Why can't we have a bookstore like this one in Ottawa?

Just wondering.

I'm watching Helvetica, the typography documentary movie, at the moment.

It's a learning experience. Recommended.

Wherein I show off just how slowly I can get urban design work done.
( Map behind the cut for the intrigued! )

Some things I'm toying with can be found here at Picasa:

http://picasaweb.google.ca/williams.dwight/MythicalMaps/

Two of the items therein have been noted here previously, but some of you newly adding me to their friendlist won't have known they were there to find. (Thanks much for that particular honour, opaqueplanet!)

Some of you will prefer Corel for your vector graphics stuff(as I mostly still do), some will cleave to Adobe Illustrator.

Occasionally, though, I've found myself playing and experimenting with Inkscape, and if you're also doing so, you might want to drop into inkscape_users to ask your questions or offer solutions. Only two of us here as of this posting, but that can change.

Something I wanted to do for the Daily Planet Guide to Gotham back in the day was a hack of the Eliot Brown map from No Man's Land # 1, showing where the neighbourhoods - and, as importantly here, the subdistricts of those neighbourhoods - I was talking about in the "City Layout" chapter were in relation to each other. Colour-coded if the budget would allow, but the "B&W + spot colour" scheme that was in effect for the Daily Planet Guide series was certainly flexible enough to allow for it. Alas, that wasn't possible for reasons I won't go into here.

My desire to do such a thing stemmed from an older desire, stemming from my map collection. I've had this collection of maps, atlases and whatnot since I was a grade-school kid. It started with the gas station-issue maps, Esso, Texaco, Conoco(there was this family trip to Yellowstone when I was in grade two or three...long story), and so on. Transit route maps, provincial highway maps, Rand McNally and so on. I look forward to the day when MapArt has every province, territory and USA and Mexican state covered with a volume of its own...ahem.

And that's a longwinded way of introducing you to a project I've been toying with for a few weeks now in a long-abandoned version of CorelDraw: Velvet City.

( See the map below the cut... )

mercuryeric noted his own addiction to font collecting, and I'd be remiss to not make my own confession along these lines. For me, it started in high school with the first Letraset catalogue I'd ever laid eyes or hands upon. Back then, not so long ago by some lights, they still sold mostly dry transfer sheets. Software for home computers was a few years off. When I saw the options available in the catalogue, and started recognizing a handful or so from TV-watching...Countdown and Data 70 from Space: 1999, Stop from the original Galactica and so on...well, it's continued from there.

I get the same online newsletter, and download freebies that catch my eye from time to time. Thanks to this one company, I've even tried my hand at designing them myself, as noted a few years back in this LJ. It's another sort of fun, and one I mean to get back to as soon as the time's freed up.

I should really try out that freebie copy of Typetool I got from that magazine cover disk a couple of years back, as well. It only works when Classic mode's turned on, but that's okay for me.

Well, it's a not-so-quiet weekend here. At the moment, I'm sitting in one of the Bridgehead coffeehouses - fair-trade tea and coffee and free wi-fi access being among their many trademarks, more about that later - and trying to cobble together the 2008 Ashcan Sampler for that Ottawa Small Press Book Fair next weekend. I can't claim to be the world's best desktop publishing layout specialist by any means, but I have tools enough at hand to make a decent go of it.

I do wish Corel would return to making CorelDRAW for the Mac, though. Version 11's fine, but some day I will hit a wall that I can't climb with it. (Or I could start fiddling with Inkscape in earnest, I suppose.)

I wanted to watch The Quality of Life, the new Dominic Da Vinci movie starring Nicholas Campbell as Da Vinci, last night. Damn the luck that saw my part of east Ottawa suffer a blackout from 8 to 11 PM EST. Just long enough to ensure that I watched not a second of that movie. Hoping that CBC reruns it soon, or that Haddock Entertainment gets the DVD into stores even sooner.

I still miss my Dad.

Those of you who still have yours? Enjoy'em while you've got'em.

Lots of small items of interest:

First off, some celebratory stuff: namely to wish a Happy B-Day to alexdecampi!

An advice request to those interested in DTP tech and software: I've recently gotten my hands on a legit copy of Quark XPress 5.01 via one of the UK computer magazines. Looks like it'll work with my Win98SE gear, too. Any pitfalls I should watch out for if I do load it up and use it for anything?

Pencil work's still in progress on Local Hero # 2. More on this in the weeks ahead.

Via the Sequential Blog: A couple of friends of mine got some good news about a project I enjoyed reading some years ago. Two words: movie option.

An article in the Toronto Star suggests an alternative way of seeing the economy. Looks intriguing to my eyes.

matociquala pointed out this proposal for a scheme of icons denoting possible safety hazards that humanity might face in future.

The hazards covered by these proposed icons are the sorts of things that you see regularly in space opera and superhero genre comics, novels, TV shows and movies, at least in my experience. I'm surprised the likes of Keith Giffen, Richard Starking or Jack Kirby didn't come up with them ages ago!

A most annoying reminder that media ownership concentration is not just a Canadian problem comes from the CanadianJournalist.ca blog today.

(In a related matter, I got an e-mail from one of the staffers working for my MP apologizing for the delay in getting back to me on that subject. Promising, yes. We'll see what comes of it.)

dduane notes that one of the non-Canadians on board Atlantis in orbit right now is part of an all-astronaut rock band. "Why was I not informed of this sooner?" indeed! :-)

Looking for graphics to show percentages of work done on a given project that I can fiddle with in a vector-drawing program.

Managed to start work on three more letter-glyphs on one of my font projects today. They need a little tweaking here and there, but I like where the design of the specific glyphs is headed.

Shopping for a wide-paper printer. Recommendations are very welcome.

More as I think of it...and now over to you!