Mark Simonson's Notebook - Page 36

Okay, so I admit it. I bought an iPhone about three hours after they went on sale a month ago. I didn’t have to wait in line or anything. I walked in, bought it, and walked out. Like nearly everyone else who has one, I’m very happy with it.

So, I was a bit tickled today when I unexpectedly saw some of my recent work on it: the new PopCap Games logo, which appears on Bejeweled, the first game designed specifically for the iPhone.

I did the job last spring. Here is a comparison of the old version and the new version:

The idea was to make the logo cleaner and smarter without making it noticeably different to PopCap’s customers. Except for the background emblem, practically every detail of the lettering was changed. It would have been fun to completely redo it, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

If you have an iPhone and want to play Bejeweled, fire up Safari and head over the PopCap website. The game will automatically load when you visit the site using an iPhone.

An alphabet made from the negative space between buildings as you look up at them. (From Slanted via Boing Boing.)

Outstanding set of photos by Carl Carl from the Neon Graveyard in Las Vegas. (Via Boing Boing.)

The cover of this book about George Gershwin is one of the nicer uses of Coquette that I’ve seen. (Thanks to Jeff.)

The “Modern” has seen many incarnations over the years. Originally it was a laundromat—The Modern Laundry. Back in the ‘80s it was The Modern Times Café. Now it’s a Mexican restaurant called La Isla Del Kora. Through it all, those giant art deco letters have always remained. It’s a monument to a “now” that has long passed. That it has survived this long makes me happy. (Photographed on April 29, 2007, in Minneapolis.)

Proxima Nova is now up to version 1.2 with a couple of new features:

• It now includes supplemental fonts (in OpenType format) containing small caps/old style figures (ScOsf) and alternate characters (Alt) in place of the normal lowercase, figures, etc. This allows programs that don’t yet have proper OpenType support (Flash, Word, etc.) to access small caps, old style figures and alternate characters.

• Previously unencoded glyphs have been encoded (private use area) to make it easier to access glyphs via Unicode in situations where OpenType feature support is lacking.

Customers needing either of these new features who purchased Proxima Nova licenses from my site (www.ms-studio.com) may contact me at mark@marksimonson.com for a free upgrade. Please include your DigiBuy order number.