Public Domain Collections: Free to Share & Reuse That means everyone has the freedom to enjoy and reuse these materials in almost limitless ways. The Library now makes it possible to download such items in the highest resolution available directly from the Digital Collections website. Search Digital Collections No permission required. Below you'll find tools, projects, and explorations designed to inspire your own creations—go forth and reuse! Visualize the Public Domain An experiment by NYPL Labs to help patrons understand and explore what is contained in this release. Discover the Collections Learn more about our public domain release. Apply for the Remix Residency To promote transformative, interesting, and creative new uses of our Digital Collections and data, NYPL is now accepting applications for a Remix Residency program. Use Our Data and Utilities Our digitized collections are available as machine-readable data: over one million records for you to search, crawl and compute. Navigating the Green Books
MonsterFace Games: Creating a pixel font for your game I recently sunk about two full days into using FontForge to develop my own custom pixelated font. Most font tutorials weren't designed for pixelated fonts, so there was a bit of a learning curve. I thought I'd post a tutorial outlining what I'd learned, both for posterity and for myself when I inevitably forget all of this in a month or two. My font currently looks like this: You'll notice that I've replaced a lot of the latin-1 character set with standard RPG symbols like swords, shields and potions. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a font, how font sizing works, how to draw glyphs by outline, and how to use the bitmap strike editor to draw your font pixel-by-pixel. We'll be using FontForge, a free font editor that's quite powerful and easy enough to use once you get the hang of it. After you install and start FontForge, you have two choices: either use an existing font as a starting point, or create everything from scratch. pixel width = (glyph width / em size) * font size
Use Flash for print | Computer Arts Loving Flash for what it can do online isn't hard. But it's less well known for being a potentially killer application for print and graphic design, too. If you're a regular Illustrator user, you may well have wondered if there's any way to set your design to automate, so you can place a random spread of elements on a page, arrange them in a line or create curves and fills automatically. Illustrator includes Visual Basic and JavaScript, which can do these things, but they're not the simplest of environments to work in, and they're not designed for people who think in graphical terms. But there's a problem. So here I'll show you how to get around those limitations and create importable graphics files with a script. Click here to download the tutorial for free
Tones: About WolframTones When prominent scientist Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science in 2002, it was immediately hailed as a major intellectual landmark. Today the paradigm shift that Wolfram's work initiated is starting revolutions in a remarkable range of areas of science, technology--and the arts. WolframTones is an experiment in applying Wolfram's discoveries to the creation of music. At the core of A New Kind of Science is the idea of exploring a new abstract universe: a "computational universe" of simple programs. WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram's computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. It's all original music--fresh from "mining" Wolfram's computational universe.
Digital Collections and Services: Access to print, pictorial and audio-visual collections and other digital services Historic Newspapers Enhanced access to America's historic newspapers through the Chronicling America project. Historic Sound Recordings The National Jukebox features over 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Co. between 1900 and 1925. Performing Arts Collections, articles and special presentations on music, theater and dance materials from the Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Prints and Photographs Catalog of about half of the Library's pictorial holdings with over 1 million digital images. Veterans History Project Experience first-person stories of wartime service through personal artifacts, audio and video interviews.
FontForge Create an animated background in Flash | netmag We web designers and developers are constantly on the lookout for animated effects that will help add visual punch to our work. If you’re creating a standalone microsite or a promotional area for a site, it can sometimes be hard to conjure up a design and animated treatment that sits well with the offer. Particularly if you’ve been supplied with very few assets, have no time and are scratching your head about what to deliver by the end of the day. That’s why I love looping animated backgrounds. Done correctly, they can be a fun and an entertaining way of brightening up an otherwise dull page. A looping animated background should, of course, be used with caution. If the effect is more subtle, however, it will work to hook your visitors and steer them toward your messaging. 1. Open partial_tutorial from the tutorial files. 2. Hit Ctrl and L to bring up the Flash library. 3. Create a new layer and name it clouds. 4. 5. Hit F8 again to convert this to the movie clip we’ll animate. 6. 7. 8.
Guest piece: Launching an app on a tight budget Erick V. Garayblas is a game designer and founder of Kuyi Mobile, a game development company based in Manila. Erick has been developing games for over 12 years and created a number of award-winning and successful titles including Streetfood Tycoon, which has received millions of downloads worldwide. In his guest piece, Erik shares valuable tips for indies on launching an app on a tight budget. So you’ve finally finished that Corona SDK-powered game and submitted it to Apple. Eight years ago, it was as easy as finishing a game, selling it online and waiting for sales to come in. Sad to say, a huge part of a successful launch depends on what you do during the development stage, weeks or months even before you release your game. Prior to launch Setup my own app network. Following the launch PRMac. Do you have any tips to share?
New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use When I was a kid, my father brought home from I know not where an enormous collection of National Geographic magazines spanning the years 1917 to 1985. I found, tucked in almost every issue, one of the magazine’s gorgeous maps—of the Moon, St. Petersburg, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe’s ever-shifting boundaries. I became a cartography enthusiast and geographical sponge, poring over them for years just for the sheer enjoyment of it, a pleasure that remains with me today. Whether you’re like me and simply love the imaginative exercise of tracing a map’s lines and contours and absorbing information, or you love to do that and you get paid for it, you’ll find innumerable ways to spend your time on the new Open Access Maps project at the New York Public Library. The NYPL announces the release with the explanation below: The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division is very proud to announce the release of more than 20,000 cartographic works as high resolution downloads. Related Content:
30 Excellent Pixel Art Tutorials For Pixel Lovers If you’re born in 90s, I am sure that you have witnessed the glorious age of the pixel art. It exists on the old-school gaming platform, mobile phone and other digital devices. It’s one of the greatest technological inventions that dominate the digital world for several years, and now it rises again as a definitive art form within the artist community. Doing the pixel art could mean that you’re striving for perfection, as you even need to manually craft out the shading, dithering and even anti-aliasing. That means you have to draw the artwork pixel by pixel! Today, with the aim to provide you a solid understanding of the pixel art and its essential techniques, we want to showcase to you 30 detailed and inspiring tutorials by talented pixel artists to help you carve out possibly one of the most detailed works in your life. Try on them and you’ll know, full list of tutorials after jump! Recommended Reading: 50 Beautiful and Creative Pixel Arts Shading Of A Rock Textures Tree Adding Pattern
Take college and university courses online completely free In recent years massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become a trend in online education. The term was coined in 2008 by David Cormier, manager of web communications and innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island. The first MOOC was created the previous year, at Utah State University. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of courses available online at no cost. You can study anything from business to zoology in your own home at no cost. MOOCs are designed like college courses but are available to anyone anywhere in the world, at no cost. Coursera is perhaps the most well-known of the online education facilitators. EdX is another non-profit course site created by founding partners Harvard and MIT and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has their own open courseware, where most of the materials used in the teaching of almost all of MIT's subjects are available on the Web, free of charge. European institutions are also getting in on the act.