Blog dedicated to things about Glyph Drawing Club, modular design, type pictures and textmode art.
An obscure text justification method I thrifted a book Type Matters! by Jim Williams. It's not a great book , but it had one interesting tidbit in it, describing an obscure text justification setting. It says: Range left, range right, centered or justified: there is also a fifth way of setting type within a given measure, called cogent . In the 1980s [...] an advertising agency called Cogent…
UPDATE Summer 2025: I've released a new version of Moebius XBIN! This guide is completely rewritten for it. MoebiusXBIN MoebiusXBIN is an ASCII & text-mode art editor for MacOS, Linux and Windows, with support for custom fonts and colors. Download To download, click the link below and choose the package suitable for your OS. Download the latest packages from Github If you have suggestions or find…
Note: This post is a companion piece to my article The origins of DEL (0x7F) and its Legacy in Amiga ASCII art . That article is all about the character DEL, what it is, how it was used, and why it even has a visual representation, but with a focus on Commodore's Amiga computers. Whereas AmigaOS's Topaz font renders DEL with diagonal lines, IBM's PC renders it... as a house. This bonus article is…
Brief Summary tl;dr: This article is a detailed (but not exhaustive) micro-history on the character DEL (0x7F) as it appears in Amiga's Topaz font ( ⌂ ), and how it was used in Amiga ASCII art between 1993–2005. In part 1 , "What is DEL" , I try to form a comprehensive understanding of how DEL(ETE) originated as a way to obliterate errors on punched tape, and how it found use as a timing control…
Syntax Highlighting in Hand-Coded Websites The problem I have been trying to identify practical reasons why hand-coding websites with HTML and CSS is so hard ( by hand-coding, I mean not relying on frameworks, generators or 3rd party scripts that modify the DOM ). Let's say, I want to make a blog. What are the actual things that prevent me from making—and maintaining—it by hand? What would it take…
Typographic Portrait of Jean Sibelius Composed Entirely of Brass Rule In the dimly lit “printing cellar” of Media Museum and Archives Merkki is a remarkable and curious object. It’s a mosaic of tightly arranged brass rule and spacing material, made by a Finnish typographer Valto Malmiola in 1937. Note, it’s not a single piece of metal, and it’s neither engraved nor etched… it’s thousands of…
My favourite source of type design inspiration is to browse Amiga ASCII archives at asciiarena and 16colo.rs . In those archives there is just an endless amount of really wild but mostly well made lettering and logos, and the strangest thing is that they are mostly made by teenagers in the 90's! One of the ideas behind Glyph Drawing Club was to be able to emulate the style of Amiga ASCII…
Download font template here . What you are drawing with in Glyph Drawing Club are actually font files, and the shapes are individual glyphs from font files. It might be a lesser known or used feature of Glyph Drawing Club, but you can draw with ANY font with Glyph Drawing Club. All you need is an OTF or TTF font file, and then you can drag and drop that font straight into the editor window and…
Vector files exported as SVG from Glyph Drawing Club should always be merged (joining the vector paths together to make a seamless path) for smaller filesize and easier handling. Merging is fast and easy. Follow these steps: Export your glyph drawing as .svg Export as SVG Open the exported .svg file in Adobe Illustrator Select the Selection Tool ( V ) and press Cmd + a to select everything Open…
Table of Contents Introduction What is Glyph Drawing Club? What is modular design, text art and ASCII art? Basics Getting started with the basics Change the size of the canvas Moving around the canvas Undo / Redo Preview image Saving your work Saving and exporting your work Advanced Area selection tools Working with layers Using glyph sets Paint mode Glyph offsets and scaling Incorporating color…
In 2017 Shick Toikka asked me and my friends at GRMMXI to design a chapter showcasing one of their typefaces ( Saol Text ) in their upcoming type specimen book. We decided amongst us that each would design one spread for the book. Page I made with GRMMXI for Merged Contours type specimen book by Shick Toikka A typeface can potentially have up to 144,697 characters covering a wide variety of…
E-zines were text files written by Hackers, freaks, nerds, Sci-Fi fans, outcasts, psychotic weirdos, mad dealers and kindred folk, about what was happening in their lives, to reach out to other people with similar interests, lonely people scattered around the world connecting in CYBERSPACE and creating their own micro cultures around their hobbies and beliefs. Most of these e-zines would be about…
Note from 2023: This article was originally published in Versus #8 diskmagazine in 2018, and you need an Amiga or an emulator to read it. I did some light formatting and added links and images to this text. I've also appended a 2023 update to the end of the article. Finding ASCII art I'm one of the very few people (or possibly the only one?) that have entered the Amiga ASCII scene in recent years.…
Summary In my thesis, I study Amiga ASCII text art. Amiga ASCII is a form of text art where the composition of letter characters set in the Amiga computer's font forms a two-dimensional representation or image. The Amiga scene is a subculture of computer enthusiasts that was popular in the 1990s. At its core are the logos and other visual materials created for BBS systems and the competitive…