Informal design workshop idea

[Alfred]

17 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Can you explain that image please? I don't understand it.

Do you need more information than can be gleaned from the Help topic?

Affinity Designer Help: Setting bleed

18 minutes ago, William Overington said:

How did you make it please?

It’s simply a cropped screenshot.

[William Overington]

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

 

 

[William Overington]

4 hours ago, Alfred said:

Do you need more information than can be gleaned from the Help topic?

Affinity Designer Help: Setting bleed

It’s simply a cropped screenshot.

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

 

[Alfred]

14 minutes ago, William Overington said:

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.

The latter.

14 minutes ago, William Overington said:

There is the palette at the bottom of the image too, so I am puzzled as to how you produced it.

I took a screenshot of the swatches on the ‘Bucolic’ page on the Pantone website, placed a copy of it on the canvas in AD, and cropped it. I then duplicated the cropped copy a couple of times and cropped each of the duplicates so as to display all of the swatches in a single row.

Here’s the palette that I created from those swatches:

[William Overington]

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

 

[William Overington]

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

 

[Alfred]

24 minutes ago, William Overington said:

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?

That’s a very broad question, William! Perhaps you could narrow its scope a little.

[Alfred]

23 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Also, the glyphs cannot be in black, as there is no black in the palette.

‘Dull Gold’ and ‘Campanula’ are the most saturated colours available.

[William Overington]

29 minutes ago, Alfred said:

That’s a very broad question, William! Perhaps you could narrow its scope a little.

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

 

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, William Overington said:

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

When I suggested narrowing the scope I wasn’t referring to the set of glyphs, I was referring to the question (“what can I get?”).

[William Overington]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

When I suggested narrowing the scope I wasn’t referring to the set of glyphs, I was referring to the question (“what can I get?”).

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

 

 

 

[William Overington]

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

 

 

 

 

 

[William Overington]

4 hours ago, Alfred said:

‘Dull Gold’ and ‘Campanula’ are the most saturated colours available.

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

 

[William Overington]

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

 

[William Overington]

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

 

[William Overington]

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

 

[William Overington]

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William

 

[Alfred]

4 minutes ago, William Overington said:

So try 20 point and Celery Green RGB=197, 204, 123 for the glyphs

The first and last glyphs are a bit too close to the edges of the ellipse, in my opinion. Try 18 pt, which would be neatly halfway between the preferred sizes of 12 pt and 24 pt.

[William Overington]

15 hours ago, Alfred said:

The first and last glyphs are a bit too close to the edges of the ellipse, in my opinion. Try 18 pt, which would be neatly halfway between the preferred sizes of 12 pt and 24 pt.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William

 

[William Overington]

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

 

[William Overington]

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

 

 

 

 

[William Overington]

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

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

So I need to add the bars on layer 4 and then put layer 4 behind layer 2.

If you select a layer in the Layers panel and then add a layer, the new layer will be directly on top of the selected layer. So selecting the top layer will put the new layer at the top of the layer stack, but selecting layer 1 will make the new layer become layer 2 (pushing all higher layers up to accommodate it).

48 minutes ago, William Overington said:

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.

To move a layer, simply select it in the Layers panel and drag it straight up or down as required. Make sure not to move it to the right of the thumbnails unless you’re trying to clip-nest it.

[William Overington]

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

 

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

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.