3D manufacturing is at a transitional state. The tools to design 3D objects are plentiful but the hardware to actually create them are too expensive and complicated for the average consumer to own. This has led startups such as Ponoko and Shapeways to provide production services for individuals’ designs. Concurrently, we have seen organizations such as MakerBot pop up, which provides ideas and support for 3D printing of objects. What I consider to be the most intriguing project to spring out of the movement is Thingiverse which provides a community platform to share your 3D plans for making objects.

Many of the objects shared at Thingiverse are silly and mostly novelty. However, it only takes one practical object to see the potential. Take for example, this design for a Canon lens hood.

It does not take much creativity to consider all the other applications something like this could have. We are surrounded by small objects in our daily lives where the cost seems disproportionately higher than their production quality. Never before in modern times has there been a practical alternative to producing physical objects by consumers. If a person can go on the internet, download 3D plans for a doorstop and manufacture it in their apartment, what is the incentive to pay $5 at a store for the same thing? Simple things such as cups could be produced literally in-house to save people money and allow another outlet for personal expression. The cabinet you buy could come with files to reproduce all the parts in case one breaks. The possibilities are boundless.

This will not remove the possibility for profit, but it will force craftsmen and manufacturers to be significantly better than their open source competitors. Be that through service, aesthetics, function or manufacturing quality, something will need to differentiate their product from free options. This tension has been beneficial to all in the world of software, I see no glaring reason why it would not be equally helpful for physical manufacturing. Open source software leveled the playing field for millions of people in this world, imagine what open source manufacturing could do.

If you would have asked someone 30 years ago if there would be a personal computer in everyone’s home, they would have said you were crazy. Today, that is close to fact. Virtually every American household has access to a computational and connected device (whether it is a traditional PC, gaming console or mobile device). It may not be too far off to expect a 3D scanner/printer in most homes or at least in every community. Such a reality could bring a manufacturing revolution that could make the internet’s impact on business look microscopic.

I have defended Android for years. I own a Nexus One, which I still consider to be one of the best Android phones made. I also strongly believe it does not hold a candle to anything past the first generation iPhone. Much to my dismay, my phone attracts conversations about why don’t have an iPhone. Before a week or so ago, I could speak in theory and philosophy, but now I have a concrete answer.

To preface, I think iOS leads the pack in UX. That said, I still maintain my long standing opinion that Android is the most important ongoing project for mobile. Android, from my knowledge, represents the first successful consumer-level open source operating system in history. This fact has allowed me to look past its shortcomings to this day.

That view became shaky after seeing mediocre or downright poor implementations of Android on various phones and tablets. Seeing carriers hack Android to pull out useful features made me doubt if an open source operating system could work with such harmful or uninspired derivatives being produced. Seeing the Amazon Fire reaffirmed my viewpoint. If you have not read about the Fire, what makes it especially interesting is that Amazon forked Android to make their own special version of the operating system for their device. The interface looks and works quite differently from the Android we are all familiar with. From the reviews coming in, the Fire is a good (not great) tablet that is different in focus from any other tablet on the market. It has a unique software experience from any other device in its category and it does not come from a traditional consumer electronics organization. You could argue that Amazon had been moving in this direction for years with the Kindle. However, the leap in effort required by Amazon to develop the Fire with its custom-tailored interface from scratch would have been risky and outside of their current skill set. This does not happen without Android, period.

For years, we have had confidence that Apple will provide a top-level user experience with their products, especially with iOS. While that is reassuring, I have been hoping to see the same diversity of thinking about design that we saw in the forming years of the Internet. We saw the explosion of design for the web for two main reasons: there was a lot of money to be made and the barrier of entry was relatively low. Few would argue that mobile is currently the prime market for software, but the financial barrier of entry is tremendously high. Similar to desktop computing, many companies have decided to focus on either hardware or software rather than take on the whole piece due to its tremendous costs. However, with Android, there exists a real and practical opportunity for organizations to control the entire experience of a mobile device without incurring the gargantuan overhead of developing an OS from scratch.

To be clear, the Amazon Fire in and of itself is relatively unimportant. However, the device symbolizes what is possible with a functional and established open source mobile operating system. This is has always been the promise of open source. We have seen this promise deliver in small ways through the years, but it continues to be my hope that Android provides that possibility in the mobile space. I am still waiting to see a startup that decides to design a new and different way to interact with mobile devices. I think that is truly possible with an open source Android. I am waiting to see operating systems in our homes, our appliances, our clothes. I think Android provides the best opportunity for that to happen.

Do I think any current Android smartphones are comparatively better than the iPhone? Frankly, no. However, my argument is that while Android continues to be open source, it does not need to be superior in order to prove its worth. It’s worth lies not in what we have come to expect from it, but what comes out of nowhere.

The Easier of Two Daunting Tasks

To be clear, I do not think it will be even remotely simple to create a core open source font library that would be seen as a viable alternative to the market’s best commercial fonts. I am not under the impression that some random people on the internet with high aspirations can just usurp Max Miedinger and Paul Renner in their spare time. What I am aware of though is the 10 year stalemate we have had with copyright protection and media/information distribution on the internet. I am also aware that, like most other issues, the W3C and Microsoft will most likely go their separate ways in how to handle this situation. This leaves the rest of the folks sitting around, waiting for someone to solve the problem. That is how little faith I have in this being settled without an open source intervention. Do not get me wrong, I understand the dilemma of type foundries. I would not be privy to having commercially-licensed fonts to be freely downloaded by anyone willing to look through the source code of a CSS file. That is an easy way to not be in business anymore. On the flip side however, that is no reason for the public to wait for hell to freeze over.

To a degree, this idea has already started to take form. There are some small repositories of open source fonts getting started. Additionally, there are some great collections of free fonts already available. The problem from my perspective is that most of the free fonts currently available just are not comprehensive or flexible enough to meet the basic needs for everyday widespread use.

Five Families, That’s All I Propose

If the web community had five strong, reliable and flexible typefaces to choose from, the general web experience would increase dramatically. In my opinion, these five type familes consist of a headline san-serif (ala Futura), a general use san-serif (ala Helvetica), a classical/transitional serif (ala Garamond), a modern serif (ala Bodoni) and a slab serif (ala Clarendon). Instead of spending time making more than these five fonts, my desire would be to see a diverse selection of weights for each family. Instead of the grossly undernourished choices of regular, italic, bold and bold italic, it would be welcoming to have the choice of light, book, heavy, condensed and other weights that just have not been in our lexicon up to this point. While five families may seem slim, these families should take care of the majority of use cases online and could potentially improve both the aesthetics, legibility and readability of online copy. Creating replacements of typefaces such as Helvetica and Futura is not something that I think is attainable. However, using these fonts as a benchmark in terms of quality and weight diversity is. Even coming remotely close to their quality would be a step up from where we currently sit. This solution would obviously pose no threat to type foundries — there will still be plenty of demand for their fonts. If such an open source collection existed, I could also see less desire by many to embed commercially-licensed fonts without permission.

Headlines Be Damned, This Is About Copy

It may not always be pretty, but web developers and designers have come up with many ways to set small portions of text in non-system fonts. While the solutions are not perfect, it at least exists. The major reason embeddable fonts are so important is to allow online copy to be set in non-system fonts. The frustration amongst anyone designing on the web is that basically all web-safe system fonts are just frankly sub-par. Honestly, if we could rely on Helvetica Neue, Sabon and possibly even Clarendon as web-safe fonts, I think I would be far less concerned about this issue. Yes, we all want to use particular fonts for particular projects, but at least we could find comfort that the type set on a website was set in a legible, solid and beautiful typeface with enough weights to ensure proper use. At this moment in time we just do not have any system font that meets those needs. To me, that is the real promise of embeddable fonts — to bring type setting on the web to the level print designers have been on for decades.

Do Not Underestimate What An Open Source Project Can Achieve

We are all aware at this point that just because something is free does not mean it is devoid of value. The open source movement is responsible for giving birth to some of the most important and influential software in the world. Additionally, the concept of “open source” is moving beyond its initial definition and encompassing any project, regardless of medium, where the intellectual materials used in constructing it are made available for reuse and modification. There are an increasing number of web studios that take an internal codebase and offer it up as open source. I do not see why it is too far off on the horizon for forward-thinking design studios to get in the spirit. Ultimately, the same rules apply — they are just executed in slightly different manners.

Much of the internet is based on open source technology. It seems fitting that the letters of the words read on it are open source as well. So until the time where all major browsers come up with a solution to safely allow embedding of commercial fonts without the possibility of piracy (i.e. a very long time from now), I think we should get busy and start making fonts of our own. For everyone that has been forced to read in Arial, it will be a welcome change.

Update: This code base has now been released under the name coordy. Read more.

For more details on the basic premise of how this library works, make sure to read my previous post on this library. Really, nothing in the nuts-and-bolts has changed. Essentially, collections of DisplayObjects are managed by light objects that update the position of each DisplayObject. Now, with Flash 10′s 3d properties, I am merely adding the Z property to these new organizers. Papervision is a wonderful library to have at your disposal, but sometimes you just don’t need something that complex to create a simple thee dimensional grid or ellipse.

Below is a small preview of the three main layout organizers built at the moment. I am confident this list will be at least double by the time it is released, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what is to come. For a better experience, view the larger version.

For presentation purposes, I set a small x,y,z rotation to the parent of the DisplayObjects so you could see the grid more clearly. However, the rotation (x,y and z axes) of the ellipse is computed entirely within the organizer — meaning the parent of all the objects does not need to be rotated for the effect. I am trying to figure out the math to do this within the grid and scatter organizers, but at this moment, it is a little beyond me. You may also notice that the organizers seem a little “sloppy” when randomizing the layout. That is because I have added a jitter property for each axis to allow a more random/organic feel. Both the 2d and 3d libraries now have jitter controls.

This whole library, along with the updated 2d organizers are going to be made available on Google Code when they are a little closer to completion. The 2d library has a much larger list of organizers at this point and, as expected, performs much better than its 3d cousin. I would love to get some help in taking this library further if anyone is interested. There are a few foundational issues that would be great to resolve. Let me know if you are interested.