SbB Emote: A colorful faux emoji set built in Fontstruct

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I was playing around with some new-to-me features and bricks in Fontstruct. After I finished SbB Roundabout1, I decided those techniques would work really well on a symbol font. So I started playing around with building a couple of little faux emoji. Then decided that I needed to add some color. And before long, I’ve built an adorable set of icons in Fontstruct… SbB Emote.

Characters from SbB Emote, a symbol font

I don’t know which my favorite is – either the robot or the minifig-inspired smiley. “Happy Frankenstein” is a classic, too. In total, the set has 63 glyphs. The build used over 140 different blocks and 6 colors. It’s probably the most complex Fontstruction I’ve made, since I normally like to keep it really simple.

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Adobe's Project Indigo a home run in tough lighting

I’ve been playing around with Adobe’s Project Indigo computational camera app recently. I’ve got an old, but completely functional iPhone 12 Pro. Tonight at a minor league baseball game, while we were waiting for the game to end and the post-game fireworks to begin, I decided to try Project Indigo out in some challenging light. First, from our seats on the first base line, I took a shot with the iPhone’s stock camera app:

The shot’s fine, but it’s clear the net was an issue. The iPhone processing made it seem far more prominent than it really was. I then tried to take the exact same composition with Project Indigo:

IDG_20250705_211832_526 Edited.

This looks a lot closer to reality. It handles the sky and the net better. You can’t really tell from this upload, but detail is much...

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Fireflies baseball. A beautiful night to catch a minor league game.

A baseball game is taking place at a well-lit stadium with spectators in the stands and players on the field.

My dad randomly asked me if I wanted the typewriter my grandparents bought him when he graduated college. He used it in seminary and his first call. Uh, YES! So I now have a Royal Safari manual typewriter. Seems to work well. Just need a new ribbon.

Close up of keys on a typewriter.

Watched the entire Cubs game today… 8 home runs. This team is fun to watch. Can’t wait to see them in person later this month.

Watching Cubs v. Cardinals on Apple’s Friday Night Baseball, which is actually on Friday afternoon for July 4. PCA with a great diving catch in the first inning. ⚾️

We’ve reached the part of summer break where one of my kids has decided they want to learn how to make bread.

Embracing old tools in new ways + two new Fontstruct designs

Recently, I started playing around on Fontstruct again. The tool has evolved massively in the 17 years I’ve used it, but I interacted with it largely the same way — placing blocks on grids. I’ve been thinking about how I use design tools lately. I use apps like Photoshop and InDesign the same way I used them a decade ago. In general, this works fine, but I don’t really take full advantage of the advancements in the software. I’ve been trying to explore new features in Photoshop and Glyphs lately, and I decided I wanted to try out some of the features I haven’t used in Fontstruct, too. I just made two designs public: SbB Vertica and SbB Roundabout.

SbB Vertica. A bold all-caps display font consisting of vertical bands. I used the brick size and grid spacing filters to create the banding effect through the letters. To get...

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