THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

Bringing a Victorian detective into the digital age

Ever since I read Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style I have wanted to typeset a book. If I had my way I would have spent another month on my thesis perfecting the typography and really polishing it. But deadlines are deadlines, so I would have to delve into typography on another project. 

Shortly after I got my Sony Reader I stumbled upon planetebook.com. I was impressed with the design and typography of their eBooks. This inspired me to make my next  typography project typesetting an eBook.

But what eBook? I chose The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle.  When I was around 10 I read the Sherlock Holmes books and have loved them ever since. They are fun, and broken into short independent chapters that make them an easy read. I used the text from Project Gutenberg and after hours of reflowing paragraphs manually, I created typesette.apspot.com, which strips out the duplicate line breaks that Gutenberg texts are filled with. Feel free to use it.

In designing the eBook I wanted to capture some of the mystery of the story so I used a simple black and white image for the cover, a magnifying glass.  The other two Sherlock Holmes books will feature a deerstalker and a pipe.

It is set in Adobe Jensen Pro throughout and saved as a tagged pdf which should be compatible with all Sony Readers and most Kindles. The page size was designed to match the screen size of the Kindle and Sony Reader (I believe they are virtually identical) to prevent odd scaling from occuring. I would be curious to see how it holds up on the Kindle DX or other readers. You can download it here.

The images included in the set start with the .txt version on my reader, progress through the epub version (photos are actually a different Victorian novel) and then end with shots of the finished Adventures. Of course the best way to see it is to download it...

Feel free to send me any comments or suggestions either via twitter or email.

THE FOLLIS

Repaint and Refurbish a vintage French Racing bike.

The Follis is a vintage French road racing bike that my Father purchased in the early 1980s. 

The components, all original Campagnolo Nouvo Record, still work extremely well. The frame was beginning to get extremely rusty thanks to a combination of the Houston area's climate and the years it spent in New York winters. I wanted to freshen the paint up, preserve some of the original patina, and give it a touch of contemporary styling.

So I started playing around in Photoshop and designed a paint and graphics scheme that kept the head tube it's original color and patina and wrapped the rest of the bike in Charcoal grey and white graphics. Then came the fun part, stripping components and sanding the frame.

The frame received three coats of sand-able auto primer, followed by three coats of charcoal metallic flake, and two layers of clear coat.

The final step was applying the graphics. I picked up some scrap white vinyl from a local sign shop and printed out 'Follis' (mirrored) on the paper backer. I picked Rockwell as the font, a nice slab serif that creates a contemporary feel while maintaining vintage roots, and hand cut the vinyl.