basics. Acu-Line, or some other outfit, is best able to answer production questions.

Tomorrow, I’ll post something more specific about designing for metal cards, especially the cool bendy stuff that gets three-dimensional.

Earlier this month, the fantastic Mark Simonson put together a lengthy post about the typography present on screen in the AMC show Mad Men. He mostly limits his exposé to showing which fonts are or are not of the period. But he also points out that real props used from the period in the show all have an anachronistic patina to them, as if the Selectrics available in the 60s were already 40 years old!

While this might seem nit-picky, no one can doubt the fantastic job the Mad Men production designers are doing on the show. We can thank Mark, though, for keeping period typography honest.

Mad Men, Mad Props

While we’re on the subject of title cards… I’ve been doing research on a forthcoming project, and I came across Dave Mackey’s Warner Bros. Cartoons Filmography and Title Card Gallery. The Wayback Machine says he’s been working on it for a while, and I’m glad I found it. It’s really an invaluable resource.

Xeni Jardin and the kind folks at BBtv allowed me to contribute some title cards to their fantastic parody, SPAMasterpiece Theater.

I’ll post some more about this later in the week, including what I’m sure will be an overly pedantic analysis of the style and design choices. Now doesn’t that sound like fun?

UPDATE: Ugh, I now see that my WP template isn’t wide enough (at 430) for BBtv’s embeded video (480). I’ve scaled it down to 430 in the embed, but there are some resolution scaling problems with that. Hit FULL SCREEN for the good on the goods. I guess my template needs some fine tuning… and coarse tuning.

John Hodgman in BBtv’s SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol III: THE STOMATOLOGIST

I suppose this is just an ad gimme page, supported with AdWords like the rest of Internet Minor. Still, I’m pretty tickled.

Ooh, isometric grids.

Printable Paper

Ubiquity is the latest spiritual inheritor of the command line. Like Aza’s Enso, or MIT’s Inky, they see the description of action (or, the use of verbs) as the simplest path to accomplish a task. It’s the difference between graphically juggling icons as metaphors for physical actions, and simply describing the steps involved in a task. It ultimately comes down to what tasks one is trying to accomplish, of course; Ubiquity won’t help me when I’m working in Photoshop. But for what it’s designed to do–data trafficking, the manual API–Ubiquity’s linguistic UI might be the ticket.

The initial suite of commands and APIs that Ubiquity comes equipped to handle seem to favor search (of various stripes, including translation); the passing of links (via email, I think I saw Twitter in there), mapping and a couple of other web services are thrown in as an overture toward eventual… ubiquity. I initially wanted to see more, but respecting that this is a very early release, I think at this point all Mozilla and Aza Raskin are trying to do is prove a point.

I don’t see Ubiquity’s brand of gestural interface as having a great deal of value on the desktop, where the user is treated to a banquet of interface methods. Even having the capacity to get more done without having to reach for the mouse doesn’t preclude the adaptability of a multi-window modern GUI. I know developers who swear by Quicksilver and similar launchers, but a developer’s relationship with their desktop is more symbiotic than the average user’s; developers are like bobsledders trying to shave hundredths of seconds off their time. But then, this isn’t about the desktop so much as it’s about the web.

And this is where Ubiquity (or, more importantly, gestural linguistic interfaces) will really shine. Especially on the future of the web: limited desktops and mobile devices. Where the switch between text-input and cursor-input is more problematic, the ability to quickly tap out some functionality between applications that don’t themselves have interoperable APIs.

Right now, though, it’s a bit of a gimmick. I’m willing to kick around with Ubiquity for a while, continue putting it through its paces, but I still say we won’t appreciate it until we’re using it on iPhone 3.0.

Introducing Ubiquity

I found this box as promotional packaging for some Bentley’s teabags. I’m not sure if it’s a craft traditional to some part of the world, but I can only imagine it was one of several hundred thousand assembled in some sweatshop somewhere. It’s 100% bamboo planking, not sure what the flat strips are made of; I’m also not sure if or how the bamboo is treated.

Looking at this, just as with basket weaving or natural sackcloth, I wonder if there’s a lesson here about the future of commercial product packaging. While the components are obviously biodegradable, I wonder if the work involved in constructing this box is excessive for something that should be thrown away; likewise, what would be an individual’s limit if forced to reuse these boxes instead of discarding them?

When looking at alternatives to plastics and treated cardboard, it’s tempting to want to return to traditional handicrafts. The natural aesthetic clearly advertises the eco-ethics the product manufacturer wishes to espouse. But given the carbon cost of shipping these boxes from overseas, the unknown working conditions under which it was constructed, and its dubious reuse (beyond an initial, token quantity), just how socio-eco-ethical is this compared to a cardboard box?

It sure is a purdy box, though.