Google/Blogger Following

I've been playing about with the new Blogger "Following" feature. It's a little gadget you can put on a site to show a grid of your blog's regular readers. If it takes off I think it could be a really nice little thing to see as you browse about. A kind of mixture between traffic statistics and social networking.

Have a look and see what you think. As a Google Reader user, I'm a little bummed that the integration between the two applications is a bit shakey right now. Google say they're ironing out the problems, so I'm gonna live dangerously and jump on the bandwagon early.

I've put the little gadget over there -> on the side of my page. So far I have 3 whole followers (including myself, haha). If you're a blog owner who reads my site: follow me and I'll definitely have a look at what you're up to. My own reading list can be seen on my profile page.

ps. Hello to Jen & Concetta, my very first fans.

Illustrative 08, Zurich

I have been invited to be part of Illustrative, an exhibition/forum of contemporary illustration from around the world. This year the exhibition is in Zurich. Here is a little info:

"From October 17th to October 26th Illustrative’s 4th forum of illustrative and graphic arts will take place in the Zurich Messehallen. Conceived in 2006 by Pascal Johanssen and Katja Kleiss in Berlin, Illustrative is an annual forum, and the only one of it’s kind worldwide that presents the latest inclinations which run the gamut of illustrative and graphic art in one exhibition."

I've done the work and sent off my pieces. You can have a little look at my info on the artists page. It's unlikely that I'll make it through to Zurich myself, but I've not ruled it out entirely. If you can make it, have fun and let me know what you think.

Oh, there is also a related book project that I'll talk about at some point in the future.

Sketchbook Skull Thing

This is just one of those doodles that kept growing while I was doing something else. I quickly coloured it in Photoshop but I think I'll maybe have a bash at the real thing with some watercolours. This one is maybe a bit too orangey.

Font Fursday

Something I've been meaning to do for a while is have a bash at designing a font. After being driven mad by a recent piece of work that required a lot of handwriting, I decided to see whether I could create something which I could type that looked like how I letter by hand.

The above image shows my first attempt. It's pretty scrappy, but it's a 100% genuine typeable font. I'm quite surprised by how well it's turned out. The whole font (two slightly different alphabets, numbers and punctuation) was created in a few hours while I was playing about on Messenger.

There's a few scale issues, some wonky letters and some kerning stuff that could be better, but yeah, it'll save some time on jobs that don't require full, original text. What do you think?