Treatise - my first professional font!

It was about time I started to try and make some money from my plethora of hobbies... Today my first professional standard font goes on sale! You can take a look at the interactive previews at myFonts.com:

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/zephyris/treatise/

Treatise is serif (with the sticky-out-bits (: ) font with some fun quirks. It has very big round terminals on the top of letters like r, c, k and s and a big blob in the top of the o. These all work together to make it look a bit more handwritten. It also uses the single storey a and g (i.e. like you write them, not like you type them) which also helps maintain the handwriting feel. Treatise uses some fancy Opentype features which let you adjust the way letters appear depending on what neighbours them. I have used this to make the long tail on the capital R and Q nestle neatly around curved letters like u, e, a, etc. It also means that letter combinations like ff and fl where the f can crash into the top of the next letter are replaced with a nicer looking character combination.

While it has some cheeky little design features which make it very unlike most serif fonts it is still subtle enough to sit happily in a paragraph of text. Having said that it also has enough character to make a title interesting. All in all I am pretty happy with it as a design!

The software used to design and code this font was entirely free and open source:
Sketching - Gimp
Outline design - Inkscape
Glyph coding and font generation - FontForge

Image Processing: Paper Camera

The "Paper Camera" style of image, a kinda faux-sketch view of the world, is actually a very simple set of image processing steps:

1. Take an image (this is Franklin bridge in Philadelphia):

2. Find the edges in the image and make them into a dark outline:

3. "Posterize" the brightness to make it look cel-shaded:

 4. Layer the edges onto the posterised image and desaturate slightly:

You can download this filtering effect as a plugin for ImageJ from my website: here.

Software used:
ImageJ - Scripting and image processing

Stop talking about economics; placebo effects and the recession.

It is no surprise that the current economic turmoil has been so bad and lasted so long. This is the first recession of the post internet era, an age where mass media of all forms turns over with incredible speed and can spread word around the globe in seconds. Even when the dot com bubble burst in the early 2000s there was nowhere near the current level of instantly published online news, social network gossip and digital or cable TV with dozens of news channels vying for content.

One part of how economic difficulties arise is the perception of a rise in economic risk. At first this worry hits the investors, people who carefully follow the latest economic news, but in time non-experts, us consumers, become aware of it. And as we see the risk we spend less, saving our cash for harder times which seen to be approaching.

So which came first, the recession or the news story? In the past it was probably the recession which came first, at least to some extent. The modern media system means that now it is often the news story that comes first, a forecast of future economic problems "sells papers", or rather makes people read the website and watch that TV channel...

Economic forecasts are a placebo, and often not a good one. Imagine your weekly shopping, would you really notice if your £50 weekly food shop cost £0.10 more each time? It would take quite a long time... On the other hand you probably would notice if the panicky news headline said "Inflation Hits 10%!". Many people would probably not be affected by these price rises but the psychology of it, being told to worry, is a negative placebo.

Because economies are driven by speculation of risk by telling people there will be economic problems you will get economic problems; you can make an economy ill by telling it that it will get ill. This is just like the negative placebo effect in medicine, if you give someone sugar pills and tell them that they will make them feel ill many of them will somehow get ill. The solution is simple though, just stop talking about the economy, stop taking the sugar pills!

‹/rant›

Read about the "nocebo" (negative placebo) in medicine here: The Nocebo Effect an award-winning article by Penny Sarchet.
Nocebo at Wikipedia.

Macro Microchip

To see this (much) bigger click here. This is a single integrated circuit die only 3 by 2 mm in size... The thin silver wires radiating from the edges of the die connect the integrated circuit to the legs of its case. The two large greyish patches are the chip's memory, this is an EPROM chip which stores data or programs. The data can be erased by shining a bright UV light onto the microchip. The other fine detail is the control circuitry which lets the chip actually access its memory, write to the memory and function as a microcontroller.

This picture was taken with a Canon 450D using a reversed 18-55mm lens set to 18mm.

Software used:
UFRaw - For RAW to jpeg conversion with colour balancing, etc.

Scientific Icons

If you have ever searched for scientific icons (unlikely but possible) you will have found it is nearly impossible to find decent ones...

I thought it was time to change this; download my new set of 22 scientific icons here: SciIcons

Software used:
Inkscape

Eggs, eggs, eggs.

(Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 DC @ 200mm)
So for anyone up for a challenge... Whose eggs are these?

(Canon 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 EF-S on 2cm extension rings @ 35mm)

 They were laid on a cherry tree leaf, neatly covering the lower half of it, and were seen on the 14th Aug.

(Canon 18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 EF-S on reverser mount @ 18mm)
They are very small, around half a millimetre each, and a blue-grey colour with a slight hint of iridescence... They are definitely a moth or butterfly's eggs, but which species?

Software used:
UFRaw
ImageJ

Colouring SEMs

Scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) are the source of some of the most iconic science pictures... The problem is that they only work in black and white.

SEMs don't use light to create the image, instead a beam of electrons is fired at the surface and the ones which bounce back or are reemitted are detected. This gives a (very cool) looking picture that would be impossible to get with light but means that colours aren't detected...

The distinctive look of SEM images is because of the way edges of objects in the image appear; unlike most visible light photos the edges of objects are lighter than the middle. By detecting which way the slopes in the image are facing we can fake different coloured light falling onto the sample, I use a red light from the top, a green light from the bottom left and a blue light from the bottom right. This makes the image really come alive and gives it an even stronger sense of 3D.

Technically this colourisation method is mapping hues to the angle of orientation edges in the micrograph. The saturation of the illumination is based on the roughness of the texture at that point in the image and the value (brightness) is simply copied from the original micrograph.

The ImageJ macro I wrote to do this can be downloaded here.

Software used:
ImageJ

Image credit:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coleus_leaf_trichomes_SEM.jpg (public domain)