Roundhand Lettering Demo

Stunning.

via kottke
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Wood Type Samples

Patricia M has compiled a beautiful Flickr Collection of old wood type alphabets.
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Pixelmator 3.0 FX

Life Hacker reports: [edited]

Most Mac users know that Pixelmator is pretty much the best Photoshop alternative you can get. That said, Pixelmator always lacked a few flagship features of Adobe's behemoth-at least, until now.

They've now added layer styles. You can now easily apply non-destructive effects to any layer to quickly add drop shadows, reflections, gradients, and more.

And there is a liquify tool for moving around parts of your image, support for OS X Mavericks, and a new image editing engine to speed up just about every task across the app.

While Pixelmator still won't replace Photoshop for everyone, this update brings it close for handling most any common image editing task as well as or better than its far more expensive competition. If you've been holding out, you might want to give Pixelmator another look.

Available for £20.99 from the App Store
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Panasonic Lumix DMC-GM1

Digital Photography Review reports: [edited]

The Lumix DMC-GM1 is a pocketable camera with a 16 megapixel Four Thirds sensor. It uses the same Micro Four Thirds mount that its larger Olympus and Panasonic siblings, and will be sold with a specially designed 12-32mm F3.5-5.6 kit zoom sporting a smaller diameter for the GM1's diminutive form.

Despite its M43 sensor, using the GM1 gives the impression of using a point-and-shoot. The controls are crowded together, and the GM1 lacks a command dial. Its exposure mode dial and focus ring are positive additions for advanced users, but it feels like it could offer just a little more in terms of direct control.

The touch screen takes the place of some of those functions, so testing it in real-world shooting will be key to understanding how the camera handles.
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Sony Cyber-shot RX10

Digital Photography Review reports: [edited]

With the same 1" sensor as the RX100 II, the RX10 offers a Carl Zeiss Vario Sonnar T* 24-200mm (35mm equivalent) zoom lens with an F2.8 constant maximum aperture. It uses a Bionz X image processor with offers improvements in resolution, noise reduction, and diffraction reduction. Other features include a tilting 3-inch LCD, OLED electronic viewfinder, Wi-Fi with NFC, and 60p video recording.

Available for purchase in November with a $1300 MSRP.

For a hands-on preview, click here
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A Quick Guide to Sans-Serif Fonts

designmodo's Zolani Stewart has published a readable and helpful piece.
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webcolourdata.com

webcolourdata.com reports: [edited]

This project aims to uncover some insights about colours on the web, in particular, some questions I've struggled with as a designer. With a crowd-sourced data-set, the ultimate goal is to answer questions like: What is the most common colour/s or hue/s on the web? Do certain industries prefer certain colours over others? What colours are generally found together?

Why not just use the CSS? Unfortunately, the colour that makes up a web design is not just the background and text colour found in the CSS. The overall impression of the website includes the images, so this app takes screenshots and analyses colour values of each pixel. This is not a 100% foolproof method, but screenshots are kept so they can be reanalysed later on with better colour-matching algorithms.
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Olympus Pen E-P5

Digital Photography Review have published an in-depth review of Olympus' flagship compact Micro Four Thirds camera.

Conclusion snippets follow:

For the first time the E-P5 is a PEN model that offers a competitively complete camera - with the image quality, focus speed and user interface all coming together to offer a strong package. Of course its rather high pricing (£850, body-only) means it has to stand up to the E-M5 - one of our favourite mirrorless cameras so far - but if you want something a little smaller, the P5 does a good job.

And, while we weren't sure we'd find reasons to use it, the ability to easily transfer images to a smartphone (yours or someone else's) proved to be rather liberating. The ability to grab good quality images and post or email them immediately further suppresses any temptation to use a phone camera. The Olympus system isn't quite 'click to send' but it's one of the easier to configure and initiate systems we've so far encountered.

However, its inability to correct image shake at what should be usable shutter speeds means we don't feel able to unreservedly recommend the E-P5. We're hoping an improvement can be made to the camera's stabilization system but, as it stands, there's too much risk of your best shots being undermined - something that's unacceptable at this level. As such, we can't give the E-P5 as high an award as it would otherwise receive.
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Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 II

Digital Photography Review has posted a full review of Sony's upgraded high-end compact camera.

Conclusion snippets follow:

It feels almost greedy asking the RX100 II to do more than it does. As it is, it takes exceptional pictures for a camera of its size, offers a wealth of manual shooting and customization options, and takes great video. It does everything and more you'd expect from a compact, and quite a few things you'd expect from a bigger camera.

The Sony Cyber-shot RX100 II produces some of the best images we could ever expect to see from a compact camera. It's not the best shooting experience, but Sony has pushed the limits for this category and produced something really innovative.

Is the RX100 II worth the cost of a mid-range interchangeable lens system? And would you be better off saving some money and buying the now-discounted RX100 instead? That depends. If a slightly-less-noisy ISO 3200 JPEG is worth an extra $150 to you, then the RX100 II will be the better investment. If you can live with a little more noise, don't care much for a tilting LCD and don't plan to use Wi-Fi sharing, then you're better off with an RX100.
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Free Font - Paihuén Mapuche

Creative Bloq reports: [edited]

Chile-based graphic designer Benjamín Rivera is the man behind today's font of choice Paihuén Mapuche. The name refers to the indigenous people of Chile and Argentina (Mapuche), with paihuén being part of their native language, translated into 'being at peace'. Developed as a personal project, Rivera generously now offers his design as a free download for all to enjoy.
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