Tag Archives for fonts

Book project launch: Into a Jewish Holiday Year with Yoga

In January of 2021, I was tagged by some friends into a Facebook thread from the illustrious Delia Sherman, on behalf of a friend looking for a graphic designer to help produce a self-published book with some Hebrew in it. Since that’s totally my niche, I was pleased when the co-author reached out to me the next day for some more information. That was my introduction to yoga teacher Sharon Epstein, her rabbi Tara Feldman, and their book project, which would become a labor of love for me as well: Into a Jewish Holiday Year with Yoga: A Workbook and Guided Journey for Body, Mind, and Soul (2021; ISBN 979-8-9850271-0-5; USD $19.95).

The ikar, or kernel, of the book is that these two delightful and insightful women have teamed up to structure a yoga experience around the Jewish holiday cycle. For each of 12 holidays, they had put together some basic introductory context, then drawn out a deep underlying conceptual theme, and matched it with a set of yoga poses to literally embody that theme. They also provided a guided meditation and some journaling prompts to round out the internal experience of each holiday.

Mind you, I have spent a total of about 2 hours on a yoga mat in my life, but I have a visceral appreciation for the rhythms of the Jewish calendar. We are souls and we are bodies. Bringing together the spiritual and the somatic brings depth to both perceptions. It was a real gift to get to be a part of this project and help Sharon and Tara activate its full potential.

Continue reading →

The time my custom webfonts stopped working in Chrome and Firefox

When I last rebuilt erica-schultz.com back in 2012, I decided to incorporate a custom webfont in my Design and Judaica sections. In the interest of cross-browser compatibility, I used FontSquirrel’s free Webfont Generator to export EOT, SVG, and WOFF files, which I then called in my CSS @font-face declaration.

Fast forward to late 2016: I discovered that while my font still looked nice in Safari, it had stopped working in Chrome and Firefox. They had apparently gone and changed their font rendering in a way that broke my site. THANKS DUDES.

This week, I finally did a little research into the issue.  Continue reading →

Invitation design: Watercolor theme

Back in September 2015, one of my dearest friends back in Boston contacted me about doing invitations for her oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah in November of the following year, for Parashat Lech Lecha.

Maya is a budding artist, and the celebration was going to have an art theme. In March 2016 they sent me a draft of Maya’s design concept (shown right; click to enlarge). It’s always helpful to have a client with such a clear vision of what they’d like to achieve!  Continue reading →

Type/language/publishing geeking links

In honor of my first day of full-time self-employment (as it were), I present a barrage of links that will interest a certain like-minded subset of readers.

Fonts.com’s For Your Typographic Information:
http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Articles/fyti/index.htm

Type Trading Cards (gotta catch ’em all!):
http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Articles/TypeTradingCards/

Helvetica (a film about typography, screening, incidentally, at MassArt at 7pm on April 11, sayeth ):
http://helveticafilm.com/

Type 1 fonts for TeX use:
CTAN directory: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/amsfonts/ps-type1/
AMS: http://www.ams.org/tex/type1-fonts.html

Fontifier: Your own handwriting as a TrueType font for just $9 (yes, I got one and so did ):
http://www.fontifier.com/index.html

Lorem Ipsum (all true typesetting geeks know that this refers to randomized pseudo-Latin filler text) randomizing generator:
http://www.lipsum.com/

Free online graph paper PDFs:
http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/

Glossary of bookbinding terms:
http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/preserve/binding/glossary.htm

Non-typographical, but useful: Converting a photo to a “painting” in Photoshop:
http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/painted/painted.htm

Non-publishing-related, but language-geekful: the Speech Accent Archive
http://accent.gmu.edu/index.php

Bookbuilders of Boston’s list of production-related publishing jobs in the greater Boston area:
http://www.bbboston.org/pageJobs.cfm

… And now, to send out a shul e-mail and hit the showers. :-D

Oh man…

1. Font geeking galore: TypeCon 2005 in NYC, 2 weeks hence! Wonder if I could talk my boss into letting me go??? “It’s professionally necessary, I swear…”

2. Klingon Klezmer: “Jewish music from other planets”!
(katyam had sent me a nice link to ALEPH‘s cantorial ordination program, which I finally looked at, and the director of the program plays in this band. And no — his name is not “Ka-PLAhhhN!”. Oy vey!)

In which I am easily amused

1. For all you information goddesses out there: A Library Musical!

2. This morning I am building myself a small FileMaker database* (to track my archive materials and submissions). And in mucking around with the tools, I have discovered that you can create a button and assign to it, as its only function, “Beep”. And you can put text on the button that says, simply, “Beep!” And then when you go back to Browse mode, every one of your records has a little button on it that says “Beep!”, and if you click it, it goes, “Beep!”

* While I’m on the topic: Is there any way to set text fields to default to a specific entry on a value list, when a new record is created? I.e., to start with the first radio button selected, instead of my having to manually select it in four different fields for each new record?

[EDIT:] 3. I just had to e-mail someone the fonts for a book jacket. The three font names were Ean, Kievit, and Therm. If those aren’t the names of a trio of space aliens (or possibly Muppets), I don’t know what is.