Posts tagged by Stewf
Last Friday, we preached the gospel of Chromeography to the citizens of Berlin. Hear the short story of how the site came to be and learn a little bit about car emblem design and history.
Thanks to my smart and talented friends for participating in Typographica’s “Favorite Typefaces of 2011”.
Subaru Sambar and American (GMC?) pickup truck. A few years ago I spotted these two friends in my Oakland neighborhood. I so wanted to put that little Sambar in my pocket, but all I could take were a few photos. My shot of the lovely chrome badge ended up in a variety of Subaru newspaper ads and online promotions.
If Stone Phillips had been a talk show host in the 1970s, not a newsmagazine anchor from the 1990s.
Typeface: Washington (modified)
Chromeography is looking a bit shinier this morning. I finally updated Chris Hamamoto’s aging site design that served us well for over two years. Thanks to a (heavily modified) Narnia theme, the thumbnail grid now fills the window with uncropped images. Navigate via the dropdown menu at the top. (If someone wanted to draw me a simple stick shifter or dashboard toggle or some other cute icon to replace the ‘+’ I wouldn’t complain.) All text is set in FF DIN Round, a typeface with a mix of craft, engineering, and industrial history that fits our topic well.
I’ve packed the Chromeography sidebar with tags. Now you can navigate by color, era, car make/model, lettering style, and motif. More to come.
Honda Fit, the New Civic Wagon
Bill is a 1990 Honda Civic Wagon. The name was embroidered on a classy carpet dashboard cover when my sister and her husband bought the car, and it stuck. I inherited Bill in 2002 and adored him. He’s reliable (like any Honda), functional, and despite his compact size (shorter than most sedans), he can lug around quite a bit of junk. Even as the odometer neared the 250,000 mile mark, I was vowing to never buy another car until I found one like Bill.
I found that car when Honda released the Fit. The 2007–08 Fit was a design that had been in production in Japan and Europe for years. It finally arrived in the U.S. just as our backwards country was finally catching on to the worldwide small car movement. Of course, it’s not as sharp and boxy as my beloved Bill, but not quite as conventional and bulbous as most of the lame cars designed in the last 20 years. Unfortunately the 2009 redesign took a turn in that direction.
The Fit is essentially the return of the Honda Civic Wagon, which they discontinued the year after Bill was born. Miraculously, they share the same engine and cargo capacity, form factor, and very similar dimensions. I couldn’t have found a better successor.
 |  | |
| 1990 Civic Wagon 2WD | 2008 Fit Sport | |
| Original MSRP | $10,325 | $15,270 |
| Tech Specs | ||
| Engine | 1.5L I4 | 1.5L I4 |
| MPG Hwy | 34 | 34 |
| MPG City | 31 | 28 |
| Transmission | 5-Speed Manual | 5-Speed Manual |
| Horsepower | 92 | 109 |
| Fuel Capacity | 11.9 | 10.8 |
| Turning Radius | 32.2 ft. | 34.4 ft. |
| Interior | ||
| Front Headroom | 39.4 in. | 40.6 in. |
| Rear Headroom | 38 in. | 38.6 in. |
| Front Legroom | 41.2 in. | 41.9 in. |
| Rear Legroom | 33.2 in. | 33.7 in. |
| EPA Cargo | 21.5 cu.ft. | 21.3 cu.ft. |
| Exterior | ||
| Curb Weight | 2335 lb. | 2471 lb. |
| Wheelbase | 98.4 in. | 96.5 in. |
| Length | 161.7 in. | 157.4 in. |
| Width | 66.1 in. | 66.2 in. |
| Height | 56.1 in. | 60 in. |
I have the Sport model with an angular body kit, fog lamps, extra speakers, and a spoiler, because I find spoilers on hatchbacks to be ridiculous and awesome. More pics.
So what happened to Bill? He’s still in the family, so to speak. He was adopted by my good friend, Frank Grießhamer, a type designer at Adobe. Frank has already treated Bill well with repairs and upgrades. It feels good to know my old pal is only a short trip to San Jose away.
Fahrzeugübergabe!
There’s only thing left to do: swap out the horrendous Fit chromeography and replace it with the old Civic emblem.
These patterns are made from a single photo, shot and edited entirely on the iPhone. The photo was cropped and saved in 3 color variations using Camera+, then composed with Diptic.
There’s a bank of multicolored lockers at Stockholm’s Fotografiska (Photography) Museum. I took a half-hearted angle shot of the room and thought nothing more of it until later at the cafe when we were messing around on our phones. I cropped the photo to hide everything but the color of the lockers and rotated it. That crop represents each of the ⅓ columns in these images.
As a contributor to the previous edition of FontBook, I’m very proud to be a small part of this new version. (Thank you, Jürgen Siebert!) It’s bittersweet to say goodbye to print, but the iPad incarnation offers many thousands more entries and samples that are interactive and updatable. That means the typefaces shown, the classifications Indra Kupferschmid applied, and the “see also” cross references that Yves Peters and I created are not set in stone. Rather than printing supplements and errata, we simply edit a database. Rather than being stuck with a book that is out of date the moment it’s off the press, FontBook app users have a guide that is perpetually more current and useful.
While most of this data is on the web at FontShop.com, the iPad experience is unique. This format solves problems with navigation, hierarchy, and interaction that aren’t as easily addressed in a desktop web browser. A website has its own advantages, but this is a more natural evolution of the book. It is truly the best typeface reference in the best format possible.
Tip: iChat “Messages” Prefs
Here are two of the most overlooked preferences in iChat. When they became available they changed the way I use the app.
- In new chat windows, show: the last 100 messages
This retains your previous chats so every time you launch iChat or open a new chat window, you can see the most recent conversation with that buddy. Very helpful if you use iChat to share work files, such as images, like I do. Keeps an easily accessible record. I don’t jack up the menu selection to “The last 250 messages” because this feature tends to slow down iChat’s launch time the more messages you save.- Collect chats in a single window
One single window for all chats, with tabs for each chat/buddy. This is something Apple picked up from other chat clients and it’s a true life/screensaver. Now if only they would do the same with accounts (AIM, Bonjour, and Jabber all get separate windows).Stephen Coles
steel cloud (by Stephen Coles)
The interior of the Huntsman Center looks as much like a UFO as its exterior.
When we were little, our yarnspinning Uncle Doug used to tell us the story of how the alien craft landed in Salt Lake City in 1969. After months of waiting for the occupants to disembark, the townspeople cautiously entered the ship and discovered it empty … and ideal for a basketball stadium. Thus the Runnin’ Utes home was built.
Thank you all for a beautiful year.
“Hands of Peace” by Henri Azaz
Photo by Stephen Coles
