Times New Roman was commissioned by The Times of London in 1929 and first used in 1932 to replace an outdated, spindly font with a more legible, compact, and efficient design. Designed by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent based on the 16th-century Plantin typeface, it was engineered for high readability and tight space-saving on newspaper print.

Arial is a sans-serif typeface in the neo-grotesque style. The typeface was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography It is metrically compatible with Helvetica, enabling documents to use either typeface without affecting the visual layout.

Calibri is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Dutch designer Lucas de Groot between 2002 and 2004, commissioned by Microsoft for the ClearType font collection. Released with Windows Vista in

Atkinson Hyperlegible is a freely available typeface built around a grotesque sans-serif core, intended to be optimally legible for readers who are partially visually impaired, with all characters maximally distinguishable from one another. It won Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Award for Graphic Design in 2019 and was shortlisted for a graphic design award by Dezeen in 2020.

Affinity Designer is a vector graphics editor pair for Photo.

Due to the half price sale, I got this so I had the full set. I have used the Free Inkscape with limited success.  But this program just makes vector graphics easier.

An the cool part is that you can switch between Designer and Photo while retaining the same image.

This program will take a long time to get to grips with. So far, it’s been useful for interesting font effects.

Affinity Photo is a raster graphics editor developed by Serif Ltd.  Its first version was available in 2016.

This immediately conveys a sense of business, from a conventional but easy to navigate interface and GUI font selection.

The most interesting thing is the adjustment layers and the ability to group them with layers. It’s a great way of non-destructive painting.

My original annoyance was that you could not see the layers and the brushes as they were on the same tab. But I found that the brushes could be floated and put to the side of the main window. This results in the best implementation I have seen of quick brush selection in a graphics program.

With the youtube tutorial videos I quickly came up to speed for 90% of what I knew in GIMP.

Due to the special half price sale, I got it. This is definitely better than GIMP and looks to be my main workhorse for graphics work.

Clip Studio Paint is  created by Japanese graphics software company Celsys. Recommended for creation of comics, general illustration, and 2D animation.

Another great painting program. fits somewhere in features between GIMP & Photoshop. I was going to give this a miss, but then the Adobe thing happened and they dropped the price to a ridiculous $35NZ. Couldn’t resist.

Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program.

The focus for this program is painting. There are plenty of painting tools, lots of brush styles. Plus shapes you can use. It has levels and filters. All you could want.

It will also use the G’MIC filters, something I have used in GIMP.

What it doesn’t do is colour adjustments.

But is is easy to use and works well with the pen tablet.

Corel PaintShop Pro 2023

The 1998 Version of Paintshop 5.01 I used for years until it broke, and I couldn’t get it working. So what does 2024 have in store ?

Corel PaintShop Pro 2023, so  I got the ultimate package for a discounted price. The old PSP5.01 came in at 10meg. This version is over 1gig to install. and it took some time.

First impressions is that it’s confusing. There is a new “manage’ part that is just a file browser. It doesn’t offer anything that the free Faststone Image Viewer doesn’t do. It just slows down loading the application.

Once in the edit part, things look familiar, like Gimp or Photoshop.

The AI Image creator, Playground AI has gotten better. Since the first images I created in May 2023 they are more detailed and vivid.

Just a few found at Willowbank Wildlife Reserve.

CD9 – Chasing the Dragon

Artwork for a CD case, based on fractals. These were generated using a program I had at the time.