Okay, I think this may be my worst public art idea ever, but I had to share it with someone to get it out of my head. You might have to click on the pic to get a better, bigger view. As it turns out it’s not the child’s pose at all, it’s really the “Uttana Shishosana (Extended Puppy Pose).”  This public art project is not slated for groundbreaking at this time.

Still working on that public art project. Here’s sketch #2. A bit better but still not quite right.

From my sketchbook, working on a yoga pose for a public art project. First sketch of the “pose of the child,” a failure.

Just for fun, I’m trying out a new blog platform at chankfonts.blogspot.com. I’ve been playing with all eight font families you get to choose from there, because I can’t figure out how to change the font of my blog here at WordPress.

Ding peers out the window of his new studio on E Hennepin in Minneapolis.

How did I spend my summer? Well I guess you might think I was taking Mad Men’s lead by smoking and drinking on a boat with my buds while my intern was hard at work in my studio making new fonts for you.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, so let me just get down to business and get it all out. First, I’ll start with the most exciting news for you: there are two new fonts up at Chank.com today. One’s free and the other’s on sale for $10 today. 

Sarcastic Robot is the freefont and it’s the result of years of R&D on the subject of creating a flavorful new monospaced font for programmers. A fixed-width handwriting font is a bit geeky, but even if you didn’t know it was technically dazzling, you still may be impressed by it’s quirky jauntiness.

GFY Sunny is a new handwriting font by my summer intern Ali Eickhoff. She wanted to learn all about type design during her tenure at Chank Co, so she got the toughest assignment possible: a cursive handwriting font. She made it look simple and effortless, creating a fluid, clean, modern cursive, partly inspired by textbook handwriting instructions, partly infused with just a little stylistic flare. Mostly it’s a no-nonsense, contemporary American script handwriting font, with ligatures and a few swash characters for those who can make use of OpenType’s smart functionality.

Now, the most exciting news for me: I’m featured on the new installment of Design Smoke! I’ve been gnawing my own flesh in a jealous rage as I’ve watched my friend Jeff Johnson of Spunk Design Machine smoke and drink with design luminaries like Stephen Heller, Craig Duffney, Mike Cina, Eight Hour Day and Sarah Nelson Forss over the past few years. Jeff finally took me for a ride and I got to expunge some of my fontmaking insights to his smoke-loving audience.

Spunk is proud to have made one of the strangest Design Smoke’s yet, and I’m thrilled to be a part of it. If you’ve ever wanted to have a smoke and a drink with an experienced font designer, here’s your chance. Get a smoke, get a drink, and settle down at your browser to watch Jeff’s drunken riverboat cruise with yours truly. We talk about Minneapolis, fonts, art, Facebook, Miley Cyrus, beards and more, all while getting liquored up and enjoying a beautiful summer day on the upper Mississippi. It’s starts calm enough, but once the booze gets flowing and the breeze a-blowing things got a little weird. It’s a 6-part interview, culminating with an outdoor, shirts-off daydream where two burly bears let it all hang out and groom each other in front of nature’s splendor along the ol’ Miss.

Other news? Well for advanced web designers, I should point out that all the new browsers that came out this summer making use of HTML5 now have an incredible new type resource available to them. It’s a CSS-call named “@font-face” and it allows you to embed fonts right in the HTML of your web page. No longer are you reliant on Georgia, Verdana, Arial and their ilk. You have hundreds of fonts to choose from, which can be displayed right in the text of your browser, as searchable HTML that can be copied and pasted. Works like magic, and experienced designers say it’s incredibly easy to use. 

To make use of this exciting new flavor of web typography just sign up for either Typekit or Kernest. Both offer 3rd-party subscription services that dish out the encrypted fonts on your behalf. They’re up and running now, and both have free trial versions of Chank Fonts ready for you to use in your web pages.

What started as a nice little introduction to two new font technologies turned into something much bigger. I wanted to write a simple, informative blog post to introduce people to Typekit and Kernest. I thought you should know a bit more about the exciting new capabilities of @font-face specification in modern browsers. But as I began writing it, I found the issue of web-font-embedding was much more complicated than I had previously thought. So it turned into a great, big, informative essay called The Sad State of Today’s Web Typography: Fertile Ground for Font License Revolution. It’s up at Chank.com now, but feel free to post responses and comments here.

Chank speaks about fonts and it’s always entertaining. See if he’s coming to your town; up next are Minneapolis, Chicago and New York. New spring tour dates are now up at Chank.com here: http://www.chank.com/tour/index.php . Hope to see you soon! Come out to the show and you might get a letterpress poster; see it at Beast Pieces and Spunk Blog.

Like so many other businesses around the world, work has been a little slow around here lately. So I’ve taken this as an opportunity to not only plan my spring tour but also brush up on my social networking skills.

I got myself a copy of the Rosetta Stone course on Twitterish (Twitter English) and after 3 tough weeks, I think I can finally speak it fairly well. While it does alienate a lot of normal people who don’t understand the syntax and lingo, I do like the brevity of it, and it seems like a good venue for showcasing off-the-cuff links and pics of the fascinating little typographic tidbits I see every day. Works well with my new iPhone too. You can find me on Twitter as “chankfonts“.

While I do enjoy Twitter quite a bit now that I understand it, I’ll keep updating this blog in plain English on occasion, too. In other social media updates, you can also find me on Facebook where I post regular updates to the “Chank Fonts” group. I don’t accept many new friend requests there, but if you post something to the group once in a while you might have a better chance of being my real world friend. Please join my FB group when you get a chance, and maybe we can be friends some day.

If you’d like to keep in touch with me as you bounce around from job to job, as so many of you do, you can find me on LinkedIn. I accept pretty much every connection request I receive there, so you don’t have to worry about rejection if you want to connect with me there. You’ll find me there as “Chank Diesel“, duh. I find that’s a good place to keep in touch with my fellow members of the AIGA, AAF and TDC non-profits, all of which I adore.

What am I not doing? I don’t spend much time on MySpace or Plaxo. I’m not in a band, and I don’t know what Plaxo is good for.

Social media is a surprisingly anti-social activity, but I enjoy it nonetheless. Seems like lots of other people enjoy it, too. You are smart and beautiful. Let’s keep in touch.

Did you know we’ve been using windmills to make our fonts for the past two years? Well, kinda.

The electricity at Chank Co is 100% supplied by wind farms. It’s surprising to me how few people know how easy it is to have your home or office powered by wind energy. The program, offfered here in Minnesota by Xcel Energy, is called Windsource® and it allows you to purchase up to 100% of your energy needs through wind sources. You can even opt to have a smaller portion of your energy supplied by wind power if you’d like. The program is available to both residential and commercial customers.

You just pay a little bit more every month to be a part of the program, and Xcel buys as much energy as you need from wind farms who supply their energy to the grid. In our case it costs an extra 10 or 20 bucks a month; that’s about how much extra it costs the average household here. And that’s not a lot considering it reduces our dependance on coal, oil or nuclear-based energy. Granted, manufacturing fonts doesn’t take a whole lot of energy; but at least we’re doing our small part to reduce our carbon footprint here at Chank Co.