Which do you prefer?

beckygoldsmith-Text-2

I’ve written before about the 52 Week Photo Challenge online class that I’m taking from Ricky Tims. Best class ever! This week’s assignment is how to add a text overlay to a photo.—yet another cool thing that you can do in Photoshop that I had no idea existed.

I’ve taken 3 photos (Splish is one of them) and I like them all. If you have a bit of time, please do click here and then leave a comment on this post telling me which one you like the best.

Choosing the word(s) was the hardest part of this photo challenge. The same thing is true when you add words to a quilt, as I wrote about in this post. Text is powerful. It draws the eye and, no matter how big or small it is, what you say can dominate a design. The quilt that I made after that post is called Say Something (below), which is in The Quilter’s Practical Guide To Color.

The words take up a small percentage of the space on the quilt, but they are the focal point, dominating the design. This is good to remember when you want to make what may be a simple quilt into a more complex statement.

Update: Thank you all for your comments! I’ve decided to submit the car photo because I like it as is. After reading your comments, I think I need to make the word “splish” more legible in the water photo and I don’t have time today to do that. So, the car photo it is and I can mark that off the list. Thanks!

For the font junkies…

If you are a font-lover, this will make you smile. The American Type Founders Company 1923 Specimen Book and Catalogue is a very hard-to-find book with 1148 pages of typefaces, typeface accessories, printing equipment, and insights into printing as it was in 1923. My favorite font (Caslon) is in this book, along with many others.

AmTypeFounders-Page

David Armstrong at Sevanti Letterpress has digitized the 1923 American Type Founders Company Specimen Book and Catalogue. It is in the public domain. Click here to find the digitized book. Click here to read more about the digitizing process.

Linda and I, as Piece O’ Cake Designs, were self-published for 8 years and I was in charge of all things related to layout. It was at that time that I really started to pay attention to different fonts and how they worked. These days I use fonts on the website and blog, and in downloadable patterns. When I want to put text into a quilt, I enjoy having access to the huge variety of fonts that are available today.

Even if fonts are not your thing, this book is laid out well and is full of surprises. You never know where that next cool idea is going to come from—it could be here. Enjoy!

PS – I learned about this from Chuck Green’s newsletter, which is always interesting.