confession
10/15 '14
I'm afraid to go for a ride on my bike alone in my neighborhood.
I'm afraid of drivers, unsafe routes, potential muggers and bike thieves.
I'm going to go drive to run errands now, and it makes me feel like a jerk to burn gas to drive about 5 miles round trip.
What's your favorite font?
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Don't worry, that's kind of what I needed to hear. I want to know that there are precautions I could take which I may not have considered, and take them.
This area doesn't have enough bike racks, and it was the favored haunt of The Swiss Cheese Pervert, because of slow police response times (we have more cops now). But, Torresdale Ave has some pretty good bike lanes now.
I continually suspect the law of averages to be not in my favor. If there were one bike accident a year in the 19135, it'd be me.
http://www.phillypolice.com/crime-maps-stats
http://www.phillycrimemap.org/
http://www.phila.gov/Map#id=c2d43f13123843688c7d6c1add5ddba2
There are many more. Real estate sites like Zillow tend to include them too.
For heads and captions I am deeply fond of humanist sans-serifs like Eras and Calibri and their geometric cousins such as Futura and Eurostyle. The heads on OPW are "Open Sans" which is another Google Fonts compromise. I would possibly have gone with Gotham Narrow for OPW's heads, as neutral and readable and contrasting well with the somewhat neo-classical book serifs I was narrowing down in on, but there are licensing issues, and it doesn't pair really well with Lora, which was the keystone choice for site fonts.
The logotype font for OnePostWonder is Satisfy, also from Google Fonts, and I don't love it, but I don't have time or skill to do the calligraphic rendering that I'd prefer, and it does make a nice accent with the other two fonts.
I don't have one favourite font, but these are the ones I chose for OPW and why.
And I used to use Eras (or a knock-off thereof) for titles in a literary journal.
In other words, I find your taste in typefaces to be very agreeable.
This could well be why I never made it into the graphic design world...
Is that a thing the crime maps say really happens where you live? If it is, it is, but that's something you can check and know.
Re: not having your bike stolen once you lock it up, I haven't had one stolen since I learned to secure it properly. So mad that nobody told me all of it at once:
* Front wheel's gotta be secured
* Frame's gotta be secured
* Rear wheel's gotta be secured
* Seat's gotta be leashed.
Otherwise some asshole eventually walks off with one of the wheels or the seat. Even in the nicest neighborhood. And then their fence tells them "dipshit, bikes wear out as a single unit, so this wheel won't really go with somebody else's chain anymore" and gives them like $10.
A kryptonite-style bike lock plus a chain takes care of the first three. Any bike shop can take care of the fourth.
Now, I ride 0 miles.
I saw too many close calls first hand, read too many obits, visited too many cycling friends in the hospital after car vs. bike incidents.
That's my experience.
I miss it.
Philly has added a lot of bike lanes.
I used to try to ride in places with inadequate shoulders, which is a really terrible plan.