Digitization is at hand

From time to time I contemplate the handmade. And not long ago I was thinking: this new personal website I'm planning to build for myself: (what turned out to be this very website, the one you're reading right now) can I make it in such a way that it emphasizes handwritten text and hand-drawn illustrations?

I felt it should be totally doable to somehow turn handwriting and hand-drawings into computer writing and computer drawings. But I did not have the audacity to proceed with the ultimate technique: simply photographing pen on paper, and presenting those photographs as Web content. Maybe someday I will. Instead, on this day, I wanted a way to somehow (systematically? automatically?) turn photographed pen on paper into computer writing and computer drawings.

Digresson on computer and mathematical perfection

Computer drawings, you know? With concise geometric representations of lines and curves? Not with pixels from a digital camera. I'm talking vector imagery instead of raster imagery. Vector graphics are a great fit for a websites, cause they can get you small file sizes without suffering from loss of resolution. And they're elegant. Just elegant. Lines, arcs, curves. The Cartesian coordinate system. XML(?)

Here's the digression: If the handmade (with its natural imperfections) speaks to us so, then how come mathematical pristine perfection is so appealing to some of us? How to reconcile this? Needs further contemplation.

Back to this website

So, I went and looked into "vectorization" tools, and before long I discovered Potrace, and tried it out, and right away, I knew I wanted to use it in a big way for this website.

I made a few simple illustrations using Potrace. It was great. I then set out to make my own digital typefaces, using Potrace, and Fontforge. This was a much bigger project, and I'm happy with how it came out. You can read all about it at /crafts/artisanal-typefaces.html