Making a Closet

Following Hurricane Irene, my heat pump stopped working. Thankfully, the good folks at my insurance company picked up the tab for a brand new Lenox pump, with an indoor heat exchange. Unfortunately, the new unit was about 4 inches deeper than the old unit, forcing the installers to rip off the front of my utility closet.

So with a few supplies from The Home Depot and some elbow grease, I managed to restore the closet to it’s previous design, plus about 4 inches more. I’m still waiting for two cabinet doors to arrive from eBay, but you can see much of the home improvement work in the gallery below.

Pantone Moods Trends

As part of the newly launched Pantone Moods Facebook application, the world-renowned color gurus asked us how we could make the social phenomenon (a quarter million moods have been posted, to date) more exciting for users. Color enthusiasts have had the ability to share their emotions and tag them with Pantone color chip values for the past three years. However, in addition to tripling the color selections (Pantone GOE, and, now, Pantone Plus and Fashion + Home libraries) and and interacting with other members, mood-posters now have the ability to share their gender and location information with the world of users online. In league with OKCupid Trends and Mint Data, Pantone Moods users can see who has posted similar moods and color chips. They can even filter down by Facebook location, gender and time of post to see whose emotional spectrum is the closest to their own.  Read more

NEST: Smart and Beautiful

Beautiful, utilitarian product design has always thrilled me. Dyson is my idol and half the products I see over at the Swissmiss blog leave me drooling. Take a look at this new device, billed as the world’s first Learning Thermostat.

Nest learns from your temperature adjustments, programs itself to keep you comfortable, and guides you to energy savings. You can control the thermostat from anywhere using a smartphone, tablet or laptop, and Nest never stops learning, even as your life and the seasons change.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCJ1PnVlzIE

The Eyebrow and The Costumed Fish

When I was a little kid, I learned the difference between long and short vowel. The teachers explained that an ? (long I), found in words like mile and fine, were signified by a macron, or horizontal line, over the letter. And an ? (short I), found in words like mill and fin, were signified by a breve, or tiny u, over the letter. Read more

[d]online Medium Typeface featured on MyFonts.com Home Page

This week, I was delighted to learn from a few separate sources that [d]online was featured on the MyFonts.com home page. I have to assume that this coveted real estate is reserved for fonts that portray their catalog in a positive light and feel honored that they selected one of my typefaces to do so. I’m hoping that my second font, era404 Regular, will pop-up there at some point too.