typography - What is kerning and what is the point of it?

From what I see here, it seems kerning is just rearranging the space between letters. However, the comments here lead me to believe there's more to the story. Is kerning really that simple? Is the only purpose of it to look nicer or is there some practical reasoning for it?

Answer

I think the Wikipedia kerning article essentially covers it, but the bulk of the article is about adding kerning information to a font during its design, or applications automatically using this built-in information to improve composition of a font's characters -- rather than the a fine-tuning a designer might do on a particularly problematic pair of characters in a headline.

As an example, say the revolutionary new product, the

iVone

was launched; that combination of italic/oblique and roman characters would probably not have been foreseen by the font designer, and so would require special treatment to avoid the dot of the i from colliding with the V.

Letter-letter, or letter-punctuation combinations that are only used in some languages are other situations that might require custom kerning by a designer.

Also to note, fonts contain widely varying amounts of kerning information - this is one of the key differentiators between amateur and professionally produced fonts, or even between different versions of the same font.

adobe illustrator - How to bind line to rectangle

I want to create some kind of flow chart with Illustrator CS3. In other programs it is possible to bind a line or arrow to a rectangle and whenever I drag the rectangle, the binded line is adapted in a way that the line is still "connected" to the rectangle. Is that possible with Illustrator CS3? Thank you!

Answer

There is no way of doing this properly in Illustrator. You'd need to use something like Visio, PowerPoint, or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Impress.

You can select the rectangle and the line's endpoint and move them together, leaving the line's other control points where they are though. Do this using the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow)

I created files AI files using adobe creative cloud. How can I open .eps files in AI CS6?

I created a bunch of files using Adobe Creative Cloud, saved files in both .ai and .eps, but have since decided switch to AI CS6.

I am able to open the .ai file versions without a problem, but when I attempt to open the .eps versions, I get a legacy error message. How can I get the .eps files to open? This is the message I get when I attempt to open the .eps file versions.

transparency - Transparent path/stroke fill in Illustrator

This is an odd request and something I've never had to worry about in Illustrator until now. I'm building out a logo that will be printed on a shirt. Instead of having a solid black border around the vector hand, the client wants the black border to be "transparent" so when it is placed on top of a pattern, you see the pattern background. I have an example below of what I'm trying to accomplish.

The second photo I mocked up in Photoshop to show what I'm trying to do. It's very easy to select the border path in Photoshop and simply wipe it out. Does Illustrator have a "transparent" fill option in the Path area? Selecting a color and dropping the transparent percentage didn't do the trick.

Answer

There is a little known feature, in Illustrator, that allows you to do this non-destructively. That is without expanding and using pathfinder. This can bring some future flexibility to your designs. As a bonus its also less work and works inside effects.

1. 
   

   First turn on transparency grid or put something behind your graphic. This ensures that you can observe the effect.

   
   


2. 
   

   Select the entire graphic (not the background) and group it. This group will determine what gets transparent.

   
   
   
   
   • In the transparency window click on knockout group (If you can not see options in the panel menu enable extra options).
   
   
   
   
   


3. 
   

   Assign the strokes/shapes you want to make transparent with 0% opacity in the transparency panel (if you just want strokes transparent use appearences panel see here). Because of the knockout group option this will now carve through your grouped shape.

   
   

Image 1: Example result.

creative writing - How do you earn the reader's trust?

Recently, I have stumbled upon a problem. After releasing an issue, I think that I failed to earn the trust of my readers. My analysis is that they did not have enough faith in me to make the "right choices" about my story. Let me explain:

One of my protagonist closest friend is a traitor secretly working for the bad guy. He plans to kill the hero, and the reader is not aware of that. I have made sure that he looks like a genuine sidekick, though there is plenty of evidence that suggests he will do something.

Before a battle, he ultimately poisons the hero with a unique type of toxin designed to induce bloodlust and insanity amongst men. I introduced a Chekhov's gun just before to showcase the moment Traitor poisons the hero, but nothing is explicit, a.k.a. the reader does not know that the hero has been poisoned. Then, during the battle, the hero goes on a rampage and kills people from both sides due to the effect of the poison. An action which causes him to lose most of his support and makes him question everything he has been fighting for.

Following this event, he will find a way to win without fighting because he fears to lose his mind a second time. It's only later that we learn the hero rampage was caused by the poison, and that it was all Traitor's fault.

The scene during which the protagonist goes insane was all but successful. Instead of asking themselves "what happened", "why did the hero do that", the readers came with critics like "the hero would never do that", "it makes no sense" or "the story lost its potential". Moreover, if I try to bring the poison and explains it all now, it will sound forced and as if I was trying to "make up" for my mistake (even though it was definitely planned!).

I am confused about this reaction, and I don't know how to handle it. I don't think the plot is the cause. The hero had to go through this trial, and the traitor had to provoke it. Yet, I have been wondering what went wrong. The explanation I came with is that I did not build enough trust. Which begs the question:

What should have I done to have the readers trust me and my story?

Answer

What you should have done, and should do in rewrite, is make it clear to the reader a traitor exists, perhaps make it clear a poison that does exactly that exists, etc. You can do that early in your book, in a story or fable.

The readers already believe the MC would never do this thing. So you need to hang a lantern on this behavior during the battle. Say the poison is called "rage oil", somebody in the battle can scream "Bob's been roofied on rage oil! He killed Stanley! Stay clear!"

So the reader gets it; yes, Bob would never, but Bob's on rage oil, so yeah. Then their focus is indeed on "Who roofied Bob?" You can still leave that part a mystery.

It messes a little with the rest of your plot; now there are people looking for a traitor they can't find. Bob doesn't suspect the real traitor. The real traitor may manage to frame somebody else, or one of the dead. Perhaps, out of caution, he even did that before the battle, getting the poison into Bob's food or drink that got served by someone else. The servant girl that mysteriously ended up with her throat cut once the battle was done. (Traitor killed her).

But it can still be true that Bob is motivated to solve the problem without battle.

In general you have to provide enough clues that the reader has SOME reason for a character to do something they would never do. Go back and plant the seeds earlier in your story, hang a lantern on the MC's behavior during the battle, and leave them with a question that makes sense (who is the traitor), not a contradiction of what they already knew.

This in turn primes the reader for your later reveal; you can't just surprise them out of nowhere with a best friend that was a traitor all along; that feels like a deus ex machina. Now they KNOW there was a traitor, and you can make the dead servant girl seems too darn convenient so the reader knows the traitor is probably still out there. Then they aren't surprised BY the traitor being revealed, only by who it is. But it doesn't look like a deus ex machina, they are forewarned that some trusted person is the traitor, and the best friend was in a position to execute all the sabotages.

Nested Menus in Mobile Apps

Please take a look below. Is it ok to have nested menus like the ones shown below? The main menu is Activity/Practice and Sub menu for Practice is Me/Everyone. Is this ok to do?

Name the on-click menu-in-circle-around-object interface

What is the name for this type of interface?

I would like to learn more about it but first I need to find it's proper name. Any links to related reading are welcome.

EDIT: While adding tags I have discovered the radial-menu tag that led me to a Pie menu on Wikipedia. Links to related reading are welcome. How usable or recommended is the radial menu?

Answer

The biggest advantage of radial or pie menus is their speed. To quote this article.

Radial Menus Are Fast

Radial menus are faster to access than list-based menus in every kind of pointer-based UI, including cursor, stylus, and touch. One big part of that is because every option is spaced at the same distance from the pointer. That’s classic Fitts’ Law: the closer the target and the bigger it is, the easier and faster it is to hit.

Even better: you get faster with radial menus over time, because they take advantage of muscle memory in a way that list-based menus cannot. Radial menus are essentially gesture-based: touch-swipe-release. That’s why some call radial menus “marker menus”: it’s like making a mark on the screen. Swiping to 2 o’clock has one meaning, and swiping to 6 o’clock another. Like all physical actions—playing an instrument, typing a keyboard, serving a tennis ball—gestures get embedded in muscle memory, which is faster to access than visual memory. Tap-swipe is faster than scanning for an item in a linear list, just like touch-typing is faster than hunt-and-peck.

The same article references two rather old research papers which have this to say on the merits of radial selections

Research paper 1 : Do note this paper is no longer available on the net hence there is no way to validate if the reference is correct.To quote the article

The research on this has been in the can for nearly 25 years. A 1988 study did the comparison and found that for a specific test of eight-item lists, users were faster with radial menus than linear ones. And it turns out that speed only improves.

Research paper (2) - User Learning and Performance with Marking Menus : This is the article linked in the earlier extract and the summary is given below

The more you use radial menus, the faster you become. That was borne out in a 1994 study by Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach, who tested radial-menu speed with a stylus. Over time, they found that expert users stopped looking at the menu at all. They no longer needed the visual cues and went entirely “blind,” marking the screen with gestures, or “marks,” instead of pecking at buttons:

Using a mark on average was 3.5 times faster than selection using the menu. … A user begins by using the menu, but, with practice, graduates to making marks. Users reported that marking was relatively error free and empirical data showed marking was substantially faster than using the menu. … Marking menus, however, are not appropiate when the list of items changes dynamically. In this situation, users can still use the menus but will never graduate to using marks since menu item locations change.

There have also been multiple usability tests conducted on the usability of radial menus as quoted in this article

Jack Callahan's study compares the seek time and error rates in pies versus linear menus. There is a hypothesis known as Fitt's law, which states that the "seek time" required to point the cursor at the target depends on the target's area and distance. The wedge-shaped slices of a pie menu are all large and close to the cursor, so Fitt's law predicts good times for pie menus. In comparison, the rectangular target areas of a traditional linear menu are small, and each is placed at a different distance from the starting location.

Callahan's controlled experiment supports the result predicted by Fitt's law. Three types of eight-item menu task groupings were used: Pie tasks (North, NE, East, and so on), linear tasks (First, Second, Third, and so on), and unclassified tasks (Center, Bold, Italic, and so on). Subjects with little or no mouse experience were presented menus in both linear and pie formats, and told to make a certain selection from each. Those subjects uising pie menus were able to make selection significantly faster and with fewer errors for all three task groupings.

The fewer the items, the faster and more reliable pie menus are, because of their bigger slices. But other factors contribute to their efficiency. Pies with an even number of items are symmetric, so the directional angles are convenient to remember and articulate. Certain numbers of items work well with various metaphors, such as a clock, an on/off switch, or a compass. Eight-item pies are optimal for many tasks: They're symmetric, evenly divisible along vertical, horizontal, and diagonal axes, and have distinct, well-known directions.

Gordon Kurtenbach carried out an experiment comparing pie menus with different visual feedback styles, numbers of slices, and input devices. One interesting result was that menus with an even number of items were generally better than those with odd numbers. Also, menus with eight items were especially fast and easy to learn, because of their primary and secondary compass directions. Another result of Kurtenbach's experiment was that, with regard to speed and accuracy, pens were better than mice, and mice were better than trackballs.