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the sent2null space header image challenge

The new header combines several of my most cherished endeavors. The background image is a Hubble Space Telescope image of a portion (n44c) of the Large Magellanic Cloud , one of our companion galaxy clusters. Streamers of illuminated gas flowing in the stellar winds of a bright star. I have spent a lot of time at the Hubble site downloading the massive full resolution images for printing at large size for display on various walls in my home. I spread the gospel about the site (each image is completely documented) to everyone that cares (or doesn't care) to listen. Head over to it if you haven't and get to downloading...I have a 20" x 30" print of the galaxy M104 "the sombrero" that quite literally brought tears to my eyes. It is important that we experience these images to simultaneously realize the grandness of the universe and our small part in its grand symphony. The title text , "sent2null space" of the image was rendered using a custom designed font (a fun little hobby for those that always wanted to make their own font families and use them on their pc) I use a combination of tools to create a new font.

  • Graph paper (printed on my printer from free pdf templates that you can custom make to your requirements) Get it now.
  • Once the font is rendered to the graph paper, I use my trusty 10 year old microtek scanner to scan the character sheet into the pc. Rhino a NURBS based 2D/3D modeling tool allows tracing the curves precisely and export .ai files (Adobe Illustrator)
  • Adobe Photoshop the workhorse of graphics professionals (that I've been using since version 3) to scale, flip, copy , color the .ai files to black clean edged characters.
  • Font Creator is used to generate the font set (true type font) and import the set into windows (or any other platform that supports true type fonts)


The final result is a font, below a couple of the finished tiles ready to be imported into font creator to render the font:

















Finally, the red symbols in the lower right corner represent something that will be familiar to fans. I wonder if any one knows??? ;)
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