celia draws & designs

When a designer is also an avid baker, we get Helvetica cookies. So, as a designer and a knitter, I guess it’s natural for me to combine typography with yarn at some point… and thus the idea for Knitted Helvetica is born. I’ve never really “designed” a knitting pattern before so this is a pretty cool challenge. Here’s how I went about converting the type into something that can be used for knitting:

Step 1. Open up Photoshop, type something in Helvetica.

Step 2. Turn off anti-aliasing so that the type becomes pixelated.

Step 3. Zoom all the way in so that individual pixels are visible (be sure that pixel grid is turned on) .

Step 4. Make a screen capture (since I can’t think of any other way to easily copy the pixel grid), paste into another file, and add visual aid as needed. Voila, a knitting pattern!

Other than knitting, I guess this will also work for cross-stitching or any other craft that creates little dots in a grid-like fashion. I started knitting away, and since this is really just a test/proof of concept, I just used whatever leftover yarn I have which happens to be a horrible shade of pink mixed in with baby vomit. Oh well, I’ll save the nice yarn for something I’m sure will work. And, judging by this work-in-progress photo, there’s definitely improvements to be made…

This is the bottom bowl of the a, and while it is a little more legible in real life I’m not super impressed by the result. Now it *is* on a circular needle, which makes it bunch up at weird places so I’ll finish the piece and steam it flat to see if it helps the pattern to stand out more. Maybe I should’ve used different colors instead of stitch patterns. In any case, stay tuned for updates on this grand experiment/disaster!

Web-safe fonts are dead. There, I said it.

Don’t get me wrong, some of them are nice. Georgia is still a good screen font, for example. But with more font embedding services, soon we’re going to enter a brand new era of web design where typography on the web is as exciting as it is in print. Many existing embedding options are subscription based, which makes sense if you want to use “real” fonts. But Google has joined in on the web font game, offering free (for now) web font API that lets you embed open license web fonts, served from Google servers. Essentially it’s a hassle-free, super accessible way to beautify the web.

And that’s way cool if you ask me.

The font selection is not big at this moment, but I’m sure it soon will be. With more fonts specifically designed for screen display, maybe “web typography” will soon stop being an oxymoron!

p.s.: this blog is currently using Droid Sans by Steve Matteson and Lobster by Pablo Impallari. Thanks guys, you are both cool dudes :)