12Feb10
You may remember from my earlier blog post that I’ve been working on a databent typeface. It was mentioned a fair while back now, but I have been doing bits of work on it every now and then. Here’s a bit of my progress so far:
Ass you can see some of the characters are more recognisable than others. In fact, looking at it again I can’t really remember what some of them were. As I’m planning on having most characters mapped out, in upper and lower case, progress will be a bit slow, so I’ll aim for April for a completed font.
01Feb10
Myself and Mez recently finished a script called Echobender that automatically databends images.
Click to download
To use it you’ll need:
- A computer with Linux installed. I don’t have a Windows or Mac PC so I can’t test it on those
- Sox. On Ubuntu you can install it via “sudo apt-get install sox”
- Convert, which is part of ImageMagick. On Ubuntu you can install it via “apt-get install imagemagick”
Once you have those installed just execute ./echobender.sh from the terminal and then drop a .jpg or .bmp file into it. The output will be in a folder called “echo”.
If you look closely at the script you can see a way to convert any data into an image! I’ll leave that one up to you… Here’s the source code for all those interested:
#!/bin/sh -e
# Echobender
# By Antonio Roberts and Martin Meredith
# www.hellocatfood.com | www.sourceguru.net
# GNU/GPL
segons=`(date "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S")`
outfile="${segons}"
if [ ! -d ./echo ]; then
mkdir ./echo
fi
clear
echo -e "\033[31m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[33m Echobender \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[32m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[35m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
read -p "DROP A FILE HERE> " foo
echo -e "\033[32mLets bend $foo \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[35m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
foo="$(echo $foo | sed -e "s/'//" | sed -e "s/'//")"
bn=$(basename $foo | sed -e 's/\.[a-zA-Z0-9]*$//')
imsize=$(identify -format "%wx%h" $foo)
cp $foo ./echo
convert ./echo/${bn}.* ./echo/${bn}.bmp
cp ./echo/${bn}.bmp ./echo/${bn}.raw
sox -r 482170 -e u-law ./echo/${bn}.raw ./echo/${bn}2.raw echo 0.8 0.9 5000 0.3 1800 0.25
convert -size $imsize -depth 8 rgb:./echo/${bn}2.raw ./echo/${bn}.$outfile.bmp
rm ./echo/${bn}.raw ./echo/${bn}2.raw ./echo/${bn}.bmp ./echo/${bn}.jpg
echo -e "\033[33mJob done. Check ./echo \033[0m"
echo -e "\033[31m---------------------------------------------------- \033[0m"
Thanks to Imbecil’s MPegFucker script for much of the inspiration.
30Dec09
I was speaking with Jon earlier about my work and he’s noted that a lot of it has been text based and then asked if I was working towards making a typeface in the same style. I must admit, my recent text based work has mostly been an excuse to use the awesome Kawoszeh typeface, but I feel he’s onto something.
Whilst I’m quite far from a complete typeface I’ve been doing a few experiments:
Believe it or not that is the letter A glitched in the same way (replaced 9 with 15), but under different conditions. The reason for the above experiment is wanting to find the best environment in which to make the typeface. For example, the more nodes you have on a shape the more variance you get. The type of nodes that you have also has a major effect.
I’m also thinking about what typeface to use as a base. Being mostly Brummie I’m drawn towards hacking Open Baskerville although using just Arial Black provided some good results, as can be seen in my short glitch animation
I’ll have something produced next year and, should I finally do some coding, actually have a script to databend for me and make the whole process a bit more random!
