Tonic

The Rather Difficult Font Game is quite a challenging test for any designers that think they know their fonts. Telling the difference between Arial and Comic Sans is easy, but when you are trying to make the the distinction between Adobe Caslon Pro and Adobe Garamond Pro, then, you need to know your stuff. Give it a go, and the score to beat is 24…

Dangerous Mike and I have spent the weekend at a tinker.it workshop, learning about Arduino. It’s a simple yet powerful board with a microprocessor that can be programmed using a language similar to processing.

Pretty soon after you’ve created your first working circuit, you start to realise that the possibilities are limitless. It can accept a variety of digital and analogue inputs, and can feed back to a computer, or be used to control any number of devices.

Already it has been linked up to numerous Flash applications, used to create a glockenspiel that plays a tune based on the magnetic strip on the back of your favourite credit card… Or you could use it to control a espresso machine, using a Wii remote. If you really wanted to.

And to think, some people waste a beautiful sunny weekend by going outside and sitting in parks or pubs.

While researching something completely different, I discovered there’s a whole community out there dedicated to collecting and documenting pencils and erasers. Even though I’m only casually interested in them, it’s still fascinating to see the variety of designs out there and how things have and haven’t changed. I also learned interesting but useless trivia like the origin of the electronics company Sharp’s name - it’s from their first product, the EverSharp mechanical pencil, from 1915. I was also surprised by how long ago the first mechanical pencil was invented. They may seem like a ‘modern’ product, but they were first invented in 1822.

Some select pencil sites:

• Wooden pencils: Pencil Talk, Brand Name Pencils
• Mechanical pencils: Dave’s Mechanical Pencils
• Erasers: Joy of Erasers, Erasersworld

As we mentioned a few months ago, Ranzie was on the CBBC programme ‘Beat the boss’.

The show aired yesterday, and has just gone live on the BBC i-player.  Which means, you have 6 days left to see it!  (Although, we may just have a recording of it in case you miss it!)

We’re not saying anything about whether he won or not…

We’re a sociable lot at tonic, and sometimes after a hard day of website-making, we enjoy nothing more than sitting in the local pub and mulling over the issues of the day.

Discussions of the current state of the economy, the political crisis in Zimbabwe, the plight of the Olympic torch as it makes it’s way to Beijing, who would win if we were to start a tonic fight club, no topic is considered too high-brow.

This time around I brought my camera along to try to catch some of the lively debates in action. However I only seem to have captured…

The Royal Mail have just released the new British Coin Redesign. The new designs have been chosen via an open competition which was widely publicised in the national media in August 2005 and attracted 4,000 entries. The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer. The only question now is, ‘Have they aged the Queen too?’

My house mate works at the BBC. He often comes home and tells me exciting things that happen at work and it makes me feel like I have my finger on the pulse because I have some small snippet of information before it reaches the general public. As a result I was really excited when he told me about a whole NEW show on the BBC and pointed me to the trailer for it on iPlayer. I eagerly went to watch the trailer so I could ask him what the exciting news was. You can watch it here.

I wasn’t disappointed when I learned it was an elaborate April Fools joke. In fact that made it even better.

I was only disappointed he didn’t tell me about it before the general public saw it.

Our new office just happened to be directly under the Red Arrows Flypast this lunchtime. This was organised to mark the 90th anniversary of the RAF and was both loud and impressive! Check out more photos here