Last year was arguably the year that made Projection Mapping known to the ‘masses’. Ok, not the masses, but quite a lot of people. This is a technique whereby projectors are positioned in front of existing physical objects whose 3d form has been mapped in software, allowing the projected ‘video’ (graphics) sequences to make use of it to create unbelievably cool effects. The end-result is a blurring of real and projected, an unbelievable sight, similar to that of seeing a hologram for the first time =)

The ‘effect’ has been part of artists and advertisers (luckily people of exceptional skill and æsthetics — something quite rare) and it has livened up what has traditionally be works of arguable value. I’d normally say here that I hope this will stay within the realm of competent, æsthetically coherent people, but I’m sure that hip ‘video artists’ that are content with repeatedly playing back short sequences of video or projecting triangle meshes on screens as well as moronic advertisers will find out sooner rather than later and make projection mapping the tool for unprecedented kitsch experiences. You still have time to watch some impressive examples of the technique below.

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The Inside Job is a documentary like few of its contemporaries: mainstream and accessible enough to win an Academy Award, yet sharp, piercing and well-researched enough to actually convince even the most sceptical among the viewers. This is a film narrated by an A-list hollywood star, Matt Damon, that dares to shred the current global economic system to pieces, along with the financial organisations that comprise it. A film that presents — in (perhaps over)simplified, digestible fashion — all those aspects of the financial crisis of 2008 that torment and dehumanise billions of people globally; that exposes the incomprehensible greed of those in the U.S. financial sector, the history behind financial deregulation from the 1980s onwards, the excesses, the abuse and the corruption that remains to this date unchallenged by the political powers, in the States and elsewhere, despite the damage the the system (not the crisis itself) has caused to both U.S. and European countries.

A matter of reputation

What really stuck in my mind after watching Inside Job, is how — throughout the film — the importance of credit rating organisations is highlighted and showcased in several occasions; organisations like Finch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s that provide ratings for anything ranging from corporations, bonds and sovereign states. Corporations that gave AAA ratings to CDOs based on subprime mortgages, allowing them to be bought by large institutional investors with strict requirements with regards to their portfolio contents. Corporations that had a determining role in the ‘creation’ of one of the greatest global financial crises of the past century and that continue to do so, through collusion with large financial organisations and as seen through their effects in the recent — partly unfounded — rating downgrades of various european states based on their national debt.

Surprisingly, those organisations were not affected by the crisis, despite their role and their position in the market. When asked, they all stated that their ratings only reflect their ‘opinion’, somehow deflecting the real issue — their de facto institutional part in a system of ‘free market’ that is largely guided by them. Despite their monumental failing, their antisocial, anti-investor, borderline illegal masking of the true value of subprime based CDOs in the mid 2000s and up until the 2008 crisis, those organisations continue to provide ratings as if they have a perfect reputation. I cannot imaging any other profession or industry when a person or corporation has consistently failed so bad at their core function and have remained in business, let alone maintained a dominant position that largely determines the actions of the largest institutional investors and with them the market.

For someone without intricate knowledge of economics and the way the financial sector in the U.S. works, Inside Job is worth watching even if it were only for the interviews and the simplified explanations of the crisis — which occasionally border on oversimplification. It serves as an eye opener that showcases how little has changed since the 2008 crisis, how consistent the actions of recent U.S. presidents (including Obama’s) have been with regards to turning a blind eye (or even supporting) Wall Street’s reckless course for profit, how the system is still as fragile, dangerous and completely inadequate, run by the same people and organisations that caused the 2008 crisis and (un)regulated in the same way. If anything Inside Job is approachable and basically sound, which is more than one can say for most other works out there that often border on sentimentalist, populist drivel similar to Moore’s works or high-brow academic works that alienate the intellectually-challenged.

Four years ago I stumbled upon Raph Levien’s excellent font, Inconsolata. It was great, not just because I loved its æsthetics, but also because it opened my eyes to the nascent free/open typography movement.

For a while Inconsolata was my main programming font, but soon enough I needed Hellenic characters, so I had to switch to other fonts that offered support for them. In late autumn of 2010 I started tinkering with Inconsolata (Raph was gracious enough to offer his FontForge source under the SIL Open Font License), slowly adding Hellenic glyphs, researching its influences, studying its design.

It soon became clear to me that many of the hellenised fonts available on the market today typically follow a number of very controversial ‘designs’ and more than often end up compromising the æsthetics of the original font. This is probably due to several reasons, not least because there are very few professional font designers of Hellenic fonts that are really good and also because the few ‘successful’ hellenic fonts out there share many of their design elements between them.

Today I’m happy to release to the world the first version of Inconsolata Hellenic, an open/free font that augments the original one with Hellenic glyphs. I am not a professional font designer — and this shows. I welcome criticism and advice and I’m willing to keep working on the font, whenever possible, in the hope that — in time — it may prove to be as great a choice for a hellenic monospaced font as the original Inconsolata is for roman. It should be clear that should you decide to give it a try, keep in mind that this font is by no means final; it is merely an early version of the font. I am releasing it now so that — hopefully — both the community and I will have more reasons to make it better.

You can find a (recently generated from source) OpenType font file, usable on all three major platforms, on the Software page of this site and the FontForge source for the font in GitHub. The font is available under SIL’s Open Font License.

Enjoy!

Prelude is the font bundled with WebOS in HP/Palm’s Palm Pre. I first saw it, and wrote about it, last summer, a bit after the device went on sale. Back then I wrote that the font was fantastic, but didn’t include any non-Roman characters. Apparently I was wrong.

Eighteen months passed since then, a time during which Palm Pre was quickly consigned to history as an interesting curiosity, Palm was acquired by HP, WebOS remained a promising, fascinating even, operating system for mobile devices. While I downloaded the WebOS SDK back in the day, I quickly lost interest given that Palm did the lousiest job bringing the Pre to Europe — it was never available in Hellas and very few carriers, electronics chains and retailers carried it throughout Europe. Subsequent variants and revisions of the device were also totally absent from the market.

I did keep an open eye, however, as I find WebOS truly interesting. The other day I read this post on the Palm Development Center Blog. Apparently Prelude now includes support for more alphabets than I previously thought. Among them was Hellenic.

Extracting the Prelude font from the emulator image is very easy, using scp after the emulator has completed booting. I tried the Prelude fonts on my main linux workstation, the machine I spend more than 85% of my time daily. The results were frighteningly bad.

Prelude is a gorgeous font, but the hellenic glyphs look ridiculously bad. They seem like they were designed by someone other than the original designer; or the original designer has no clue as to how hellenic glyphs are designed. I mean look at this lowercase omega, or that totally out of place lowercase alpha. Like a distant, uglier cousin of Futura, that got lost and found shelter in a different font. In addition to being very ugly, with absurd metrics and an æsthetic feel that’s totally different to that of the Roman glyphs in the font, the hellenic glyphs betray complete ignorance of the hellenic alphabet. Needless to say, hellenic in Prelude look like a botched, hurried job, aimed at providing the bare essential support for hellenic, probably added at the last minute, bunched together with cyrillic and eastern european glyphs, for the sole purpose of giving HP/Palm the opportunity to claim international font support in their upcoming products. In reality, hellenic characters in Prelude have very little in common to their roman counterparts. And this is a shame not only because Prelude (for roman characters) is a fantastic font, but also because fonts, contrary to software, are not iteratively designed at the rate that software is and chances are that the botched hellenic glyphs currently found in Prelude will be on HP/Palm devices for a long time to come. What a shame!