William Overington

Here is a link to another thread, which, in the event, led to the production of another greeting card. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/143812-informal-design-workshop-idea/ William

Fortunately I have five of these already, not yet used, because they are not currently available, and the silver version is not offered round here. https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/251929289 I keep a look out for them as they are in the My Favourites list. They are intended as certificate frames, so maybe they will reappear sometime. Most of the other cards that I have produced are in that type of frame, either landscape orientation or portrait orientation according to the orientation of the card. Cranes before a Gibbous Moon is in one of the following. https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/303403819 I would buy more of those frames if they were available, as they are good. The Gallery font and the second copy of Software Unicorns reflected in a Lake each use one of the following, used in landscape orientation.. https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/303403803 Those two prints are both displayed on a wall in my home. Readers who so choose can find details of the cards mentioned in this post in the following thread. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/ William

I have now placed an order for the card. For the greeting within the card I transcribed the English localization of the text in 14 point Garamond, centred; together with, over three lines, centred, an explanation, namely English localization of a poem displayed using language-independent glyphs, each representing a whole sentence together with my name and the date June 2021 , also centred, using two lines, all using 12 point Garamond. I already have a frame to use. William ,

I got the impression that the colours in Alfred's palette illustration were brighter than those of the horizontal bars in my artwork. I wondered if this was a similar effect to the way that bold type in print looks darker than regular type because there is more ink though the ink is the same colour. So I expanded the illustration. In passing,I found that the glyphs had a border, so I removed the border. I produced a 300 dots per inch jpg file. I am attaching it here, though the forum does not show it full size. The file has 300dpi_bucolic_art7.jpg as the file name. The artwork includes a 3 milimetre wide bleed area at each edge. William

I eventually managed to put the layers in the desired order. I needed to drag down on the second item from the left to do it. I do not know what clip-nest means but I did at one stage drag on the wrong part and got it all jammed together, so maybe that is to what you refer. Anyway, here is the artwork as I now have it, all nine colours from the Bucolic palette in it. William

Well, I have got stuck. I am trying to move layer 4 behind layer 2, that is, put the bars behind the ellipse while still in front of the parchment layer. I have looked at the Affinity Help and it says that I can reorder layers but I have not found anything that shows me how to do that. William

Rose Tan is RGB = 209, 156, 151 Viola is RGB = 166, 146, 186 Tendril is RGB = 137, 160, 107 Dull Gold is RGB = 138, 111, 72 Crockery is RGN = 164, 152, 135 in the order that I used them. As this is a workshop thread, this image shows how I lined up the colour bars. It is just an intermediate stage, not intended as finished artwork. William

So, now to the next stage. Do I say that, well, that is a good design, that's it; or as the palette has nine colours and I have only used four of them, go forward! Well, I can keep this design and use Save As and explore a design to add in the five extra colours. I have thought to include five horizontal bars, one each of the five remaining colours, each bar 125 pixels wide, the middle one at the left and the other four at the right. I want to put the bars behind the campanula filled ellipse. Yet the ellipse is on layer 2, and the glyphs are on layer 3, and the parchment background in on layer 1. So I need to add the bars on layer 4 and then put layer 4 behind layer 2. Yet which colour where? The crockery colour is a grey colour, so can go near the part about the colour grey. The dull gold colour is a yellow, so there are three parts about yellow, yet the dull indicates to put it in autumn. The tendril is a pale green so put it in spring. Rose tan is a red, so put it in summer. That leaves viola, so put it near the start. William

Please find the 18 point version. I export each of these illustrations as a png file 400 pixels wide. William

So try 20 point and Celery Green RGB=197, 204, 123 for the glyphs, adjusting the vertical position of the glyphs. William

There seem to be three options. Make the ellipse taller. The thing is I have allowed space in case, hypothetically, someone wants to mount the card in a frame with a mount, where the mount would go over the edge of the card on four sides. So I am reluctant to make the ellipse larger. Reduce the vertical space between the glyphs. There is not really space to do that sufficient to get the extra space needed, and it might look awful. Reduce the point size of the font. The font was designed for 24 point or 12 point. So a size such a 20 point might look strange on a screen. Yet on a printed card at 300 dots per inch, maybe that would be fine. So, try reducing the text size to 20 point and changing the colour of the text. William

So, save as bucolic_art3.afdesign and add another layer and try to add the glyphs for the poem, using the Glyph Browser facility. Well, as this is a workshop thread, here is what I have so far, just entering the glyphs in 24 point and just using yellow as the colour. So, the text does not fit in the ellipse at present, and I need to change the colour. So how do I fix this? Time for a think. William

Campanula is RGB = 50, 114, 175 Here is what I have so far. The size of the filled ellipse may need to change when I try to add the glyphs. William

Yes. However, I wonder if it is worth having a try at having a filled ellipse of Campanula and having the glyphs in a lighter colour upon it. Will there be enough space to be able to get the first and final glyphs of the poem within such an ellipse without the ellipse being prohibitively wide? So, copy the mineral yellow sun, and use the transform panel to make a larger filled ellipse centred in the artwork and colour it Campanula. William

If some readers might like to have a go themselves, there is another poem, already typeset in the following document. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_027.pdf I have just tried getting a copy of the glyphs out and pasting them. They may not come out in the correct font, but the code points are conserved, so formatting with the Localizable Sentences 977 font is needed. Upon checking, an earlier version of the font was used to produce that chapter document on 24 April 2017, but the code points are the same. For an explanation of the symbols, the following chapter is recommended. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_005.pdf I intend to continue with the poem from the 2010 post, at least for now, so if readers would like to try the poem from Chapter 27 then they have a clear run at it. William

Ah yes, I forgot to click on the Expand part that the system put into your quote. Well, I started to have some thoughts about that in the next post that I posted. But more generally, I have the parchment colour background, I have the mineral yellow sun. I need to include the seventeen lines of the poem. I have seven inches of vertical space available, so, I can have the glyphs vertically as in the earlier card design. That design had sixteen glyphs, but there is space for another one and still have blank space above and below. In metal type 24 point is one third of an inch, including descenders, but in electronic publishing point size does not seem to include descenders, descenders take up extra space. The glyphs for the localizable sentences do not have descenders, but the font in which I implemented them does have descenders. A design principle of the localizable sentence system is that the meaning of a glyph does not depend upon its colour. So although I could put, say, the glyphs for the seasons in one colour and the other glyphs in another colour and the result possibly be more artistic, I am not going to do that as it could cause confusion. As there is no red in the palette it is not possible to illustrate the poem using the colours mentioned. William

Well, the glyphs for the localizable sentences used in the poem in the Unicode mailing list from 2010 for which I provided a link. William

So, let us start by looking at the constraints of the (sel-imposed) project brief. Looking at the text of the poem and the colours in the palette it quickly becomes clear that the approach used with the earlier poem, namely of using the colours mentioned in the text of the poem, is not possible. There is no red, no white. Also, the glyphs cannot be in black, as there is no black in the palette. So what to do? Hopefully bring in as many of the colours in the palette as possible - hopefully all of them. Well, arbitrary blocks of colour here and there would do that, but I hope for something better. William

I have been trying to think of what picture to try to produce. Looking at something in relation to my research project I happened to find a link to the following post from 2010. https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2010-m01/0106.html There is a poem of seventeen lines. In the thread https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138654-artwork-for-greetings-cards/ I produced the following for a similar poem of 16 lines. I ordered and received a greetings card of the design with the English localization inside where the greeting of a card would normally go. That card is now framed in a frame that was delivered with a grocery order. So, if I use the localizable sentences glyphs from the following font https://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/LOCSE977.TTF the glyphs listed in the following document http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf using only the colours in the Bucolic palette, what can I get? William

Yes please. I cannot work out whether you started with a print screen image of my posted image or whether you followed my text and produced the illustration yourself. There is the palette at the bottom of the image too, so I am puzzled as to how you produced it. William

It appears that I have always had the bleed indicating line the same grey colour as the background! The default colour when using the light user interface? When I changed it to red I started to understand better! William

Can you explain that image please? I don't understand it. How did you make it please? William

Please know that this thread is not just for my attempts. Posts by others, including images if possible, are welcome. William

Not really. Just adding images as I go on. Yes. Together with lack of checking. William

So, save as bucolic_art2.afdesign and set the margins to be 35 pixels at left and top and 36 pixels at right and bottom, so that the area within the margins is the rea of the picture without the bleed areas. Start a new layer so that the background does not move if I add something to the image. Add a circle and fill it with whatever is the default colour and give it a zero width line. Now position and resize the filled circle. X= 235 Y= 235 W= 300 H= 300 Refer back to the Pantone palette web page. Click on Mineral Yellow. Note that Mineral Yellow is RGB = 211, 156, 67 Make the fill colour of the circle Mineral Yellow. Export the image as bucolic_art2.png, as a png file of width 400 pixels. William