Friday, December 20, 2013

How to turn your icons into a web font: Creating icon fonts

How to turn your icons into a web font 

Creating an icon font
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/04/how-to-turn-your-icons-into-a-web-font/

Symbol fonts can be built using a dedicated font-creation app such as Glyphs, but a professional typography tool is way beyond the needs or requirements of building a simple icon font, in which the relationship between characters (i.e. kerning and ligatures) is not important.
By far the easiest way is to use a great free online app called IcoMoon, by Keyamoon, which takes away all of the hassle of converting symbols into a web font.
This HTML5 app takes away all of the pain of creating font files for simple uses such as building icon fonts. IcoMoon comes with a number of icon sets already loaded, and you can add more to your library, most of which can be used for free (check the licensing). If you are looking for fairly standard icons, such as “file download” and “shopping cart,” then you may find that using one of these is preferable to creating your own.

Step by step

1. Prepare your illustrations

To begin with, you need to create the icons in a vector-drawing program that is capable of exporting to SVG format, such as Illustrator or Inkscape.
While you are designing, you can work with whatever colors you like, but the icons must be one solid color. Make sure each icon is approximately the same size. Having one icon much taller or longer than another will make it hard to build a consistent font. Here, I’ve had to reduce the width of my airship icon so that it matches the others.


2. Clean up....

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Friday, December 13, 2013

Ride with Stig on the Top Gear test track - BBC Top Gear

Ride with Stig on the Top Gear test track - BBC Top Gear:






If you've ever desired to be strapped to
the roof of a brawling supercar as Stig takes it on a lap of the Top Gear
test track, today's your lucky day.
With our devilishly clever 360-Degree
Interactive Stig Power Lap Immersive Experience (OK, it's a working title), you
can now ride along with our white-suited maniac as he wrestles the Mercedes SLS
Black on a warm-up lap (yes, he went a lot faster later on...).

Thanks to the miracle of science and witchcraft, you can use your cursor to spin around for a glorious, 360-degree view of every corner, from Gambon and the Hammerhead to the infamously infamous Follow Through. It is faintly nauseous but curiously addictive.
And if you're of an iPad persuasion, you can also download the 360-Degree Immersive Power Lap Stig Interactive Experience, for free, from the App store, allowing you to navigate round the circuit using the gyro from your tablet-device-thingy.
But what you really want to do is download the latest issue of Top Gear magazine for the iPad, which features masses of exclusive video and other interactive goodies like this every single month...

Wednesday, December 11, 2013