Tag: design

16th century portfolio

Before black vinyl folders, and way before the website, the Mediaeval ancestors of today’s graphic designers produced ‘model’ or ‘pattern’ books to show their work to potential clients. Only a handful survive but the British Library has recently discovered a prime example – the so-called Macclesfield Alphabet Book

Produced c1500, the book is filled with designs for different styles of script, letters, initials and decorative borders.

Hangul

Hangul, Korea’s “Great Script,” is perhaps history’s only effort at alphabet reform that is both scientifically rigorous and universally successful. As a result of careful planning, Hangul is easily learned, comfortably written, and infinitely flexible. Consonants are linear (ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅎ), vowels are horizontal or vertical lines (ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅣ), glottalized letters are doubled (ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ). their shapes are related to the sounds they symbolize.

Generated worlds

“Another big benefit of procedural content creation is that you end up being able to do stuff you simply couldn’t do otherwise. It opens up innovation fields. If you’re creating things through code, you have a deeper understanding of what you’re doing, and you can bake in some limitations. Our artists needed to be able to build not a random tree, but a type of tree. It’s actually much closer to building a particle system than building traditional art assets. Artists play with parameters more than they play with vertices.”

the same will happen to movies too. directors have reached a limit about the level of detail they can micro manage. lord of the rings was probably one of the peaks.