I havent posted a tutorial in a while. I have been super busy. I recently switched jobs and now am working at Alexander Interactive on the Lowes account, I also have been trying to foster my personal project, The Font-Bot Project. I basically took 2 things that I really liked, Typography and Robots and combined them into my baby, what is now known as The Font-Bot Project

The concept of the site was to foster a good ribbing with type and robots in a competition for type supremacy. I created a place where designers could pit their type creations against each other. I thought it would be a good exercise in design that people would be interested in

So far I have had a pretty good response. People seem interested and I have even received some submissions, including this weeks which traveled here all the way from @LukeDesignUK in Derby England to face @_eck a former co-worker and friend of mine (he would say best friend *).

Since people seem to be interested in the site I have been concepting new ideas to make the site better. Some of the things in the works, a winners circle, designer baseball cards for the bots and their creators as well as a more advanced voting and damage system.

What this is all getting too is that I realize the importance of personal projects because of this experience. The site was not only fun to build, it was a lesson in design and development for me. First it was one of my first experiments with the Modular Scale by Tim Brown. (You can also read more about the scale and Tim Brown here) Second it was the first site I ever built using HTML 5 markup. Third it is built completely on WordPress, and although it’s not the first site I have built on the platform, each one ends up teaching me valuable lessons.

So I encourage other designers to create something for themselves and give it to the world. It will keep your skills sharp and teach you things that will help you to stay on top of this roller coaster that is design, any kind of design, Web, Print, or whatever you happen to create.